He was a television celebrity in the GDR and a crowd favorite for generations: The actor Herbert Köfer, who was still active in his old age, is dead. He died on Saturday at the age of 100, as his widow Heike Köfer announced.
Köfer was out of the stage for more than eight decades. He always savored the applause until the last second, as he once confessed with a smile. “I come to life with every performance, every reading and every day that I play.”
The word retirement could not be heard from his mouth – and his name is always associated with the GDR television series “Pensioners never have time”. His part as grandpa Paul Schmidt was legendary.
Köfer, born in Berlin on February 27, 1921, began his career in the theater in the 1940s. After the Second World War he started working for GDR television, where he read the first news in 1952 – including a birthday greeting from the GDR leadership to Stalin. Köfer was also present at the New Year’s Eve gala in 1991 when the lights went out for GDR television. He played in DEFA films such as “Nackt unter Wölfen” (1963), in which a child is smuggled into the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was seen in popular series such as “In aller Freunde”, “SOKO Leipzig” and “Ein starkes Team”.
He was always fashionably dressed and very well-groomed, even in old age he looked like a young senior. Charming and very detailed, he reported about his life and his many experiences with colleagues – dead and living. He recorded his thoughts and experiences in bullet points in a small notebook that was always ready to hand and which he took out of his pocket as needed. Some of his books came out of this. Work keeps him young, he had repeatedly emphasized.
With his third wife Heike, 40 years his junior, Köfer went for a lot of walks. In 2012, when he was almost 90, he built a new house on Seddiner See in Brandenburg – and had himself photographed in action with a wheelbarrow. Energetic, of robust health, that is how he liked to present himself. In comparison to his peers, Köfer sometimes showed off his fitness level with push-ups. He wiped away possible health problems with a wave of his hand.
He also did not miss out on modern technical developments: when he was almost 100, he had his own well-maintained website, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel. “I think it’s good that you can express yourself on social media,” he said. Everything that appears on his Facebook page, he adds himself – no management. However, his wife helps him: “Because she is simply faster on the keyboard.”