Lars Klingbeil: SPD boss had cancer on the tongue

Lars Klingbeil (47) spoke for the first time about his cancer survived. Around half of the over six-hour conversation, the politicians and the moderators Jochen Wegner (55) and Christoph Amend (51) arrive at the subject and God when the SPD chairman tells: “I had cancer in 2014 and I had discovered it myself. I had tongue cancer from smoking.”

Klingbeil had previously told that he had started smoking at the age of 25, with his consumption in the meantime being “40 cigarettes a day”. Klingbeil continues a year before the diagnosis, he had stopped smoking. “Then a year later this diagnosis came with the malignant carcinoma, which God had not yet broken out on the edge of the tongue.”

The carcinoma could be removed in an operation, and Klingbeil is now considered healed. Experience gave him “a lot of strength for everything else”, said the politician. “And when people look at me today and say ‘Why is he resting, why is it not so excited, why doesn’t he get out of the composure?’, Then that has a lot to do with me that I say that there is a bit of extension that I have developed myself.”

Returning to the subject of faith, Klingbeil clarifies using the example of his disease history: “I don’t want to put my fate in the hands of others. […] I found this position and said I let it examine it. And that meant that I thought I took this step at the right moment. That’s why I believe in something like fate, but I don’t want to delegate it. “

He would have been “very lucky”, admits Klingbeil and reports how the diagnosis also changed him sustainably: “It gives me a very great inner peace that I have completed this moment in my life and also passed it successfully.” Before this experience, he was “more convulsive” and “compulsive”, “but you can look at life differently, if you are standing before the cliff.”