At 88, Werner Kalecinski wanted to try something new.For months, as he took care of his ailing wife, he felt his own vigor wane. He needed to work. He had held many jobs in his long life — scavenging scrap metal, doing electrical work and selling insurance and frozen food. Now, in the age of social media, he wanted to give TikTok a try, even if he didn’t understand it.“I thought ‘influencer’ was a cold,” Kalecinski, now 89, said, stretching the vowels so that the word sounded like “influenza.”These are exactly the kind of quips that have turned Kalecinski into a beloved TikTok star in Germany. He is part of a growing cast of elder influencers who have gained traction among much younger users. Their content ranges from the fashion videos known as “Get Ready With Me” to motivational messages offering advice.Kalecinski’s character, Opa Werner, or Grandpa Werner, has embraced juvenile humor and has built a following on trying out what Germany’s young people are up to. Audiences love his taste-test videos, watching him grimace as he goes from one coffee shop to the next.He has yet to find a matcha latte he likes. He once compared the taste of the trendy green beverage to a freshly mowed lawn. His online persona of an affable curmudgeon who uses Generation Z slang to complain about the cost of lattes has drawn almost 200,000 followers and 2.8 million likes. Kalecinski may hate the taste of oat milk matcha lattes, but his fans say his thirst for life is infectious.“You always know he’s not going to like it, and he always calls it weird things,” said Szymon Zurawski, a 19-year-old fan, who patiently waited outside a Düsseldorf coffee shop to take a selfie with the TikTokker. “Younger people often try to adapt to older people when they’re spending time with them, but in his case, he tries to understand the younger generation.”Amin Anbousi, 26, was a social media veteran when he discovered Kalecinski in April 2025. For years, Anbousi had made a name for himself as a teenage YouTuber, but in his early 20s, he decided it was time to go behind the camera and tap into the lucrative industry that social media has generated.Scrolling for an idea, he noticed that older people were trending on social media, so Anbousi set out to create the next grandfluencers. When looking for his stars, Anbousi didn’t have to look very far: His own mother, Heike Hepperle, turned out to be funny on camera, playing the role of a bewildered but enthusiastic pensioner.Hepperle, 64, a retired nurse, encouraged her wisecracking friend, Kalecinski, to audition.Kalecinski stood out among more than 150 auditions with an email about why he deserved a shot at internet fame. His application, written in Gen Z slang, was a winner. Slang is spoken, not written, and definitely not used by an octogenarian, Anbousi said, recalling the email.“I thought that he was crazy, in a positive way,” he said. “The sound of the email was so special, I couldn’t ignore it.” It also helped, he added, that Kalecinski could navigate a follow-up video call.When Kalecinski sat down to write that humorous email, he was trying to overcome the latest tragedy in his life: the death of his wife. In the twilight of their 66-year marriage, illness had calcified his wife’s personality into the opposite of his, Kalecinski said. She had become pessimistic and critical, and caring for her in her final days had taken an emotional toll.“I don’t even know what happened to her,” he said. “I tried to break free a little, so that I wasn’t completely submerged.”He took Anbousi’s audition call just weeks before his wife died. In the face of heartbreak, he was determined to move on.This was not the first time he had reached for optimism out of necessity. Kalecinski, whose family came from what is today Poland, was born in Berlin when Adolf Hitler was at the height of his powers. When war broke out, his father was drafted to the German army’s front lines and killed in Russia.As the Allies pummeled Berlin, he and his brother were among thousands of children evacuated to the countryside, first to what was then East Prussia, and then on to Sudetenland, the German wartime territory that is today the Czech Republic. When Germany was defeated, the young Kalecinski walked back to Berlin.He was just a boy when he earned his first money, carrying neighbors’ groceries in his wagon. As an adolescent, he stripped the electric wiring of destroyed houses, which led to work as an electrician. But life under Russian occupation was “cruel,” he said, adding impishly, “Much was worse than matcha lattes.”At 18, to avoid being forced to join the government’s police force, he escaped East Germany, lying to the guards that he was going to visit his grandparents in West Berlin, he said. He wore a suit and rode his bicycle. He never returned.What followed was an adulthood full of pivots. He found that his boisterous personality was more suited to sales. He excelled, and his commissions ensured that his three children had a more comfortable life than his own. It didn’t always work out, like the time he tried to sell bicycles in a town with steep roads, or when he invested in a Munich construction company that went bankrupt.“If there was any straw to grasp at, I grabbed it,” he said, using the German idiom.At retirement age, he kept working. He drove delivery vans, sold insurance and even became a door-to-door salesperson of frozen food. Today, when he is not swimming, walking or shooting TikTok videos, he makes some extra money as a day trader, watching the stock market on his TV.“I always have to have one euro more in my wallet than I spend,” he said.Still, he has had to accept that building a comfortable life has not spared him from tragedy. In 2013, his son died at age 53 from an undiagnosed illness after living abroad, leaving Kalecinski to raise his granddaughter. Ever the optimist, he is grateful that he now has a multigenerational home, a rarity in Germany. Living with his granddaughter, now 34, and her three children has allowed them to share their burdens, he said.Most young Germans don’t get to see their grandparents be funny or full of life, said Hepperle, his co-star, and that is probably why Kalecinski has been so successful online.“Many older people isolate themselves,” she said. “In Germany, that’s just how it is, everyone lives for themselves.”In his accounts — @deropawerner on TikTok and Instagram — Kalecinski has also tapped into a rare thing on social media: authenticity, said Colin Fernando, a management consultant for Brand Trust, a Nuremberg-based company. Brands know he’ll hate their product, and yet they seek Kalecinski out for sponsorships because honesty sells on TikTok and the provocation brings attention, he said.“Everyone knows that he’s produced and that there is an agency behind it,” Fernando said. “But you still get the feeling that he is really authentic.”In the past whirlwind year, Kalecinski has won an award for his campaign with a supermarket chain and has appeared at multiple festivals. He tried his most daring stunts yet on spring break in Mallorca, where he chugged beer from a funnel and partied on a yacht with Oma Heike, Hepperle’s character. He teamed up with a German musician to release a summer dance party anthem.Evelyn Wilczek blasted the song from her car as she drove to her shift at an emergency room in a Düsseldorf hospital. Wilczek, 27, said that Kalecinski’s videos were an antidote to the polished influencers flooding her feed. Opa Werner reminds her to live her own life with a bit more zest. When she spotted him out in Düsseldorf this summer, Wilczek said she was almost too shy to approach him for a photograph.“We often forget that even old people were young, they had dreams, they made mistakes,” she said. “It’s beautiful to see that they also have a life when they are old, not only sitting at home, getting grumpy.”This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
