Memorial Page for Horst Krause

Horst Krause (born 18 December 1941 in Bönhof, West Prussia; died 5 September 2025 in Teltow) was a German actor. Between 1962 and 2022 he appeared in more than 120 film and television productions. He became familiar to a wide audience as police officer Horst Krause in the Brandenburg episodes of Polizeiruf 110 and in the spin-off series Polizeihauptmeister Krause: a village policeman who carried the same name as the actor playing him.

Bönhof, Ludwigsfelde and a youth club

Horst Krause was the youngest of five children in a farming family. In 1947 his mother and the children were expelled from West Prussia and found a new home in Ludwigsfelde in Brandenburg; a year later his father returned disabled from Soviet captivity. Krause attended school for eight years, where he was known as the class clown, and then trained as a lathe operator, working at the Brandenburg tractor works.

In 1961 a colleague encouraged him to try acting at a youth club. The experiment became a profession: from 1964 to 1967 he studied at the State Drama School in Berlin-Schöneweide.

A quarter of a century in the theatre

Krause made his stage debut in 1967 at the Landestheater Parchim. From 1969 he performed at the Schauspielhaus Karl-Marx-Stadt, and from 1984 to 1994 he was a permanent member of the Staatsschauspiel Dresden. The theatre was not a stepping stone for him but his craft for decades. Only in the 1990s did he withdraw from the stage to work entirely in film and television.

A breakthrough at fifty-one

Krause had been in front of the camera since the 1960s, first in recorded stage productions and East German television. In 1981 he made his cinema debut in the DEFA comedy Asta, mein Engelchen. In 1987 he appeared for the first time in Polizeiruf 110 as an innkeeper, and in 1988 he played Lieutenant Rolf Schön in the episode Eifersucht. In 1990 he was part of the regular cast of the seven-part series Spreewaldfamilie.

The breakthrough came late. In 1993 Detlev Buck cast him in the comedy Wir können auch anders … as Moritz "Most" Kipp, one of two brothers who drive an old flatbed truck through post-reunification East Germany without being able to read. Krause and Joachim Król jointly received the German Film Award in 1993 for their performance. Krause was fifty-one.

A village policeman with his own name

In 1999 Krause joined the Brandenburg investigative team of Polizeiruf 110 as police officer Horst Krause, first alongside Jutta Hoffmann, from 2002 to 2010 with Imogen Kogge, and from 2011 with Maria Simon. The character retired in 2015.

That the village policeman carried the same name as the actor was highly unusual. The idea came from director Bernd Böhlich, who explained it simply: why should the village policeman be called Schulz when he looks like a Krause. Asked about a first name, Böhlich said: Horst. It stayed that way.

The supporting character grew into a series of its own. From 2007 to 2022 the ARD told the private life of the village policeman and his sisters Elsa and Meta in nine television films under the title Polizeihauptmeister Krause. Filming took place at the Gasthof Naase in Ludwigsfelde-Gröben, a few kilometres from the place where his family had arrived in 1947.

Schultze and the accordion

Between the crime films lies perhaps his quietest role. In Michael Schorr's tragicomedy Schultze gets the blues (2003) Krause plays a miner in Saxony-Anhalt who is sent into early retirement and one night hears zydeco music from Louisiana on the radio. Instead of his usual polka he plays the unfamiliar melody on his accordion, and eventually sets out for America. For the title role Krause was named best actor at the Stockholm International Film Festival in 2003.

Later years

From 2015 Krause played another leading role in the series Krüger, as the pensioner and former wrestler Paul Krüger. In 2012 the state of Brandenburg had awarded him its Order of Merit. He never married, had no children and lived for decades in Berlin-Moabit.

Horst Krause died on 5 September 2025 at the age of 83 in a retirement home in Teltow. He was buried on 17 October 2025 at the Französischer Friedhof in Berlin-Mitte.

What remains

Horst Krause acted for six decades, more than half of them before a wide audience knew his name. What he brought with him when fame arrived at fifty-one was the calm of twenty years on stage: he did not have to explain a character, he simply stood there.

His best-known role carried his own name, was set in the landscape where he grew up, and was filmed in an inn a few kilometres from his family home. That closeness between the man and the character was the basis of his effect: millions of viewers did not see an actor in a part, but someone they knew.