They have featured such personalities as Keith Haring, Larry Kramer, Diamanda Galás, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Judith Malina, Jeff Stryker, Jayne County, Divine, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and a row of Warhol superstars.

Von Praunheim was born as Holger Radtke in Riga Central Prison [lv] in the German-occupied Latvia during World War II.

[5] Von Praunheim made his debut with experimental and short movies, like Sisters of the Revolution (1969) and Samuel Beckett (1969), with which he quickly became famous.

[6] At the beginning of his career, von Praunheim also worked as an assistant director for Gregory J. Markopoulos, who dedicated his film (A)lter (A)ction (1968) to him.

It became a cult movie, which had a sequel in 1975 (Berlin Bed Sausage): "Avant-garde cinema also has its masters, its greatest in Germany: Rosa von Praunheim.

His film The Bed Sausage, which premiered on ZDF, confirmed once again what his works Pink Workers on Golden Street and Sisters of the Revolution, which have already been shown at many festivals, characterise: A mixture of artistic inventiveness, social awareness and humour that is exceedingly rare in Germany."

The breakout film by director and activist Rosa von Praunheim (aka Holger Mischwitzky) became a foundational text of the German gay rights movement, and its call for liberation reverberated through the history of queer cinema.

[13] A prolific and controversial filmmaker, von Praunheim has centered his directorial efforts in documentaries featuring gay-related themes.

[15] In the USA von Praunheim worked with camera people like Jeff Preiss, Mike Kuchar and Juliana Wang.

[17] In 1983, von Praunheim's revolutionary film City of Lost Souls (1983) with Jayne County and Angie Stardust was released: "This riotous and massively ahead-of-its-time intersectional queer-punk musical has gone on to greatly influence transgender politics."

(Los Angeles Times)[21][22] The documentaries Positive and Silence = Death, both shot in 1989, deal with aspects of AIDS activism in New York City.

"[25] The Los Angeles Times summed it up: "In short, Praunheim is just the man for the job he has taken on with Silence = Death and Positive: he has the breadth of vision, the compassion and the militance and, yes, the sense of humor necessary to tackle the AIDS epidemic in all its aspects.

"[21] Critic Jerry Tallmer, co-founder of the Obie Awards, wrote in the newspaper The Record: "Rosa (originally Holger) von Praunheim, the brilliant, acerbic director of such breakthrough gay-revolutionist works as Silence & Death and A Virus Knows No Morals.

"[26] Von Praunheim was a co-founder of the German ACT UP movement and organized the first major AIDS benefit event in Germany.

On 10 December 1991, von Praunheim created a scandal in Germany when he outed the anchorman Alfred Biolek and the comedian Hape Kerkeling in the TV show Explosiv - Der heiße Stuhl [de] as gay to call for public solidarity with the stigmatized gays from homosexual celebrities, of which there were hardly any in the German public at that time.

[27] In the early 1990s, von Praunheim developed the first queer TV format in Germany, but continued his film work at the same time.

[36] Former Praunheim students, filmmakers Tom Tykwer, Chris Kraus, Axel Ranisch, Robert Thalheim and Julia von Heinz, made the film Pink Children (2012) about their mentor.

[42] On occasion of his 70th birthday (2012), von Praunheim made 70 short and medium-length films for German television station RBB under the title Rosa's World.

[47] The American Cinematheque in Hollywood honored von Praunheim with a retrospective in 1997 as "a fearless international pioneer of gay cinema".

[48] In 1986, the first edition of the Gay Cinema Festival in Toronto held a Rosa von Praunheim retrospective to honor the director as "the dean of Berlin's underground filmmakers".

[69] The magazine The Advocate selected von Praunheim among the world's 50 most important queer people in the fields of activism, art and culture.

"[70][71] Von Praunheim lives in Berlin with his husband Oliver Sechting [de], a German author, director and activist for Mental Health.