Many thanks for your reply!
I already went through the basic tutorials.
After further trial and error I was now finally able to see the remeshing work, but only when I remove the periodic boundaries and the "Match control" in the meshing for both sides of the periodic domain. Also I removed the lower domain (with the hex mesh) for now - so this part could also be the source of the problem.
So it seems like the periodic boundaries with conformal mesh might be causing the trouble in my case. However, I could not read anywhere in the documentation that remeshing with periodic boundaries is not supported. Unfortunately I need the periodic boundaries and cannot compute the whole domain because of low computational resources. I might try with non-conformal mesh on the periodic boundaries and see if this allows the remeshing.
Did I maybe miss something and remeshing is not compatible at all with periodic boundaries?