This is how Herbert Achternbusch lived in Ambach - Tilman Spengler remembers
Created: 02/06/2022, 06:00
By: Volker Ufertinger
Citizen terror: Herbert Achternbusch (1938-2022) spent a few years on the eastern shore of Lake Starnberg.
From here he revolutionized Bavarian film.
© Effigie/Leemage/Picture Alliance
The late filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch lived in Ambach for a wild and productive few years.
The contemporary witnesses are becoming fewer and fewer.
Münsing
– In his film “Servus Bayern” from 1978, Herbert Achternbusch sits in the Fischmeister beer garden in Ambach, with a typewriter in front of him.
He is dressed all in white, takes a sip from the wheat beer glass and speaks the provocative sentence that has often been quoted since then: "I don't even think I died in Bavaria." A good 40 years later, that's exactly what happened: Herbert Achternbusch died on Died of a long illness in Munich on January 10th.
He turned 83 years old.
Recently it was relatively quiet around him.
But at the time he started one art scandal after the next.
The fish master was film backdrop and domicile
The painter, filmmaker and author has much more in common with Ambach than this one scene. He lived on the east bank, with the fish master, on the second floor, between about 1978 and the mid-1980s, it's no longer possible to trace it exactly. Sepp Bierbichler was not only his landlord, but also his most important actor. Achternbusch was in a relationship with his sister Annamirl for a long time. He had left his wife and child for her.
Together, the trio revolutionized film and theater.
During this time films such as "Servus", "The Young Monk" (both 1978), "The Comanche" (1979), "The Negro Erwin" (1981) were made, idiosyncratic, bitterly angry and sarcastic.
The pieces "Ella" (1978) and "Mein Herbert" also caused a sensation.
At times Ambach became a place of worship, an insider tip.
At some point, Achternbusch left Annamirl, and there was a break.
After that he only showed up at night and in fog.
At some point there was a break with the Bierbichlers
One would like to talk to Sepp and Annamirl Bierbichler about these wild times.
But the actress died in 2005, her brother Sepp is very reluctant to talk to the press.
After all: When the Munich Film Museum showed his probably most notorious strip "The Ghost" in honor of the deceased on January 27, the Ambacher sang the Schubert song "Der Leiermann" from the "Winterreise".
It's probably the saddest song in the world.
Read the latest news from Münsing here.
There are fewer and fewer people who remember Achternbusch and his time at Lake Starnberg.
One of them is the author and journalist Tilman Spengler from the Ruhr area, whose novel “Made in China” was recently published.
He settled in Ambach in 1983 and inevitably came into contact with the idiosyncratic citizen terror.
"In the beginning he was reserved towards me," he recalls.
"For him I was an author of polished literature, and he definitely didn't want to be that," he says.
But then they both got closer.
Not only because of the mutual admiration for the sculptress Margit Orlogi, who lives in Pöcking, but also because of the common love for Tibet.
Tilman Spengler, author and journalist from Ambach.
© Markus Scholz/dpa
In this context, Spengler, who was writing for the travel magazine "Geo" at the time, remembers that Achternbusch pressured him to fly to Tibet at the expense of the publisher and be allowed to report from there.
"I presented it to the editors in Hamburg," he says.
"And I looked at the completely shocked faces." The name Achternbusch, which was mentioned in Bavaria with admiration or disgust, said nothing to the people in the far north.
As a result, "Herbert" was deeply angry with his friend, even if he couldn't help it.
"He was just an odd, mysterious guy."
Also read: The history of the Ambach Wiedemann Clinic
Spengler has great respect for the artist Achternbusch.
"I was impressed that he didn't care about artistic conventions." Over time, he understood the films, which he didn't really like much at first, better and better.
The rebelliousness, the hatred of the church and the CSU didn't impress him that much.
“It was just the way it was at that time.” Although Spengler regrets that the two revolutionaries Herbert Achternbusch and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who at the same time brutally reinvented German film in Munich, did not work together.
"It could have been something great."
Souvenir: A picture of Herbert Achternbusch still hangs in the Fischmeister in Ambach.
© Ufertinger
At the Fischmeister, a picture is reminiscent of the former resident.
It is relatively small and – atypically for Achternbusch, who mostly painted representationally – exceptionally abstract.
It shows two mirroring triangles, the dominant color is blue, which goes well with the nearby lake.
"I assume that the picture comes from his time here at the lake," says Managing Director Cordula Smolka.
Only the initiated know where it is and who it is from.
A piece by Herbert Achternbusch is still in Ambach.
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