25th anniversary of Diether Krebs’ death: star comedian with humorous principles

During his career, the actor Diether Krebs (1947-2000) shone in a wide variety of professions, but he set milestones as a pioneer of German television comedy in flashy formats such as “A Heart and a Soul” and “Sketchup”. When he died of lung cancer 25 years ago, on the night of January 4th to 5th, 2000, at the age of just 52, there was great shock – we would have liked to have seen more of this versatile all-rounder in the new millennium that had just begun . The actor always gave his all for his audience – and was still on stage a few days before his death.

The actor, who was born in Essen in 1947, learned his acting craft at the Folkwang University there. He received his first engagement in 1970 at the Oberhausen Theater and later enjoyed success under the star director Peter Zadek (1926-2009) in Bochum. But at the beginning of the 1970s he increasingly turned to television and from 1973 onwards he suddenly became known to a large audience through his role as the easy-going son-in-law Michael Graf in the first German sitcom “A Heart and a Soul”.

He got involved in the show through private contacts – his girlfriend at the time, Hildegard Krekel (1952-2013), had already been cast for the role of Michael’s wife and suggested him to the producers. The special features of the sitcom included bawdy gags and a rough tone. In particular, the ideological skirmishes between the “Socialist” son-in-law and the reactionary head of the family Alfred Tetzlaff (Heinz Schubert, 1925-1999) with references to the current political situation were an absolute novelty on German television at the time.

When Krebs left the successful format after just one year together with his “Ekel Alfred” wife Elisabeth Wiedemann (1926-2015), he demonstrated for the first time his artistic unwillingness to compromise, with which he would often offend in the rest of his career. As the “Spiegel” reported, among others, the newly crowned audience favorite left the series when WDR began to “defuse” the scripts at the alleged urging of the then ruling SPD.

From 1978, Dieter Krebs worked for a while in the crime department, where he was able to live out his comic talent in smaller doses until 1986 as the gnarly crime master Dieter Herle in the TV series “SOKO 5113”. However, he would celebrate his greatest successes again in the comedy sector from the beginning of the 1980s.

Between 1981 and 1984 he and his colleague Beatrice Richter (76) were part of the regular cast of Rudi Carrell’s (1934-2006) “Tageschau” satire “Rudi’s Tagesshow”. When he and Richter were unexpectedly offered their own television show in 1984, the two of them didn’t miss the opportunity – much to Carrell’s chagrin.

The new format called “Sketchup” was perfectly tailored to the two comic talents and impressed with a humorous radicalism that has remained unmatched on German television to this day. In each episode, “Sketchup” presented the audience with a firework of mock jokes in which the actors satirized the lives of lower-middle-class cliché characters in grotesquely exaggerated costumes.

In their show, Diether Krebs and Beatrice Richter, who was replaced by Iris Berben (74) in 1985, demonstrated an almost spectacular courage to be ugly. For every sketch, no matter how short, they were equipped with dentures, artificial noses, wigs and thick-walled glasses in the mask until the first sight inevitably led to laughter – a tradition that was later particularly impressively carried out by Hape Kerkeling (60). should be continued.

The show’s sketches, which sometimes bordered on absurd nonsense, repeatedly targeted outdated male role models with biting humor. Diether Krebs loved to play cocky and suggestive villains who were then mercilessly exposed to ridicule in the final punch line. His show partners also repeatedly slipped into male costumes for this purpose.

The creators of this first German sketch comedy show pushed the limits of good taste – and often beyond. On the day following the broadcast, the weirdest excesses of the respective episode were an integral part of the topics of conversation among the Federal Republic of Germany’s television audience. Between 1984 and 1986, “Sketchup” revolutionized the German TV landscape and opened up a wide swath of new possibilities for the later comedy boom of the 1990s.

At this peak of his fame, the principled Diether Krebs and his partner Iris Berben surprisingly left the successful format. As Berben describes in 2022, outraged professional associations and politicians increasingly put pressure on the production, which led to the selection of sketches suddenly being noticeably “pre-censored”. The fact that she and Krebs promptly announced their exit caught the producing company Bayerischer Rundfunk off guard.

In the following years, Diether Krebs was no longer able to build on the brilliant highlights of his previous comedy career. His new sketch show “Very wrong – Gags with Diether Krebs”, which he started again in 1990, was only a moderate success and was taken off the program after six episodes. However, the short-lived RTL format “ROST – Die-Diether-Krebs-Show”, which flopped mercilessly with audiences in 1993, turned out to be the biggest failure of his career.

As a result, Krebs increasingly shifted his focus to humorous stage programs, in which he sometimes continued characters established on “Sketchup”. He also appeared in less comical roles in TV series such as “Polizeiruf 110”, “Our teacher Doctor Specht” and “Großstadtrevier”. Already marked by his lung cancer, he scored his last major success in 1999 with his role as the shady freight forwarder Werner Kampmann in the Ruhrpott action comedy “Bang Boom Bang”.

Like Krebs’ son Moritz (45), his father refused to let the disease get him down, even after he was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer. Even during his chemotherapy treatments, Diether Krebs stood unwaveringly on stage with his solo program, without a single hair on his body. He made his last appearance three days before his death. “He was really stubborn,” said the son. – A stubborn person who continues to be sorely missed, and not just by him.