Herbert Achternbusch
1938–2022 · German film director, writer and painter
Herbert Achternbusch (Munich, 1938 – Munich, 2022) was a German film director, writer and painter, best known for low-budget, anarchic and surrealistic films. Born Herbert Schild, the illegitimate son of a sports teacher and a dental technician, he grew up in the Bavarian Forest with his grandmother. In 1960 he was adopted by his biological father and took the surname Achternbusch. He studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and Munich, and developed his work across several disciplines at once.
His first notable work was the prose Die Alexanderschlacht, written in the early 1970s and considered important by the literary avant-garde of the time. He then turned to film, debuting in 1974 with Das Andechser Gefühl, and went on to make almost thirty low-budget features. He usually starred in them himself and worked mainly with friends, among them the actor Josef Bierbichler, who appeared in fifteen of his films, sometimes unpaid. Bierkampf (1977), in which drunk Oktoberfest visitors became unwitting amateur actors, drew attention, while Das Gespenst (The Ghost) from 1982 caused a scandal over its alleged blasphemy. Its funding was halted by the federal interior minister, and Achternbusch fought a long legal battle before winning in 1992.
As a painter he produced hundreds of large-format canvases, often described as child-like, expressive and naively excessive. He also wrote twenty plays and forty books, and worked as a theatre director. His relationship with Bavaria, marked by both affection and rejection, runs through much of his output. Werner Herzog based his film Heart of Glass on a story by Achternbusch, and in 2024 an English compilation of his written works appeared. He died in Munich in January 2022, aged 83.