Detlef Soost: 'My Father Was Not My Father' – What's Behind His Mother's Affair

TVS News AI, editorially supervised, presents Detlef Soost: 'My Father Was Not My Father' – What's Behind His Mother's Affair.

Detlef Soost sits on the "Frühstück bei Barbara" podcast and says a sentence that reorders his entire childhood: "My father was not my father." What sounds like a cliché was, in his case, literally visible on his skin – even when he was still an infant.

The story the choreographer and "Let's Dance" juror tells there begins with his mother Erna, a German woman, and a man named Günther, whom she had married. During that marriage, Erna had an affair with a medical student from Ghana – and became pregnant. Detlef was born, and the older he got, the darker his skin became.

For you, this means: here is a man who has been appearing on German television for decades, telling for the first time in detail how he stood as a child between two fathers – one who thought he was his, and one who rejected any responsibility. Both contested paternity in court.

As a baby, he kept getting darker

What for most babies settles into a stable tone after a few weeks became a family drama for Detlef Soost. According to Bunte and Focus, he kept getting darker after birth – until his paternal grandmother said the sentence that set everything in motion: "That is not your child." The grandma was the first to question the paternity, Soost reports on the podcast.

What followed was not a quiet conversation at the kitchen table, but a court proceeding. According to Wikipedia, Soost's father – the man who had considered him his son until then – contested paternity in court. His biological father, the Ghanaian medical student, also later contested paternity in court, writes MZ.

Two men who didn't want him

If you imagine it for a moment: a little boy growing up with the certainty that neither the man lying next to his mother in bed nor the man who actually conceived him wanted to claim him as his son. That was exactly his reality, Soost recounts – in a mixture of great openness and the sober gaze of an adult who took a long time to make sense of it.

After the affair, it emerged, according to MZ, that Detlef's mother Erna had had an affair with a medical student from Ghana. The marriage between Erna and Günther fell apart as a result – Erna divorced shortly after Detlef's birth, as the Abendzeitung München reports.

A childhood between addiction and loss

On top of the already shaky family constellation came his mother's illness. According to Wikipedia, Erna suffered from manic depression. Heute.at writes that she was addicted to alcohol and pills and had tried to take her own life multiple times – the first suicide attempt occurred when Detlef was four years old.

Erna died at 46, when Detlef was 13. The man who had raised him, Günther, died in 2006 according to Wikipedia. Soost was left behind as a teenager – without a biological father who wanted to be there for him, and without a mother who could stabilize daily life.

What remains – and what Soost made of it

What you can take from the story: Detlef Soost doesn't tell it to accuse, but to show what the language of a family can do to a child – and what a person can make of it when they later sort themselves out. The born Berliner, who now works as a choreographer, coach, and TV juror, has spoken several times over the years about his difficult childhood, but this time he named particularly clearly the moment when the foundation of his family of origin broke.

If you yourself know someone growing up with a similar story: the most important distinction Soost keeps drawing in his interviews is not the truth about paternity, but the question of whether someone stays. He himself had to search for that sense of grounding for a long time.