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Creativity to touch
Achternbusch’s 13th-century house in Munich’s old town was a testament to his creativity, says Niessner. “Everything was painted by him: the walls, the ceilings, the wooden floor, some of the tables. He made pottery or mobiles.”
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Farewell to a grumpy genius:
Listen here
also an obituary by Sven Ricklefs.
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Achternbusch, who likes to provoke, wanted to be completely independent, says Niessner. “The first film got a small subsidy and the last two films – all 26 films in between he financed himself because he didn’t want anyone to interfere with him.”
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Achternbusch’s work is extensive: in addition to his films, there are 20 plays by him, 40 book publications and hundreds of large-scale pictures. However, the public will remember him less as a painter than as the creator of bizarre and subversive works on canvas.
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From Walchensee to America
One of these films is called “The Atlantic Swimmers” and shows two fairly normally built men, dressed only in swimming trunks and ridiculous swimming goggles, as they hop into Lake Walchensee in Upper Bavaria in order to reach America from there.
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Motto: You don’t have a chance, use it! A real aft bush. Nonsense with deeper meaning and down-to-earth. Somewhere between Karl Valentin, Gerhard Polt and Thomas Bernhard. His love-hate relationship with his homeland connected him with the Austrian playwright. “I don’t even want to have died in Bavaria,” he wrote in 1977.
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Achternbusch was born in Munich as the illegitimate son of a sports teacher and a dental technician and grew up in the Bavarian Forest. After graduating from high school in Cham, he studied a bit at the art academies in Munich and Nuremberg and got by with odd jobs before he started writing.
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The first novel catches fire
With his first novel “Alexanderschlacht” he secured a permanent place in the literary avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s. With the plays he wrote in quick succession, he twice won the Mülheim Dramatist Prize.
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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, a commitment to his hometown and perhaps something of a legacy.
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German films, there’s no hunger for it. And no getting full. But how a terribly beautiful scene suddenly turned into something terribly frightening with Achternbusch, that was bomb!
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As early as the 1970s, Achternbusch came into contact with the scene surrounding the German auteur filmmakers Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. His films, often made with little effort, regularly made fun of the unconventional, subversive, bigoted and obedient Bavarian soul of the people.
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Favorite enemy Franz Josef Strauss
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.
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But when he then had Jesus Christ descend from the cross in “The Ghost” in order to open a pub with Maria, the then CSU Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann had enough. He refused to pay the insubordinate director the payment of the last installment because he had allegedly offended the “religious feelings of large parts of the population”.
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For a long time, Achternbusch couldn’t get his foot on the ground on television. But times changed again, Achternbusch was part of the inventory of the Federal Republic of Bavaria’s cabinet of curiosities. The Munich Film Museum dedicated a tribute to him on his 80th birthday.
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Achternbusch also showed his anarchism by not only working with actors when shooting his films, but also with “beer garden friends,” says director Andi Niessner. “Common people” got big movie roles that way.
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In his work, Achternbusch shows sympathy for characters who don’t conform, who are harsh, pathetic and sometimes silly, says film scholar Tilman Schumacher. At first glance, the films would appear “strongly amateurish” and “like rudimentary cinema”. But there is a method to all of this. It is “a form of unruly cinema”.
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Loving, tender, funny
All in all, Achternbusch was just an “incredibly loving, tender and just infinitely funny person,” said Niessner. At the end of each film shoot, Achternbusch said that he was happy to be able to paint again.
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