Lothar-Günther Buchheim

Lothar-Günther Buchheim

Birth : 1918-02-06, Weimar, Germany

Death : 2007-02-22

History

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Lothar-Günther Buchheim was a German author and painter. He is best known for his novel Das Boot (1973), which became an international bestseller and was adapted in 1981 as an Oscar-nominated film. Buchheim was born in Weimar, in the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (present-day Thuringia), the second son of artist Charlotte Buchheim. She was unmarried, and he was raised by his mother and her parents. They lived in Weimar until 1924, then Rochlitz until 1932, and finally Chemnitz. He began contributing to newspapers in his teens and put on an exhibition of his drawings in 1933, aged just 15. He travelled to the Baltic Sea with his brother, and canoed along the Danube to the Black Sea. He spent time in Italy after taking his Abitur in 1937, where he wrote his first book, Tage und Nächte steigen aus dem Strom. Eine Donaufahrt. ("Days and nights rise from the river. A travel on the Danube."), published in 1941. He studied art in Dresden and Munich in 1939, and volunteered for the Kriegsmarine in 1940.

Profile

Lothar-Günther Buchheim

Movies

Das Boot Revisited: An Underwater Success Story
Himself (archive footage)
In 1981, a film about the misadventures of a German U-boat crew in 1941 becomes a worldwide hit almost four decades after the end of the World War II. Millions of viewers worldwide make Das Boot the most internationally successful German film of all time. But due to disputes over the script, accidents on the set, and voices accusing the makers of glorifying the war, the project was many times on the verge of being cancelled.
Doctor Faustus
Dr. Erasmi
A musician beds down a prostitute he knows is diseased in order to gain inspiration, an act he later believes to have been a tacit pact with Satan
Das Boot
Novel
A German submarine hunts allied ships during the Second World War, but it soon becomes the hunted. The crew tries to survive below the surface, while stretching both the boat and themselves to their limits.