Silvia Lafer keeps a simple supply in the chemotherapy ward: gummy bears and diet cola. She told Bild am Sonntag that is how she looks after her husband, the television chef Johann Lafer, through each treatment. She also keeps one rule. No pity. “If I kept saying ‘oh, you poor man,’ he would go mad,” she said.
Lafer, 68, made his illness public at the end of May 2026. He has an indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a low-grade form that is not aggressive. It surfaced two and a half years earlier almost by accident. A doctor doing a routine check during a fasting cure spotted shadows in his groin. He felt no pain. Surgeons removed several lymph nodes, and the diagnosis followed. “It was a shock and hit me like a bolt from the blue,” he told Bunte.
Four cycles in
For a long time the disease stayed out of sight. Lafer tried alternative medicine first, without success. In January 2026 his condition worsened, and chemotherapy began. By the time he spoke to Bild he had finished four cycles. “Every chemo runs almost 24 hours. Bottles hanging everywhere. It knocks you out completely,” he said. It also cost him his hair and 25 kilograms of body weight.
Yet there was good news that early summer. “You can see the nodes getting smaller. That the treatment is working. And that gives me strength,” Lafer told the paper. On Instagram he wrote that he was all the more grateful that the treatment was taking hold. Silvia said the lymphomas had roughly halved, and that the doctors at Mainz University Hospital, whom she trusts, had predicted a hard but promising course. “I know he will manage it. I was never afraid of losing him,” she said.
Lafer did not slow down for it. Silvia had offered to cancel some of his appointments. He refused. “I can see how active he is,” she said. “Almost more active than before.”
A harder summer
The picture has since darkened. At a gathering of old colleagues and friends in Munich, Lafer told the Münchner Merkur that the cancer can no longer be cured. “I have metastases all over my body, everything is black,” he said. It can be held back, he added, but not healed. A sixth chemotherapy cycle was about to begin. “I face this task. I have to face it.”
No doctor will give him a prognosis. He heard of one patient who lived a single year, he said, and others who have done well for ten. He admitted to the Abendzeitung that he was in a crisis phase. Still, he plans ahead. His wish is to reach Mount Everest base camp in the Himalaya. Faith, family and friends carry him, and he writes to his fellow chef Alfons Schuhbeck, who also has cancer. “You cannot put anything off,” Lafer said.
His children, Jennifer, 31, and Jonathan, 25, learned of it only about two months before he spoke out. They came at once, he said.
Sources
- Johann Lafer: Die Familie und der Glaube geben ihm Kraft – Yahoo Nachrichten
- Johann Lafer: Ehefrau Silvia berichtet von ersten Therapie-Erfolgen
- Johann Lafers Krebs kann nicht mehr geheilt werden: „Metastasen im ganzen Körper” – n-tv.de
