Do we like them?

Do we like Hanna Schygulla?

Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record and a public stand against far-right nationalism, held back from the top by how little else there is to go on.

Hanna Schygulla is the face of New German Cinema, the muse of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and a long-time chanson singer. She was still in the public eye in 2025, with an Interview Magazine sit-down about her life in cinema, including her ties to Fassbinder and Warhol.

If you're after a scandal, there isn't one. Searches for lawsuits, court cases and allegations came back empty, so nothing goes in the evidence file. The only friction on record is professional, from her years working with Fassbinder, and that is not a court matter.

The moment that matters most for the harm test came at the 2025 Berlinale. At the press conference for the film Yunan she took aim at AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel, who wasn't in the room. She said she had heard Weidel on the radio calling for all foreigners to be deported, and told reporters “Solche Nationalismen haben uns immer nur ins Elend geführt.”

She also said she was shaken by the rise of nationalism in Germany and felt powerless, but that people must be ready to stand up. Plenty of artists stay quiet at a festival podium; she picked a side and said why, in her own words. Where you land on the AfD is your business, but taking a stand against a push to deport all foreigners fits our house rule.

On the rest of the harm test, we found no statements from her on trans people or LGBTQ+ rights, nor on climate, either way. Her recent work, including Yunan, gave us no sign of the harmful company we check for, though we only had thin cast information. That's the honest limit of what we could confirm.

The good stuff is mostly a lifetime of work. In 2024 the German Film Academy, which she helped found, gave her its honorary award for services to German film, with the ceremony in Berlin that May. She also turns up as herself in a 2025 documentary, Denkste Puppe, about young Afghan refugees who came to Germany as unaccompanied minors, though we couldn't open a page on it.