By NICHOLAS KULISH

BERLIN - When Jan Josef Liefers steps up to the microphone to sing rock songs from the former East Germany to sold-out theaters across the reunified country, he is almost unrecognizable to his millions of fans from a German television crime drama, “Tatort.”

The loose performer keeps the audience laughing between songs with stories about life under Communism . He bears little resemblance to Professor Karl-Friedrich Boerne, the prim and priggish medical examiner he plays on “Tatort.”

Indeed, many of his fans have no idea that Mr. Liefers, 45, was born and raised in Dresden, much less that he played a starring role in calling for the German Democratic Republic’s peaceful end. That was no accident, he said, as he found that once the Berlin Wall had fallen he had a difficult time explaining life under Communist rule and for more than a decade simply declined to discuss it.

But through the music of his youth, known as Ostrock, he slowly found a way to voice his feelings about the land where he grew up. And fans from the former East said in interviews that Mr. Liefers managed to encompass the spectrum of their mixed emotions toward their vanished homeland.

The shows combine the music of the era with projections of photographs and videos from the former East Germany . But most of all it is his autobiographical stories that hold the evening together .

The German actor was just 25 when he got up before nearly a million people at a demonstration in Alexanderplatz in what was then East Berlin, five days before the Berlin Wall fell, and called for the end of the Communist government .

Shortly after the fall of the wall, Mr. Liefers found himself at a dinner organized for Jane Fonda. He recalled his embarrassment when Ms. Fonda told him he was a “Robert Downey Jr. look-alike,” which threw him into confusion as he knew neither the name nor the word.

“I wanted so badly to tell her everything about East Germany, but I had no idea where to begin. I had no idea where to start it,” Mr. Liefers said.

“There’s this very famous and sympathetic person, who comes all the way from the States because she’s interested in what’s going on in the world and you’re not even able to explain how your own life was.”

Appearing on “Tatort,” a German institution that brings all generations together on Sunday nights, means the broadest sort of fame here.

But at a performance here in Berlin in November, Mr. Liefers led his fivepiece band through a set list of songs by East German groups. Those were interspersed with stories from his own past .

Holding it all together, he said, is the universal quality of rock ‘n’ roll. “The dream in America is the leather jacket and the Harley-Davidson. In East Germany it was a cardigan and Simson S50 moped,” Mr. Liefers said. “But all the emotions underneath, anger, longing, love, hate, the feeling of being lost, this is the same all over the world.”

“I wanted so badly to tell her everything about East Germany, but I had no idea where to begin.” / MAURICE WEISS/OSTKREUZ, FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES