A seminal figure in the Queer German Cinema and a key proponent of AIDS activism, Rosa von Praunheim has cemented his position as one of the most significant individuals in the German gay liberation movement and perhaps as the most provocative German queer filmmaker to date. While his contemporaries, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter and Ulrike Ottinger, regularly depicted nihilistic visions of queer suffering, Praunheim insisted on the possibility of hope, even within an era of social repression. Setting himself against the widespread vilification of queer individuals during the European AIDS epidemic, Praunheim remained an unabashed champion of the eccentric outsider. His films offer wildly amusing, and at times disturbing snapshots of marginalised, idiosyncratic individuals as they form their own spaces within hegemonic states.
Praunheim’s earliest films provide groundbreaking critiques of the rigid segregation which existed between gay subcultures within Germany’s burgeoning queer scene in the 1970s. In It Is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt, 1971) Praunheim leads his protagonist, Daniel, a naive and provincial gay man, on an episodic journey through the various milieus of the Berlin queer scene. His innocence is soon lost as he develops an appetite for the adrenaline and danger of big-city gay life.
Daniel’s fleeting experiences are accompanied by a non-synched voice-over, which provides disparaging commentaries on contemporary gay communities. Within one iconic scene, Praunheim uses static tableau imagery to record half-naked sport jocks as they sit flexing their muscles in a park. Via a combination of audiovisual schisms, ironic voice-overs, and deliberately wooden acting, Praunheim satirises the posturing of these subcultural identities in hyperbolic fashion. Whether depicting flamboyant queens and their obsession with the latest fashion trends, homoerotic jocks with their fixation on body image, or leather-clad daddies, the strict tropes of these exclusionary forms of kinship are laid bare and, in turn, dismantled. While Praunheim was criticised for appearing to attack the queer community, ultimately he was taking aim at the depoliticisation and internal segregation which he saw as being propagated by the queer community itself. In turn, he advocated for the deconstruction of queer segregation, and promoted solidarity and queer fluidity as the root of queer liberation.
While Praunheim’s early films laid the groundwork for the deconstructive stance he would take in response to hetero- and homo-normativity, it is within his later films, notably City of Lost Souls (Stadt der verlorenen Seelen, 1983) that he displays the true force of his queer politics. This film centres on the patchwork world of a Berlin boarding house-meets-burger joint, owned by American transsexual superstar, Angie Stardust. The fast food joint is staffed by the boarding house’s eccentric occupants, which include an array of drag queens, trans people, erotic trapeze artists, showgirls, and magicians. In fitting style, the film opens with a chorus performance of ‘Burger Queen Blues’, as the residents prance around the space, straddling its dirty countertop.
The film follows the residents’ stories as they descend on Berlin in search of sexual liberation and respite from stifling American conservatism. For instance, the erotic trapeze artists, Judith Flex and Tron von Hollywood, arrive in the German capital in anticipation of sexually liberated audiences. Their artistic ambitions are, however, cut short when Tron descends into drug addiction and sexual promiscuity in Praunheim’s typical slapstick style. Judith subsequently elopes with a Jewish American lesbian and a German man with Nazi sympathiser parents.
The experience of Tron and Judith, as with many of Praunheim’s protagonists, is one of dislocation, as they exist in transnational spheres, forced from the oppressive hegemony of contemporary America. This displacement, along with their intercultural and non-binary relationships, forms a process of ‘deterritorialisation’. The boarding house becomes a transitional space that allows for the creation of new forms of queer nationhood, and comes to define Praunheim’s depiction of queer liberation. In an iconic scene, the residents congregate around the television to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, in a dystopian parody of the American nuclear family, thousands of miles from home. While the image of the nuclear family once signalled the absolute exclusion of queer individuals from mainstream society, Praunheim uses parody to both pervert and reform this image, creating a space for queer individuals within the institutions that previously rendered them abject. The residents do not entirely relinquish their American roots, nor is this space wholly denationalised. Instead, the boarding house provides a space in which a reinterpretation of typically hegemonic American ideals can take place.
While these scenes are riddled with irony and absurdity, it is directly within Praunheim’s excessively camp and highly aestheticised image that the true power of his film arises. Praunheim’s cinema is purposefully rough around the edges and delights in its own implausibility. Within this cinematic excess, which Bradford Nordeen called a “fabulist punk cabaret”, all essentialism and referentiality are stripped away, and a queerer vision of cinema appears. This absurdity reaches fever pitch when Gary (a resident of the boarding house and a connoisseur of black magic) is arrested after leading a nude therapy session through the streets of Berlin. He is swiftly dealt his deportation papers, and distraught at the prospect of his forced return to America, burns down the pension, killing both himself and Tron von Hollywood in the act.
