July 20, 2022
The German director Dieter Wedel is dead. He died on July 13 in Hamburg, as the Munich I Regional Court announced on Wednesday, where criminal proceedings once morest Wedel were pending. The court finally wanted to announce on Wednesday whether there would be a trial once morest Wedel. According to the court, the case once morest him is now being discontinued.
The public prosecutor had accused Wedel in March of last year of an allegation from 1996. The actress Jany Tempel states that Wedel (“The Great Bellheim”, “The Shadow Man”) raped her in a Munich luxury hotel at the time – an accusation that Wedel has denied. When the charges were brought, Wedel’s lawyers spoke of prior conviction and emphasized the likelihood that the charges might not be admitted at all – although that hardly ever occurs in the German judiciary.
The lawyer for the joint plaintiff Tempel, on the other hand, only recently complained regarding the delay in the proceedings once morest the director. “More than 14 months have passed since the indictment,” lawyer Alexander Stevens wrote in mid-May in a complaint of delay to the court. Temple suffers “very much from the long duration of the proceedings”. She even went on a brief hunger strike to protest the court’s delay in making the decision. Even before the public prosecutor’s office even filed charges, they had been investigating for three years.
Wedel was one of the most successful German filmmakers. With his multi-part series, he delighted an audience of millions and wrote television history. There were contradictory statements regarding Wedel’s date of birth during his lifetime. According to current information from the Munich court, he was born on November 12, 1939. He was 82 years old at the time of his death.
He started his work in the 1990s. One success followed the next: “The Great Bellheim” (1993), “The Shadow Man” (1996), “The King of St. Pauli” (1998) and “The Semmeling Affair” (2002). When the storyteller published his latest work, people spoke of the “new wedel” with a mixture of awe and curiosity. That sounded like a seal of approval – and it often turned out to be true.
Before the allegations once morest him became known as part of the so-called #MeToo debate, Wedel was director of the Bad Hersfeld Festival. At the open-air theater festival, the doctorate in theater studies had set audience records and ensured that many celebrities walked the red carpet at the opening.
Things were turbulent in Wedel’s private life. He has six children from six women, a son with Hannelore Elsner, who died in 2019.