84. never heard of her until today but inventing a whole genre of TV at 32 is wild
Their story
Gisela Marx was a German journalist, radio and television presenter, documentary maker and producer who founded the Cologne production company Filmpool and, with Richterin Barbara Salesch, helped invent the scripted courtroom and lay-actor formats that filled German afternoon television around the turn of the millennium. She was born on 26…
Gisela Marx was a German journalist, radio and television presenter, documentary maker and producer who founded the Cologne production company Filmpool and, with Richterin Barbara Salesch, helped invent the scripted courtroom and lay-actor formats that filled German afternoon television around the turn of the millennium.
She was born on 26 May 1942 in Nümbrecht, in the Bergisches Land east of Cologne. She studied history, Romance languages and philosophy at the University of Cologne, and from 1964 to 1965 she was editor in chief of the Cologne student newspaper Perspektiven. According to the Hamburger Abendblatt she learned the craft of journalism under Peter von Zahn.
From 1967 she worked as a freelance author and presenter for several German broadcasters, above all the WDR in Cologne. On WDR 2 radio she co-presented the Morgenmagazin with Manfred Breuckmann, Claus Stürznickel and Reinhard Münchenhagen, and from 1995 to 1999 she led the WDR 2 Mittagsmagazin. On television she worked on Euro-Show, Treffpunkt Dritte Welt, Auslandsshow, Auslandsstudio and the West 3 talk show Drei vor Mitternacht, and in the 1980s she hosted the SFB talk show Leute with Wolfgang Menge. She wrote and directed many documentaries on development policy. Colleagues described her as uncomfortable, self-confident and opinionated. In 1970 she played an outside reporter in Menge's prophetic television film Das Millionenspiel, and in 1973 a studio reporter in Smog by Menge and Wolfgang Petersen.
On 31 October 1974, aged 32, she founded Filmpool Film- und Fernsehproduktion, a rare step for a woman in the West German industry of the time. The company began with industrial and advertising films, documentaries and campaign spots for the SPD, then produced the framing programme of the WWF-Club, Menge's ARD series Motzki, Polizeiruf 110 episodes and socially engaged television films. She kept working at the WDR in parallel, leaving the broadcaster in 2000 after 32 years.
The private broadcasters changed her career. In 1997 Filmpool made Jetzt reicht's for Sat.1, and during rehearsals the team found that lay stand-ins often performed better than the real people. That insight shaped Richterin Barbara Salesch, which began with real arbitration cases and became a ratings hit once lay actors played out fictional cases. Zwei bei Kallwass, Das Jugendgericht, Das Familiengericht and the pseudo-documentary crime series Niedrig & Kuhnt followed, along with docu-soaps such as Die Fahrschule and the Sat.1 camp show Kämpf um deine Frau. By 2004 Filmpool employed around 400 people. Richterin Barbara Salesch won the Deutscher Fernsehpreis in 2002, and in 2003 she received the Order of Merit of North Rhine-Westphalia for her political and social engagement.
Critics saw her formats as a flattening of television, and the contrast between the left-leaning WDR journalist and the ratings-driven producer defined how many people wrote about her. She defended her lay actors as authentic and expressive, and she saw it as a small victory against the industry's obsession with youth that women over fifty such as Barbara Salesch and Angelika Kallwass became successful television faces. Alongside the afternoon shows Filmpool kept making ambitious films, including dramas about domestic violence.
In 2004 Filmpool was taken over by MME Moviement AG. Marx joined its management board, left the management on 1 September 2009 and then worked as an adviser. She also served as an honorary commercial judge at the Cologne Regional Court from 2000 to 2008 and as deputy jury chair of the Deutscher Fernsehpreis in 2003 and 2004. She published the essay Eine Zensur findet nicht statt (1991) and co-edited a book of conversations with writers with Klaus Bednarz (1997). In April 2022 she was among the first signatories of the open letter to Chancellor Olaf Scholz published in Emma, which called for negotiations and opposed further arms deliveries to Ukraine.
For more than a decade before her death she lived largely out of public view. DWDL reported on 25 October 2026 that she had died peacefully at home after a long illness, aged 84. The exact date of death was not made public.
Biography adapted from Sources: DWDL.de obituary by Thomas Lückerath (2026-10-25); German Wikipedia; Stefan Niggemeier, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (2004-08-08); Hamburger Abendblatt (2000); Der Spiegel; Die Welt. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“Ich sehe mich als subversive Kämpferin für die Gleichberechtigung von älteren Frauen. (I see myself as a subversive fighter for the equality of older women.)”
To Stefan Niggemeier, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 2004
“Wir fanden häufig, daß die Laiendarsteller besser waren als die eigentlichen Protagonisten. (We often found that the lay actors were better than the real protagonists.)”
On the origin of the lay-actor format, FAS, 2004
“Ich liebe Menschen. Ich möchte, daß die Programme, die wir machen, etwas von dieser Zugewandtheit dem Menschen gegenüber widerspiegeln. (I love people. I want our programmes to reflect some of that warmth towards people.)”
FAS, 2004
“Ich sage häufig Nein. Ich mache nicht alles, was ich machen könnte. (I often say no. I do not do everything I could do.)”
FAS, 2004
“Vorgetäuscht ist gar nichts. (Nothing is faked.)”
On Filmpool docu-soaps, Hamburger Abendblatt, 2000
Photos
2Gisela Marx as a guest on the WDR talk show Kölner Treff, 2010
Jan 2010 · by People Forever
Gisela Marx
by People Forever
From social media
1Posts by Gisela, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.