After leaving school she studied from 1964 to 1967 at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.

On 16 June 1976, she began reading the evening news of ARD on television, a position she held until her retirement on the eve of the new millennium.

[1] A trained actress, she appeared in theaters and on television series during her time as a newsreader, various music programs and the NDR Talkshow.

In 1983, she spoke on the Atari cassette Programming Made Easy – An Introduction to BASIC with Dagmar Berghoff.

Berghoff was born with ectrodactyly of the left hand, a fact that remained hidden to most audiences for decades thanks to the way she positioned it, mostly covering it up with the sheets of paper she read from during news broadcasts.