German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim, 83, died on Dec. 17. Born Holger Radtke, he took the name Rosa von Praunheim to honor the Pink Triangle victims of the Nazis. He was born in a Latvian prison during Nazi occupation; his mother died in a mental institute in 1947 (his film Two Mothers examined the trauma). Von Praunheim wrote, directed and produced some 150 films between 1968 and this year. His movies mostly dealt with gay and trans rights, AIDS, and other social issues; they included Pink Workers on Golden Street, Sisters of the Revolution, It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts, City of Lost Souls, Anita: Dances of Vice (a biopic of the wildly eccentric Anita Berber), A Virus Knows No Morals (an early—1986—film about AIDS), City of Lost Souls, I Am My Own Woman, and Transexual Menace. He told interviewer Liza Foreman, “I always was a filmmaker first and not a gay-rights activist. But I addressed these subjects in my films. I made a lot of difference and I was controversial.” Von Praunheim is surviv3ed by his husband, author and director Oliver Sechting.
