Dagmar Berghoff (79), the famous and self-confident radio and television presenter, has been "Miss Tagesschau" for almost 25 years. But as the 79-year-old now revealed in an interview with "Bild am Sonntag", her remarkable career arose from a deeply sad and traumatic childhood.

She had to miss her parents' love literally from the cradle: "My parents, first and foremost my mother, rejected me because I wasn't such a pretty baby. I was a bit fat, and the hand was slightly deformed" - Berghoff was born with a so-called "cleft hand" (ectrodactyly), on her left hand two fingers are missing.

As a result, her mother convinced herself that Berghoff "had been switched in the hospital. [...] She then told my father so many times that he believed it too." The first few years she was still too young to be aware of the cold handling. "But when I was five or six years old, I really missed her love."

When Berghoff was just seven years old, her "severe manic-depressive" mother committed suicide. But it took many years before she became aware of the full extent of this act - Berghoff then felt anger towards her mother: "I could not forgive her for leaving a man with two small children alone."

After the death of her mother, she was all the more attached to her father, who was now a single parent, but who was often out of the house due to his work as a businessman. "I still remember that I always thought up questions when I was ill and he came to our house in the evening. Just so that he could sit by my bed longer."

Her future husband Peter Matthaes also traveled a lot as a doctor. When he died in 2001, she initially didn't want to accept his death and "imagined, for example, that he was on a business trip for a long time". She built this "deceptive protective cocoon" to keep pain away. But at some point I realized: something is going terribly wrong in my head, you have to talk to someone about it. It was difficult for me."

The telephone counseling service offers help with depression on the free number: 0800/111 0 111