Horst Tomayer

Biography

Horst Tomayer (born November 1, 1938, in Asch; died December 13, 2013, in Hamburg) was a German poet, columnist, and actor.

After training as an insurance clerk, Horst Tomayer worked as—among other things—a journalist, radio contributor, and satirist. He became particularly well-known for his long-running column, Tomayers ehrliches Tagebuch (Tomayer’s Honest Diary), which appeared in the magazine konkret from 1982 until shortly before his death. During the 1970s and 1980s, he also garnered attention through satirical telephone stunts, in which he posed as a conservative persona to elicit provocative statements from prominent public figures.

Tomayer authored numerous radio pieces—including contributions to the WDR program Kritisches Tagebuch—and performed as a spoken-word artist alongside Hermann L. Gremliza. In 1990, a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court attracted nationwide attention when it classified his parody Deutschlandlied ’86 as protected satire.

In addition to his journalistic and literary work, Tomayer also appeared as an actor in film and television productions. His credits included the Otto films; TV series such as Kir Royal, Tierarzt Dr. Engel, and Der König von Bärenbach; and the feature-film comedies 7 Zwerge – Männer allein im Wald and 7 Zwerge – Der Wald ist nicht genug. In 1994, he took on a more substantial film role in Hans-Christoph Blumenberg’s Rotwang muß weg!. Tomayer died in 2013 at the age of 75 due to complications from cancer.