Lothar-Günther Buchheim

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, when he was 15. He travelled to the Baltic Sea with his brother, and canoed along the Danube to the Black Sea. After taking his Abitur in 1937, he spent time in Italy, where he wrote his first book, Tage und Nächte steigen aus dem Strom. Eine Donaufahrt ("Days and nights rise from the river. A journey on the Danube"), published in 1941. He studied art in Dresden and Munich in 1939, and volunteered for the Kriegsmarine in 1940. ==Second World War==

Buchheim was a Sonderführer in a propaganda unit of the Kriegsmarine in the Second World War, His orders were to photograph and describe the U-boat in action. From his experiences, he wrote a short story, "Die Eichenlaubfahrt" (The Oak-Leaves Patrol; Lehmann-Willenbrock had been awarded the Knight's Cross with oak leaves). Buchheim ended the war as an Oberleutnant zur See. ==Post-war career==

After the war, Buchheim worked as an artist, art collector, gallery owner, art auctioneer and art publisher. Through the 1950s and 1960s, he established an art publishing house, and he wrote books on Georges Braque, Max Beckmann, Otto Mueller and Pablo Picasso. He collected works by French and German Expressionist artists, from groups including Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Max Beckmann. These works had been derided as "degenerate" during the Nazi period, and he was able to buy them cheaply. describing Petersen's film as converting his clearly anti-war novel into a blend of a "cheap, shallow American action flick" and a "contemporary German propaganda newsreel from World War II". He also criticised the hysterical overacting of the cast, which he called highly unrealistic, despite their talent. Buchheim, after several attempts for an American adaptation had failed, had provided his own script as soon as Petersen was chosen as new director. It would have been a six-hour epic; Petersen turned him down because the producers were aiming for a 90-minute feature for international release. However, today's Director's Cut of Das Boot amounts to over 200 minutes, and the complete TV version of the film is 282 minutes long. ==Art collection==

In later life, Buchheim sought a location to house his art collection, including curiosities ranging from nutcrackers and Thai shadow puppets to mannequins and carousel animals in addition to his important collection of German Expressionist paintings and graphics. A building was constructed as an extension to the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, but he considered it unfit, and he turned down later offers from Weimar, Munich and Berlin. After years of quarreling with his home town of Feldafing, Bavaria, about his plans for a museum for his art collection, the town's citizens voted against the museum in a referendum. His museum finally opened in 2001 as the Museum der Phantasie in Bernried on the shore of Lake Starnberg, funded by the government of Bavaria. The entire collection has been estimated to be worth up to $300 million. In June 2000, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover voted to return a Lovis Corinth’s painting, “Walchensee, Johannisnacht” (“The Walchensee on St John’s eve”) which its donor, Dr. Bernhard Sprengel, had purchased from Buchheim, to the heirs of Dr Gustav Kirstein and his wife Therese Clara Stein, who committed suicide due to Nazi persecution. == Private life and death ==

Buchheim married Geneviève "Gwen" Militon, a resistance fighter from Brittany who appears in his novels as Simone Sagot, and whom he also painted. They had a son, Yves, born in 1949. In 1948, Buchheim already became father of a daughter, Nina, outside of marriage. They divorced in 1951 and he remarried in 1955 to Diethild Wickboldt. == Awards ==

• Iron Cross 2nd Class • U-boat War Badge • Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1983 == Filmography ==

• Doctor Faustus (1982) - Dr. Erasmi • Erfolg (1991) - Galerist (last appearance) == References ==