Once upon a time, there was a young woman who had been working as a production assistant at Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) for seven years, and the editors and department heads - all men - took merciless advantage of her hard work. Her boss liked to have a beer in the evening, and when he took a taxi home when he was unable to drive, he would throw his car keys at her the next morning with the remark: “Regina, look for it!” on the desk - and Regina then ran through the streets to find the car.
"Like every capable woman," Regina Ziegler wrote decades later in her memoirs "It's not possible, it doesn't exist," she hoped that her work would convince people and be supported: "Far from it! ... The gentlemen at the station never dreamed of it. The term 'film producer' didn't even exist back then. Producers were men, that's it."
And so Regina Ziegler, the founding legend goes, went to the savings bank and asked for a loan, but they mistook her for a secretary. “That’s not true,” Ziegler said, saying she went to the Bank for Trade and Industry. "The manager's name was Mr. Jaenichen. So I asked if I could overdraw up to 10,000 marks every now and then." And Mr. Jaenichen said: “Sure, you have had a regular income every month for seven years.” And so the 29-year-old's debut came about - "I thought I was dead" - a film about a young woman who doesn't feel up to the oppressive middle-class expectations of her parents, her boss and her boyfriend. It was also the debut of a 29-year-old director named Wolf Gremm, who had been courting her for months. The two eventually married and stayed together for nearly four decades, making nearly two dozen films together.
Regina Ziegler pursued an erratic course for a long time. She filmed Peter Stein's Schaubühne theater success "Summer Guests" and, as "Death or Freedom", Schiller's "The Robbers". She also filmed the life of Heinrich von Kleist (“Heinrich”) and the Kästner novel “Fabian”. She gave Udo Lindenberg his first leading role in “Panic Times” and Kluge student Jeanine Meerapfel her first direction with “Malou” and finally had the ancient piece recited in an amphitheater in “The Antigone of Sophocles based on Hölderlin's translation for the stage by Brecht” and filmed by the strict stylists Straub and Huillet.
After that, Ziegler felt that things couldn't go on like this anymore. “After my passionate commitment to films had made me a millionaire for many years,” she writes in her memoirs, “we clearly shifted the production focus to the area of television.”
So began her rise to queen of Friday night films with titles like “Survival on the Wrap Front”, “Do You Know Your Lover?”, “Lies Have Left Hands”, “Foam Kisses” and “Moppel-Ich”. In some years, up to ten pieces of Degeto Kitsch were created, which blatantly – and successfully – aimed at the quota. Obituaries often talk about 500 Ziegler films in five decades, but in reality it was more like half, around 250, which is also an enormous number. You can only get to 500 if you count each episode of a series as a separate film, and Ziegler has filmed enough series, including the award-winning “Weissensee” (24 episodes), the “Istanbul Murder Commission” (18) and the “Bundschuh Family” (eight).
Regina Ziegler can be seen as the successor to the film mogul Artur Brauner, who earned his money in the post-war years with hit and crime films and occasionally allowed himself to make the films that his heart was set on, films about National Socialism. Unlike Brauner, Ziegler was not a victim of the dictatorship; she was too young for that - her mother, however, was buried in an air raid shelter for four days in a bomb attack when she was heavily pregnant with her daughter - and yet Ziegler repeatedly returned to the Nazi past in film.
She made “Korczak” possible through the Jewish pediatrician Janusz Korczak, who voluntarily accompanied children from a Jewish orphanage to the Treblinka extermination camp; Brauner had also made a Korczak film. Steven Spielberg is said to have seen Ziegler's film eleven times before starting Schindler's List. She filmed Irmgard Keun's novel "After Midnight" about the fanaticism that spread after Hitler came to power. She filmed the last weeks of the life of “Martha Liebermann”, the painter's widow, who took an overdose of sleeping pills when she was threatened with deportation. Andreas Dresen's “In Love, Your Hilde” comes from her, the story of the resistance fighter Hilde Coppi, and Margarethe von Trotta's “Rosa Luxemburg”.
Her interest in contemporary history was wide-ranging, from the end of the war ("Visitation", a Schlöndorff production that was currently successful in cinemas) and the Berlin blockade ("The Wolves", for which she won an American Emmy) to the rise of the newspaper magnate Axel Springer ("The Publisher") and the end of Willy Brandt's chancellorship ("Shadow of Power") to the fatal hostage drama ("Gladbeck") and the panorama of the late GDR (“Weissensee”). She produced documentaries such as “Assassination of Adenauer”, “The German Chancellor” about Helmut Schmidt, “Mr. Federal Republic” about Hans-Dietrich Genscher and “The Chancellor – Angela Merkel's first year in power”. During the 2013 election campaign, she initiated the Facebook campaign “Say Yes to Angela”.
Self-confident and strong-willed, she got almost anything she wanted. She got this from her mother, who worked as a roving reporter for a local newspaper and also wrote film reviews. "She had an attitude that impressed me even as a small child," she wrote about her mother: "Don't let anyone lie to you, don't let anyone tell you that you can't do something, follow your feelings, follow your dreams. I always stuck to that."
When Fassbinder wanted to film the life of Rosa Luxemburg, she simply called his dream cast, Jane Fonda!, and won her over to the project; only Fassbinder died shortly afterwards. When the Vatican opened the archives of the Inquisition, she traveled with her advisor Michel Friedman to Rome to see the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and later Pope) Josef Ratzinger and wrested permission from him to film, exclusively for six months. She just didn't get the movie about Beate Uhse made.
She was appointed honorary professor at the Babelsberg film school “Konrad Wolf” and had a young student named Philipp Pratt – the Pratt who would be responsible for German content for Amazon 15 years later. And so, in her 70s, Ziegler became a pioneer in collaboration with streamers, and at Emmy time she always threw a lavish party at the most elegant Berlin address, the Grunewalder Schlosshotel. She knew what she owed to her industry. She had already celebrated with her in the eighties, back then in the Kreuzberg cult bar “Exil”, with David Bowie, Otto Sander and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Back then she was the only woman there, while the men smoked and drank and debated and smoked, drank and argued all night long.
You can also tell the story of Regina Ziegler using an optical axis. One end point is Ziegler's Berlin headquarters on Lake Lietzensee in Neue Kantstrasse. From there a straight connection leads over the East Prussian Bridge to the RBB (formerly SFB) radio station, one and a half kilometers away, at the foot of the radio tower, end point number two. And now we fade to the beginning of Wim Wenders’ legendary “Sky over Berlin”. The camera flies around the radio tower, it looks at the East Prussian Bridge, at Neue Kantstrasse, and in the background you can see the magnificent Wilhelminian style building of Ziegler's company headquarters, in the distance, but still so close.
The point is: Ziegler has made plenty of films for public television, but never one with Wim Wenders. Never one with Werner Herzog, Dominik Graf, Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, Bully Herbig, Fatih Akin or Tom Tykwer, the flagship directors of German cinema. The reasons may be varied, but perhaps they also had something to do with the question of power. It would have been a clash of egos, that of a director and that of a producer.
The honors came late for the woman in red. Red was her hair color and her favorite color. She always wore something red. She received an honorary Lola and Austrian Romy and a three-week retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Above all, it cannot be emphasized enough that her company with 30 employees has remained an independent family business to this day, which is now managed by her daughter Tanja. Regina Ziegler was much more than Degeto kitsch. It is German film history. She has now died at the age of 82.
