Photo: Getty Images
TV star Kai Pflaume
He knows his way around with great feelings. In his show "Only Love Counts", Kai Pflaume (42) is a matchmaker and, at the same time, a messenger of the heart, who brings together lovers who have long lost sight of each other. And whenever people lie happily in their arms, it also deeply touches their soul. The moderator knows the pain of being separated only too well. For when Kai Pflaume fled the GDR for the West about 20 years ago, he was terrified that he would never see his family again.
Now that the fall of the Berlin Wall is celebrating its 20th anniversary, the memories of that time come to life again: it was the summer of 1989. Kai Pflaume studied computer science in Leipzig. The whole GDR was in transition. Thousands of people tried to escape.
The young Kai felt that this country could offer him no future. Although he was always close to his family, especially with mother Uta and father Ullrich, he decided to escape. On September 28, Kai Pflaume only left his parents' house with a travel bag. He got a visa for Hungary.
Arriving by plane in Budapest, he cheated on a bus that drove via Vienna to Passau, and arrived on his journey into the unknown in the west. He experienced a time full of emotions, between happiness and uncertainty.
He was free! But he had lost his family in one fell swoop. In the interview, Kai Pflaume said, "I missed my parents very much, did not know if I could ever embrace them again ..." The greater was the joy when the wall fell in November.
The escape, the loss of home, the joy of reunion - all that has shaped the moderator. For him today, family security, being with his wife Ilke (40) and sons Marvin (11) and Leon (9) are the top priority. Kai Pflaume: "No success in the job could be so nice and so important that I would forgo significantly more time for the family."
