When he was about one year old, he moved to Bucharest due to his parents' work (his father was a journalist and his mother worked first for a newspaper and later in television), but when their home was damaged in the 1977 earthquake, he returned to the Banat region where he stayed for 4 years at his grandparents' home. Then he went back to Bucharest to attend the German Lyceum. After graduation, he failed the university entrance examination to study foreign languages in Bucharest, so he worked for a while as a translator in Bucharest and then as an actor at the German Theater in Timișoara. In 1988, he emigrated with his family to Germany.