ARCHIV - 28.02.2011, Sachsen, Dresden: Regisseur Dieter Wedel, aufgenommen bei einem Komparsen-Casting für die Zwingerfestspiele im Staatsschauspiel. Wedel ist tot. Das teilte das Landgericht München I am 20.07.2022 mit, dort war ein Strafverfahren gegen Wedel anhängig. Demnach starb Wedel am 13. Juli 2022 in Hamburg. Foto: Arno Burgi/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa +++ dpa-Bildfunk +++

The director Dieter Wedel is dead. He died on July 13 in Hamburg, as the Munich I Regional 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 already indicted Wedel in March last year for an allegation from 1996. The actress Jany Tempel states that Wedel (“Der Große Bellheim”, “Der Schattenmann”) raped her in a Munich luxury hotel at the time – an accusation that Wedel denied.

When the charges were brought, Wedel’s lawyers spoke of prior 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. Wedel, about whose date of birth there is conflicting information and who was probably around 80 years old when he died, started out in the 1990s in particular.

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.