At the age of 83
Director Herbert Achternbusch has died
Herbert Achternbusch 2015 at the Munich Film Festival. The director and author died at the age of 83. Photo: Felix Hörhager / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
He was a novelist, playwright, poet, filmmaker, painter and actor: Herbert Achternbusch. Now the Bavarian universal artist has died.
The Munich filmmaker and writer Herbert Achternbusch is dead. He died at the age of 83, as the city of Munich confirmed on Thursday. As the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported, he died earlier this week.
Achternbusch is best known for his bizarre films such as “Andechser Feeling”, “Servus Bayern” or “The Ghost”. He has also created plays, book publications and hundreds of pictures. Achternbusch was primarily characterized by a love-hate relationship with his native Bavaria.
As early as the 1970s, Achternbusch came into contact with the scene of German auteur filmmakers around Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. His strips, often filmed with little effort, regularly targeted the unadjusted and subversive as well as authoritarian and bigoted Bavarian folk soul. In “Der Depp” (1983) he had his favorite enemy Franz Josef Strauss poisoned, in the semi-documentary “Bierkampf” he settled accounts with a Bavarian sanctuary: the Oktoberfest.
Achternbusch was born the illegitimate son of a sports teacher and a dental technician in Munich and grew up in the Bavarian Forest. After graduating from high school in Cham, he studied at the art academies in Munich and Nuremberg and got by with odd jobs before starting to write.
With his first novel “Alexanderschlacht” he secured a permanent place in the literary avant-garde of the 70s and 80s. He won the Mülheim Dramatist Prize twice for his theater pieces, which he created in rapid succession. His two-person play “Gust” (1986) with Sepp Bierbichler as a farmer who has fallen out of time and is about to lose his wife ran successfully for years at the Munich Kammerspiele. In 2017, “Dogtown Munich” premiered at the Munich Volkstheater, another commitment to his hometown.