The paper presents an analysis of the grammatical function of the German perfect tense form by encoding the "real" times. The theoretical base provides a combination of two separate concepts, i.e. Reichenbach's and Weinrich's model, and is an attempt to combine them into one, prototypical model. As an additional criterion, the classification according to Vendler is introduced, because one of the goals of the paper is also to examine the use of auxiliary verbs haben-have and sein-be in verbal periphrases depending on their Aktionsart, or type of activity.