Actor and journalist Lutz Riemann is dead. Riemann died on Monday in a hospital in Greifswald at the age of 82, as his publisher Frank Schumann confirmed to dpa in Berlin on Wednesday, citing the family circle.
Bekannt was Riemann above all in his role as Oberleutnant Zimmermann in the television series "Polizeiruf 110", for which he stood from 1983 to 1991 before the camera. Born in Stettin, Riemann first worked in shipbuilding before joining an amateur group to study acting in Potsdam and Berlin. He then gained stage experience in Meiningen and Weimar, for example. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Riemann worked as a journalist in the northeast.
As an employee for the GDR state security, Riemann not only spied on his environment in Thuringia, but also the SPD politician and later chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück, with whom he was distantly related by marriage.
There were also points of contact with another politician from West Germany. Riemann heard as a shipbuilder contributions of the then journalist Egon Bahr. Riemann met the later architect of the SPD's eastern policy after the fall of the Wall. They communicated intensively, sailing together on the Baltic Sea. The exchange is documented in the joint volume "Annäherung durch Wandel. Cold War and Late Friendship" (Edition Ost of the Eulenspiegel publishing group).
