Antje-Katrin Kühnemann: Former TV doctor died at the age of 80

The doctor Antje-Katrin Kühnemann, who became known nationwide, is dead. Kühnemann died shortly after her 80th birthday, reported on her circle of friends on Tuesday. Previously, the Munich “tz” had reported on the death. The Kühnemann, who had been sick for a long time, celebrated her milestone birthday with friends in St. Moritz in Switzerland a week ago.

“I don’t want to bare people by talking about my illnesses. I am not doing well at all,” said the doctor of the “evening newspaper” on the occasion of her 80th birthday on February 22, 2025. “But, Mei, it is just, I don’t want to complain.”

The Munich woman had difficulties with her eyes, among other things. “The worst thing is that I can hardly get up myself, that I hardly have any strength and depend on the help of others,” she reported. But she was tough and can endure a lot.

But giving up was out of the question for the popular television doctor (“the office hour”). “The saying applies to me: I have to live on because the devil fears the competition. It is otherwise not to explain that I am still alive.”

Kühnemann was born in Herz in Herz and grew up in Munich. From 1965 she studied medicine and earned money as a television announcer on Bavarian Radio. From 1973 to 2007 Kühnemann moderated the popular program “The Consultation hour – Advice for Health” on Bavarian television. From 1989 she moderated the “ARD guide: Health” in the first. From the BR, however, she died in a dispute in 2007. She felt that she was overturned with the end of her show.

Kühnemann continued to work as a doctor in her professional career for television, she was a medical director of a sanatorium on Lake Tegernsee. The two-time married doctor was a close girlfriend of the director Leni Riefenstahl, who was controversial for the Nazi regime, for whom she held the funeral speech after her death in 2003.

The 80-year-old was not afraid of death what had to do with her man who died in 2021, whom she had maintained until his death. “I look forward to seeing him again and have hope that our energies will meet after my death,” said Kühnemann. “I speak to him every day, greet him in the morning, wish him a good night in the evening.” And she misses him every day. “I was like that, so, so infinitely loved. Yes, love remains.”