Eat one time Alexander Kluge came up once morest Herbert Achternbusch in front of the camera. In a broadcast by BR in 1983, Kluge, the grandmaster of the new German film, explained his idea to his colleague from the Bavarian Forest in the finest standard German that one might cut each other’s film material. Kluge enthusiastically waves his index finger, while Achternbusch under his hat looks like a cat that is haunted by an over-committed puppy. Until Achternbusch makes a dismissive gesture in the direction of the camera and says: “It’s enough if you strengthen each other from a distance.” Subtext: You can lick my ass. Now he has died in Munich, as the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported.
The state, the Catholic Church and television once considered fire dangerous because in his film “The Ghost” Jesus Christ (Achternbusch) descends from the cross and begins a life as a waiter with a sister superior, Achternbusch was among the bright and hip of the seventies and eighties heavily fashionable. That should have flattered him. He still found it repugnant, the “upper class chirping” that thought it was left, as he called it.
He had a problem with half-heartedly disguised contradictions between self-image and output. Not with openly embraced paradoxes, because they only described the world and its surreal superstructure. This is what makes his cinematic work so timeless and outdated to this day: Just as close to the documentary as to the peep box theater, his films usually get by with just a few shots, the tableaus become stations of the cross, at the end of which stands the bizarre death of the protagonist, mostly played by Achternbusch himself .
Born on November 23, 1938 in Munich as the illegitimate child of a Nazi-enthusiastic sports teacher and a dentist who was always joking, Herbert grew up with his grandparents in the Bavarian Forest. After impregnating a classmate, he first studied painting at the art academies in Nuremberg and Munich and then switched to writing: “The Battle of Alexandria” (1971) was considered a wake-up call in young German literature.
Ab nach Tibet !, Germany 1994, director: Herbert Achternbusch, actress: Judith Tobschall
Quelle: picture alliance / United Archives/TBM
But it was only in the film that he found his autobiographical (un) salvation-historical universal language. The professional world today compares Achternbusch with both Goethe and the Canadian underground filmmaker and former gay porn star Bruce LaBruce, and rightly so: because of the cosmic absurdity that he measures with his subversions, which ranges from mere pun to literally the deepest abyss. To drink a schnapps for every Jew killed by Hitler (“The Last Hole”) and then to plunge into a volcanic crater, that is hellish penance and hyper-carnivalesque foolish at the same time. In “The Beer Fight”, Achterbusch disguised as a policeman and robs the Oktoberfest, which is mutating into a world theater.
“This area has ruined me, and I will stay until you notice it,” it says in “Servus Bayern”. For the Dadaist word-stealer, the “counter” from “area” or “present” was always the decisive point. Familiarity with and alienation from one’s own origins were intertwined without putting on psychological theater of exertion.
The Bavarian only apparently wanted to leave, “Off to Tibet”, to America (“Hick’s Last Stand”) or to Greenland (“Servus Bayern”). The first thing he did there was to look back to his homeland with binoculars, where he “didn’t even want to have died”. A sentence that the Bavarian state government considered “a mess”, which is why it cut funding that had already been granted.
This was also a tradition at the federal level, Federal Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann withheld prize money from the director, Achternbusch took the German state to court and won following ten years of fighting. “That ruined me,” he said on the one hand. On the other hand, he was not impressed by it in his work.
Once reviled, then celebrated
The once vilified was finally celebrated by his hometown Munich. When he turned 60, the whole city was adorned with Achternbusch bonmots, in 2008 the film festival dedicated a retrospective to him: almost all 29 films might be seen there, which was a sensation, because only a handful have been released on DVD to date. At that time he sat tormented on the podium in front of his water glass and answered questions in his own mixture of snugness and elegance.
He is told that he was able to switch from 16 to three beers a day, that is very rare, because either you drink yourself dead or you don’t drink anything. “Yes, I’m just something rare,” counters Achternbusch, “even when drinking”.
He wanted nothing to do with pathos, and yet he created some of the most pompous women’s monologues in film history. The main character was often Annamirl Bierbichler, Josef’s sister and Achternbusch’s partner for eight years. He preferred to work with laypeople like you; he valued “when you put sentences and don’t interpret them”.
Disguised as ghosts, around 20 people disturbed the speech by Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann in Berlin in 1983 at the awarding of the Federal Film Awards in the Zoopalast
Quelle: picture-alliance / Konrad Giehr
He was a linguistic genius, a word watcher who did not miss the fact that Bavarian sentences, translated into High German, “sound much more dangerous”. That is why the characters speak this strange Achternbusch artificial language, which unfolds its own unruly presence neither folksy nor like colored High German.
It may be that Achternbusch has been quiet lately because he evaded the applicable laws of attention – even if his plays were still present on German stages (such as “Dogtown Munich”, 2017). When he really felt very lonely once, the Catholic fright told the BR, he prayed that a person would be sent to him. And then daughter Naomi was born in 1994. In 2002 she starred in his last film “The Clap of One Hand” and is in no way inferior to her father in stoic observation and representation of the state of the world, as you might see in Tom Lass’ “Blind & Ugly” in 2017.
He once played dead with Naomi in the BR documentary. She is the “ressurist” here, she says, and he should now lie down on this blanket in the grass, it is his grave and he is dead. It is “like sleeping, only without snoring”, is her stage direction. And dad, who so often played the death of his characters in his films, doesn’t question it, but does what she says. He knew that the inexperienced were always able to play best when they didn’t think or fear anything, but simply did. Because that was the only freedom. Now the grumpy avant-garde Herbert Achternbusch has died, he was 83 years old.
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