Anne Will, the 41-year-old former anchorwoman of Germany’s most popular evening news show Tagesthemen, and current host of her own top-rated political talk show Anne Will, officially came out at an event at the Jewish Museum in Berlin this weekend by publicly acknowledging her five-year relationship with Professor Miriam Meckel, 40.
“Yes we are a couple,” she told reporters before posing under the museum’s slogan, “Tolerance and Understanding”, “but we would like to keep our private life private.”
The relationship between Will, a top political TV journalist in Germany who has become a national celebrity, and Meckel, a well-known media expert, has been widely speculated about in the media for some time, in part because the women have made little effort to hide their relationship. They attended the Federal Press Ball — Germany’s most important social event — together in 2002, and dined with the Queen of the United Kingdom in 2004.
But they have always declined to publicly confirm or comment on their relationship, until now.
Will rose to fame in the ’90s as the host of various talk and sports shows, and was a television announcer for the 2000 Summer Olympics. She co-hosted Tagesthemen with Tom Buhrow from April 2001 to June 2007, reporting on national and political news and interviewing politicians like U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (read an English transcript here).
Will left the nightly news show to host her own political talk show on September 16th of this year, taking over for the previous host, Sabine Christiansen.
Meckel is currently Professor for Corporate Communication and Director of the Institute for Media and Communication Management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She was a journalist before becoming the youngest university professor in Germany in 1999.
Will and Meckel’s revelation has made national headlines in Germany in the last day, with newspapers touting the women as one of the nation’s power couples.
In the wake of the announcement, Will’s employer issued a public statement supporting Will, maintaining they were only concerned with her talent as a journalist, which has been “firmly established” by her success.
In 2001, Germany instituted a form of civil unions, and then in 2004, granted gay and lesbian partners adoption rights. According to a December 2006 poll, over 52% of the nation supports granting same-sex couples full marriage rights, although the nation has yet to do so.
There are a handful of out high-profile gay men in Germany, including the mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, who came out in 2001 prior to the mayoral elections, and Hamburg’s mayor, Ole von Beust.
But Will and Meckel are among only a very few high-profile openly gay or bisexual women in Germany, especially in politics.
