Survival in Berlin, By Rosa von Praunheim

Rosa von Praunheim, the famous German filmmaker and gay rights activist died this week. He was 83 years old. This is a story he wrote about Berlin for our book "Our West-Berlin" that came out in 2024. This is your Advent story.


Berlin… City of Lost Souls: that is the title of my 1983 film, the story of several American singers and dancers who were stranded in Berlin and whose biographies inspired me to improvise a feature film about their lives. Many of them are already dead. Tara was murdered in Tiergarten Park. Beautiful Tron died of AIDS, Angie Stardust of cancer, and talented Black dancer Gary seems to have disappeared.

Only Lorraine, punk singer Jayne County (“Man Enough to Be a Woman”), drag star Joaquim la Habana, and the versatile Judith Flex are known to be still alive. Now the film has been rediscovered internationally because it’s a historical display of Berlin before 1989, when the Wall was still standing: an island of outsiders where creative people from all over the world met. Rents were cheap, the nightlife endless, and the gay scene was unique in Europe.

I came to Berlin in the early sixties to escape military service. I studied free-style painting at the Academy of Arts and lived in a storefront apartment with other artist friends. The police long suspected that we were running a narcotics ring and watched us from a flower store across the street. On my 21st birthday, there was a raid. At the time I was painting murdered kings, and there was a Punch puppet hanging out of one of the paintings. I’d hidden marijuana in it, and the cops didn’t find it.

For a short time, an architecture student lived with us who wanted to turn me in when he found out I was having gay sex. He wouldn’t even use our bathroom anymore. The anti-gay Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, taken directly from Nazi law, still existed at that time. If charges had actually been filed, a court would have had to convict me.

From 1949 to 1969, twice as many gay men were convicted in West Berlin and West Germany as during the Nazi era; the only difference was they landed in prison instead of a concentration camp. Finally, in 1969, the Paragraph was liberalized in favor of gays, although it wasn’t completely abolished until 1994 in united Germany.

In the sixties, I had caused a sensation with my short films that also dealt with homosexuality. Bavarian Television asked me on behalf of WDR, the biggest German public TV station, if I wanted to make a feature-length film about homosexuality. I did so with pleasure. I shot the film very subversively without synchronized sound, but with a very provocative voice-over. This is how my sensational, scandalous film "Not the Homosexual is Perverse, but the Situation in Which He Lives" was made in 1970.

In that film, I let out all my rage at the cowardly gay scene in West Berlin. Most gays, as I had experienced it over many years, were apolitical and uninterested in their own emancipation; they preferred to take refuge in glamour and movie-star fantasies. They entered gay bars furtively, had sex in dark parks, and were always in danger of being beaten up by homophobes in public toilets. It was hard to meet politically like-minded people. And the leftist groups were as anti-gay as they were anti-woman. When the movie premiered in 1971, it caused furious indignation; but a small minority of gays took it as an opportunity to form the first gay liberation groups.

Television banned the film, so we showed it in cinemas, never without heated discussions, by the way. During this time, over fifty gay groups were founded. Finally, in 1973, the film made it on television and became a big hit. Gays in East Berlin could also see it, and gay activists over there founded the first liberation group. Unfortunately, the group was soon forbidden by State Security, the all-powerful secret police.

Berlin was the liberation for me, too. I grew up in Praunheim, a district of Frankfurt am Main. I was very sheltered and shy; only in Berlin did I dare to live out my gayness. But in the circle of my artist friends, there seemed to be no gays. I was considered eccentric and wild, and I expressed that in my paintings and poems. 1968 was the time of politicization. Many students were protesting against authority and also against the Vietnam War.

Most of them considered art to be reactionary at that time, because leftist ideology saw art as nothing but a means of propaganda. I didn’t like mass movements. At that time, I only participated on the fringes of the many rallies on the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s main boulevard, because I saw myself as an individual. Even later, when many of the political firebrands turned to drugs or joined sects, I didn’t participate.

Nevertheless, I attracted attention at film festivals. With my cult film The Bed Sausage from 1970, I got really big publicity. For the movie, I brought my elderly aunt Luzi together with a hustler from West Berlin, and we parodied a heterosexual love affair. To this day, the film is loved by young people. So I quickly became famous.

But my following films flopped. That’s why I went to New York, where I shot successful documentaries, among them Survival in New York, a movie about three young German women in New York; Ulrike Buschbacher, Claudia Steinberg, and Anna Steegmann (as pictured above in a New York subway car). That enabled me to continue working.

The eighties were marked by the disease AIDS, to which many friends in America and Berlin fell victim. For almost a decade I devoted myself to prevention work with films, talk show appearances, and newspaper articles. It was an emotionally difficult time. Many of my friends didn’t want to lose the sexual freedoms we had fought for so laboriously, and they downplayed the peril of HIV and AIDS. At the time, however, there was no viable way to ameliorate it. The disease meant dying in agony.

This also changed Berlin. But that was only the beginning. When the Wall came down in 1989 and many gays from the East came to the sexually liberal West, they were fascinated by the sex clubs and sexual freedoms. But I was very afraid that this could mean a death sentence for many. My strident safer-sex campaigns became more and more furious. In 1985, I made one of the first films on AIDS: A Virus Knows No Morals. It was a deliberate black comedy meant to educate with humor. When we showed the film, there were good discussions, but we also experienced protests and ignorance. I remember disputes with young, handsome gay men who didn’t take our warnings seriously or even mocked them. Many of them soon became tragic victims of the virus.

It wasn’t until the mid-nineties, when new drugs curbed the danger of AIDS, that the gay scene became more relaxed again. Today, Berlin is once again the capital of sex and wild nightlife. Meanwhile, there is Prep, which is supposed to protect against HIV infections, but of course not against STDs like syphilis and gonorrhea, or against hepatitis. The young gay scene has become more careless and numbs itself with drugs.

Yes, Berlin is getting expensive, rents are rising and apartments are hard to find; but the city is still a magnet for artists and outsiders from all over the world. I’ve now made over one hundred fifty films, many of them with gay themes. Last year I made a movie about Berlin’s new creative center: Survival in Neukölln shows the international diversity of the artistic and gay scenes there, centering on the wonderful Juwelia, who has been running a small club in the south-central district of Neukölln for many years and enchants her guests with her charm.

In the meantime, I have become old. In November 2023 I will celebrate my 81th birthday. I have been fortunate to live in a wonderful relationship for eleven years, and I am finally enjoying the quiet side of Berlin. I will remain faithful to this city. This is where I will die, and until then I am enjoying the diversity of a great, wonderful city. The success of right-wing parties makes us aware that we should not take our democratic freedoms for granted, and that we must always remain vigilant and active.

 

 

Rosa von Praunheim, director, author, and winner of many film awards, is considered an important representative of the post-modern German film scene and a pioneer of the gay and lesbian movement. In over fifty years he has made more than one hundred fifty movies. Born Holger Mischwitzky in 1942 in Riga, Latvia, he grew up in Frankfurt / Main and has lived in Berlin since the sixties.

Photo: Markus Tiarks