Plot Totcounter-Value

I’m trying to get tikzpicture and pgfplots working with totcount to create the following bars.

I count all occurrences of the different ratings with totcounter and in text I am able to read the counts with:

total{critCounter}
total{highCounter}
total{mediumCounter}
total{lowCounter}
total{infoCounter}

But when I try to load the values into a plot, I get a plethora of error messages.

addplot[style={black,fill=red,mark=none}]
        coordinates {(Kritisch,total{highCount})};

The messages reach from Missing number, treated as zero. to Missing endcsname inserted. and Undefined control sequence.

I guess this burns down to compilation sequence issues. Does anyone have an idea for a better approach?
The graph should show the identified issue ratings through the document, which I just count and want to visualize.