»Being Brave!« – Memories of an Adventurous 95 Years

»I’m getting on a bit. But so far things have gone pretty well.«

Courage, confidence, self-assurance: All these things are characteristic of Marianne Koch. They are qualities she learned from her mother, who brought her up in a single-parent household. She didn’t meet her father – Rudolf Schindler, a Jewish doctor who was forced to emigrate – until she was an adult. By then, she had left medical school to become an actress, and her film career had taken her to Hollywood. Yet medicine remained her passion, and after divorcing the father of her sons – a period of major upheaval in her life – she resumed her studies. She worked as a specialist in internal medicine, while remaining a media presence. In this book, she offers us an insight into various episodes of her rich and eventful life. In looking back, Marianne Koch gifts the reader an uplifting memoir about courage, self-determination and embracing new beginnings at every stage of life.

From movie star to doctor: the extraordinary life of a woman who excelled in very different worlds
A unique first-hand account of decades of social change
Total print-run of Marianne Koch at dtv: over 900,000 copies

Genre: Non-Fiction, Biography / Memoir

Marianne Koch

Marianne Koch, born in 1931, gave up her international film career in order to resume her medical studies. For decades, she practised as an internist and worked as a medical journalist with her own radio programme as well as being a prolific author for many years. Marianne Koch has been honoured numerous times for her work, thus receiving the Paracelsus Medal in 2019 (the highest honour granted by the German Medical Association) and the Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz) in 2023.