In celebrating the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution that brought down the Wall, we will profile over the course of 2009 important East Germans who have shaped beyond all physical borders the cultural, intellectual and political life of postwar Germany and Europe.

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Manfred Krug as the Berlin-based attorney Robert Liebling in the hit German TV show "Liebling Kreuyberg" in 1996, a role created for him by the acclaimed German author and screenwriter Jurek Becker.

(© dpa - Bildfunk)

Manfred Krug is a household name in Germany. He is known to millions of TV viewers for his popular roles as a Berlin attorney on the hit show Liebling Kreuzberg (Dear Kreuzberg) and as a Hamburg-based police detective on Tatort (Scene of the Crime), Germany's longest-running crime series.

He also had an early career as an actor and jazz singer in East Germany. And he is a published author, notably of a book chronicling his 1970's era transition like many other artists and dissidents from the former East Germany to the former  West Germany that is aptly entitled Abgehauen (How I Split).

Matinee Idol

After his parents separated, Krug (born on February 8, 1937) moved at the age of 13 with his father in 1950 from the western German city of Duisburg to East Germany. He worked at a steel plant and finished his Abitur, or high school diploma, at night school before beginning his acting career.

Krug studied at the Staatliche Schauspielschule performing arts school in Berlin. But he was expelled from this publicly funded program when he was deemed "too unruly". This did not, however, stop the charismatic Krug from performing onstage at the famous Berliner Ensemble theater.

In 1957, when he was 20, Krug began appearing in GDR film and television productions. In 1960 he starred in Frank Beyer's successful war movie Fünf Patronenhülsen (Five Cartridges). Many other film roles followed, with Krug often cast as a socialist hero. Another Beyer film he starred in, Spur der Steine (Traces of Stones), was censored by the communist GDR government and removed from all movie theaters only three days after it was released in 1966.

Singing Sensation

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Manfred Krug and Christel Bodenstein in a scene from the 1963 East German DEFA film "Beschreibung eines Sommers" (Description of a Summer).

(© Wikimedia Commons/Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive))

Krug was also popular in the GDR as a jazz singer. He peformed in the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess at the Komische Oper in Berlin in 1970. He also produced several albums in the 1970s with composer Günther Fischer. Most  of the tracks were artfully arranged Schlager, or German power folk and pop ballads which were popular at the time and still have an ABBAesque cult-like following among Germans of several generations today. Krug wrote the songs himself under the pseudonym Clemens Kerber. Another album featured jazz standards, and several of his legendary performances on the TV show Lyrik - Jazz - Prosa can still be recalled verbatim by many former GDR citzens.

Starting from Scratch

Yet Krug's blossoming career was quashed by GDR authorities who forbade him to work as an actor and singer in 1976 because he had signed up along with several other performers to an official protest of the denaturalization of Wolf Biermann. A dissident East German singer, Biermann was stripped of his citizenship and sent packing to West Germany, marking what many historians now refer to as "the beginning of the end of the GDR."

Unable to work anymore in East Germany, Krug asked after six months of unemployment for permission to leave the country in 1977 with his wife Ottilie and their three children. He was granted approval for the move and relocated from East Berlin to the West Berlin district of Schöneberg.

Despite initial concerns about having to begin a new "second career" from scratch as a virtual unknown in West Germany, Krug soon found work again as an actor, including a two-year stint on the German version of the popular American children's program Sesame Street.

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Manfred Krug as police detective Paul Stoever in the popular Hamburg-based edition of the long-running German crime series "Tatort" (Scene of the Crime).

(© picture-alliance/KPA)

TV Superstardom

In 1977 Krug became one of the male leads of the action-drama television series Auf Achse (On the Go), and would continue to appear on the series until 1995, one year before the show ended its long run.

His most well-known and popular recurring roles, however, have been on the two hit TV shows Liebling Kreuzberg (Dear Kreuzberg) from 1986 to 1998 and Tatort (Scene of the Crime) from 1984 to 2001.

Jurek Becker – another artist who resettled in the West from the GDR and a good friend of Krug (the two of them once shared an apartment with other friends in East Berlin) – wrote the award-winning script for Liebling Kreuzberg, which he is said to have created specifically with Krug in mind as the headstrong attorney cracking tough cases in the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg.

After moving to West Germany Krug rarely sang in public for a long time. But this changed in the final years of his run as detective Paul Stoever on the crime series Tatort, when he and his partner in crime-solving, detective Peter Brockmöller (Charles Brauer) broke out into song and dance numbers, including in the extended final episode featuring the two actors in 2001, which was "must-see TV" for all of their German fans.

First aired in 1970, Tatort is Germany's longest-running television series. It features a special regional flavor with a potpourri of different detectives based in cities across Germany - including in the former East Germany since German unification in 1990. Various regional public broadcasters produce the programs which air in one-hour episodes, each set in a different city with a different detective, on Sunday nights. German TV viewers have cited Krug as one of their top two favorite detectives in Tatort history in past surveys.

In recent years Krug has re-released some of his older GDR recordings, as well as produced new ones with his daughter Fanny Krug. He has also written two biographies - Abgehauen (1997) and Mein schönes Leben (My Wonderful Life, 2005) - as well as a book of stories called Schweinegezadder (Pig Talk, 2008). He has also recorded some of his own hitherto unpublished stories on CD.

Always Authentic

Krug has said of himself that as an actor he can only really ever play himself. His characters do indeed often resemble each other in most aspects of their personalities. They tend to play fair and seek justice for others, are more grounded than hot-headed, and exhibit a subtle sense of humor with more than a little salt-of-the-earth common sense. Both Krug and each of his characters could in this sense be described as "a man in full" - as trustworthy, reliable, respectable and just downright likeable. He's the kind of guy you want to have on your side, and hang out with after a hard day on the job.

Related Links:

Spur der Steine (Traces of Stones) by director Frank Beyer - German Films

More about the music of Manfred Krug - NME (online music magazine)

Manfred Krug in a 2008 interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German)