- Born
- 25 November 1942Riga, Latvia
- Died
- 17 December 2025Berlin, Germany · aged 83
Rosa von Praunheim
With a 1971 film whose title said it all – “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives” – he sparked the gay movement in West Germany.
Rosa von Praunheim was born Holger Radtke in Riga in occupied Latvia and was adopted as a baby; only in 2000 did he learn that his birth mother had died in a psychiatric hospital in Berlin, a story he later told in the film “Meine Mütter”. He grew up in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, studied painting and chose his pink-tinged pseudonym in memory of the pink triangle that gay prisoners had to wear in Nazi camps.
His film “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives” (1971) was a provocation: it showed gay men’s lives critically and called on them to organise. After its screenings, the first gay action groups were founded in West Germany and Switzerland. Over five decades he made around 150 films, including “Die Bettwurst” (1971), documentaries about AIDS and portraits of queer personalities.
In 1991 he publicly outed the television host Alfred Biolek and the comedian Hape Kerkeling on television, which caused a scandal and is still controversial. He was also an early campaigner for safer sex and worked as a professor of film directing in Potsdam.
On 12 December 2025 he married his long-time partner Oliver Sechting. He died in Berlin five days later, aged 83.