"In a week-long march, the submarine runs through the lakes of the Atlantic lashed by the equinox to its hunting area".

It was written on April 12, 1942 in the newspaper “Das Reich” under a photo that illustrates an article praising the victorious campaign of the German submarines off the North American east coast.

The war reporter Lothar-Günther Buchheim shot the admission of the marines in the spray-washed submarine tower, but as early as November 1941 when the boats U 96 and U 572 met in the Atlantic.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

  • Follow I follow

The image of the heroic marines is used for propaganda purposes, in reality such an encounter should not have taken place.

It revealed the uncoordinated state of the German submarine fleet.

In the novel “Das Boot”, “the old man”, the commander of U 96, is annoyed that “two boats are carting around in the same area”, huge gaps open up through which the English “could rush through with a whole armada”.

At a distance from the founder of the foundation

Even if he thought nothing of Hitler as a politician and did not hold back with this opinion - Buchheim, born in 1918, was a prominent member of the propaganda machine of the “Third Reich”. His drawings, paintings and photographs shape the image of the submarine fleet, in times of war and especially after 1973, when he achieved a worldwide success with “Das Boot”. When Buchheim died in 2007, the “Museum of Fantasy” was already in Bernried on the west bank of Lake Starnberg. The Haus am See is the collection bag Buchheim envisioned, his eminent Expressionist holdings have a home here, a laboratory of the imagination, folklore pieces, dolls, posters, his own works, contemporary art in temporary exhibitions.

Museum director Daniel J. Schreiber has now redesigned the permanent exhibition “Das Boot”, which was dismantled three years ago: It clearly distances itself from the founder of the foundation.

The journalist Gerrit Reichert, who was on board three years ago for the exhibition for the Hundredth Buchheim, also worked.

His first, revised edition in 2019 and the third revised edition in 2021, “U 96 - Reality and Myth.

Der Alte und Lothar-Günther Buchheim ”(Mittler Verlag) provides evidence of how strongly and financially successful Buchheim was involved in the National Socialist propaganda business.

And how skilfully Buchheim made a name for himself as a warning and warner in the post-war period without distancing himself from his role as an accomplice.

A repression between fascination, fear, guilt and shame.

"Such a fascist filth"

Buchheim has been thinking about an autobiographical book for a long time. "The ducked life" is the first, "Styx" the second working title of the book, which will be published by Piper in 1973 under the title "Das Boot". Initially, Droemer Verlag had refused. Buchheim delivered 2,400 manuscript pages, and editor-in-chief Walter Fritzsche had to be asked how he could “handle such fascist filth”. Piper also refuses at first, then Fritzsche creates a cross-out version of six hundred pages. As a propaganda professional, Buchheim was used to carving out his own reality; and so the exaggeration always appears in the “boat”. In a preliminary remark, Buchheim writes: "This book is a novel, but not a work of fiction."