German film and television producer Regina Ziegler has died. A spokesperson for Ziegler Film GmbH told the German press agency that she passed away at the age of 82, surrounded by her family. Among her best-known productions are the ARD series Weissensee and the musical adaptation I’ve Never Been to New York.
For more than five decades, the producer born in 1944 in Quedlinburg helped shape the German media landscape like few others. With her Berlin-based production company founded in 1973, she realized roughly 500 cinema and television productions, set standards for independent production, and established herself early on as a bold supporter of authors’ cinema and socially niche topics, including queer material.
The Connection to Rosa von Praunheim
Ziegler’s exceptional standing in German film is closely linked to the queer director and activist Rosa von Praunheim (1942-2025). In the early days of her career, Ziegler worked as a production manager on the queer cult film Die Bettwurst (1971), where she took her first steps in the film business. When Ziegler, at the age of 29 in 1973, branched out on her own in a field still dominated by men, she did so with a project that established funders balked at: Praunheim’s film Ich dachte, ich wäre tot, for which she received the German Federal Film Prize. The film also marked Wolf Gremm’s first feature-directing effort, whom Ziegler had met at the SFB (Sender Freies Berlin) and whom she married in 1977. She remained married to him until his death in 2015.
Ziegler financed Ich dachte, ich wäre tot under considerable personal risk — including a loan from her mother and her own savings. The work signaled not only the formal inception of Ziegler Film but also forged a lifelong friendship and recurring collaboration with Praunheim. In this way, she created spaces for his radical, uncompromising aesthetics. As part of her internationally renowned short-film series Erotic Tales, she produced Praunheim’s grotesque camp comedy Can I Be Your Bratwurst, Please? around 1999.
Mainstream and Niche
The collaboration with Rosa von Praunheim was not an isolated case but a defining stance for Ziegler as a producer. She understood film and television not merely as entertainment but as a mirror of society’s controversies. While she celebrated success in prime-time programming with high-rated formats, literary adaptations, and crime series like Tatort, she regularly used her financial latitude to fund material outside the mainstream.
These included productions that explored queer identities, gender roles, and sexual self-determination — often against the resistance of conservative broadcasting councils and program executives. In 1975, she produced the ZDF television film Anna und Edith, which is considered a historic milestone. It was the first German TV film to depict a romantic relationship between two women and to present it as a positive life model.
Direct link
|
For her work, Ziegler received numerous awards both domestically and internationally, including the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, several Grimme Prizes, the German Television Prize, and honors from international festivals. She remained closely involved with the productions of her company well into old age, a company later steered by her daughter Tanja Ziegler.