In one of the film’s rare serious scenes, the boarding house matriarch, Angie Stardust, is seen lamenting the loss of all her worldly possessions while stranded in a moonlit park. Yet in typical Praunheim fashion, any hint of nihilism or narrative authenticity are short-lived, and the film ends with an absurd chorus in which all characters, both dead and alive, join Angie Stardust for a musical rendition in the shopfront of her burger joint. The deliberate implausibility of this scene shows Praunheim acknowledging the fabrication of his narrative head on. A propensity for free performance, improvisation, and the deconstruction of narrative integrity allow Praunheim to implode phallogocentric conceptions of cinema, and in turn create a space for the coexistence of diverse on-screen sexual identities and experiences.
It is within this patchwork aesthetic that Praunheim revises archaic conceptions of gender binaries. The figure of Tara O’Hara, a fearless transgender woman, is used to challenge these repressive social norms. After hooking up with a German hunk, Manfred Finger, Tara is violently rejected by the man for apparently concealing her transgender status. Yet in a scene of sexual enlightenment, Tara educates the man of her revisionist conception of womanhood, as an identity based on gender rather than sex. Tara and the man subsequently make love, and Praunheim succeeds in creating a space in which transgender women and sexual pluralism are celebrated without violence or rebuke.
Yet despite the revelry and absurdity which give rise to the sexual freedom enjoyed by Tara O’Hara and the younger generation of trans and queer individuals, Angie Stardust is quick to remind her that queer history is still rooted in suffering. In a seminal scene, Angie laments Tara O’Hara’s apparent obliviousness to the struggles of the previous generation of trans women. Whilst Tara rejects the need for surgery, stating “I don’t want the operation, I am happy as I am,” Angie describes the struggles she endured to become, in her view, “fully female”. Angie says, “We pumped the hormones, puked in school, put up with every bum calling us faggot, drag queens. Now it’s easy for you. You get tits, grow your hair long, you’re a woman.”
While Praunheim avoids entering into a political judgement on what constitutes transgender womanhood, he reinforces the historical experience of trans women as one still rooted in loss. Indeed, Angie alludes to her own distressing history, rising to stardom in the cabarets of New York, at a time when being transgender was still illegal and drag performers were expected to enter theatres in male attire. This is underlined in Angie’s iconic ballad ‘Im Exil’, in which she sings: “I came from a land of many different races… as dumb as it is they’ll always hate each other. That’s why I had to leave the land that I love … I’m not happy, but yes, I’m satisfied…I’m in exile.” While she finds a degree of freedom from the transphobia and racial prejudice she experienced in America, her liberation in Germany is hard-fought, and has demanded an existence of exile.
Yet just as Praunheim’s social outcasts locate a strand of queer agency within the transitional space of the boarding-house, Angie too grounds her liberation in her dislocation. Praunheim acknowledges within Angie’s ballad that even within the comparatively liberal post-war German society, queer individuals may never find full acceptance within mainstream society. It is instead through Angie’s continual process of dislocation and exile that she manages to frustrate the hegemonic project which aims to subdue her, and in turn carve out her own narrative within overwhelmingly repressive states. This transitory and patchwork world ultimately paves the way for a more settled and utopian vision of transgender and queer representation, as seen within the figure of Tara O’Hara.
What at first glance parades itself as a messy, ebullient fanfare of hot-headed queer personalities, in fact conceals a delicate and at times poignant commentary on queer isolation and the search for queer agency. While this film was regularly cast aside as a glib mockumentary about Americans in Berlin, it in fact opens out into a layered and highly politicised diatribe against the way highly conservative states manage sexual and gender pluralism. Indeed, behind the lurid façade of Praunheim’s film, lies a powerful dialogue about the queer and trans struggle for representation, which remains highly pertinent over 30 years later. Praunheim conjures up an alternative, phantasmatic world, in which society is experienced in inverse; where subversive lifestyles have become custom, and the heteronorm is nowhere to be seen. Whether Praunheim sees this world as a genuine political manifesto, or simply a wry incarnation of an unattainable queer ideal, it is safe to say we are still a way off reaching our very own City of Lost Souls.
