Director Dieter Wedel is dead

Created: 07/20/2022, 11:19 am

The director Dieter Wedel is dead. © BREUEL-BILD/dpa/Archive image

After months of waiting, the Munich I district court wanted to announce whether and when there would be a rape trial against Dieter Wedel.

Now there will be no more negotiations.

Dieter Wedel is dead.

Munich - The director Dieter Wedel is dead. He died on July 13 in Hamburg, as the Munich I district court announced on Wednesday, where criminal proceedings against Wedel were pending.

The court finally wanted to announce on Wednesday whether there would be a trial against Wedel.

According to the court, the case against 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 preliminary conviction and emphasized the likelihood that the charges could 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 about the delay in the proceedings against 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 "a lot from the long process."

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 about 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 often proved to be true.

also read

Lifetime beach bans for punks?

Sylt takes action against wild camping

Travemünde Week is back: almost 1500 sailors there

Before the allegations against 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 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.

dpa