German author and painter who served as a war correspondent aboard ships and U-boats in World War II. He is best known for his 1973 novel Das Boot (The Boat), a fictionalised autobiographical account narrated by a “Leutnant Werner”. It became the best-selling German fiction work on the war and an international bestseller and was adapted in 1981 as an Oscar-nominated film. Buchheim’s artworks, collected in a gallery on the banks of the Starnbergersee range from heavily decorated cars – outside – to a variety of mannequins seated or standing as if themselves visitors to the gallery, thus challenging the division between visitor and art work.
Buchheim was the second son of artist Charlotte Buchheim, born while 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 (Nazi navy) in 1940.
Buchheim was a Sonderführer in a propaganda unit of the Kriegsmarine in the Second World War, writing as a war correspondent about his experiences on minesweepers, destroyers and submarines, including the U-96 U-boat. He also made drawings and took photographs. Buchheim ended the war as an Oberleutnant zur See.
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, these works had been derided as “degenerate” during the Nazi period, and he was able to buy them cheaply.
His 1973 novel Das Boot was followed by a non-fiction work, U-Boot-Krieg (U-Boat War) in 1976, which became the first part of a trilogy, together with U-Boot-Fahrer (U-Boat Sailors, 1985), and Zu Tode Gesiegt (Victory in the Face of Death, 1988). The trilogy includes over 5,000 photographs taken during World War II. He is also the author of the novels Die Festung (The Fortress, 1995), based on travels home across France in 1944, and Der Abschied (The Parting, 2000), about the nuclear-powered cargo vessel NS Otto Hahn.
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. 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.
Buchheim, who was always noted for his short temper, earned the nickname the “Starnberg volcano”. He died on 22 February 2007 of heart failure in Starnberg, survived by his wife, Diethild, and two children. He was 89.
Link to Wikipedia biography