Once, Herbert Achternbusch wrote, he carefully examined his cinema seat after the film had been shown;

he was convinced that his bleeding heart had left a big stain on it.

And even if one is not sure whether this text by Achternbusch was about John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Otto Preminger or Max Ophüls: it is certain that such names, the greatest of all, formed the frame of reference for Achternbusch's cinema.

Anyone who smiles at him as a funny (and at best cunning) dilettante has understood nothing of Herbert Achternbusch. On the other hand, he shouldn't take it amiss because it was he who once said that nowadays everyone wants to be understood by everyone. Just not him. It's enough for him if no one understands him.

His filming was determined by the insight that if you can't make really big, expensive films, you just have to make really small, cheap ones.

Everything in between was stuffy or TV.

And so, when he started the film "Bierkampf", Achternbusch went to the Oktoberfest disguised as a policeman and provoked people.

And the camera, without any permission to shoot, watched.

Bernd Eichinger has seldom brought more impressive crowd scenes to the screen than this beer tent madness.

And when the camera looked down onto Marienplatz from a roof, the film only had to assert a small overall narrative context.

And half of Munich became an extra in Achternbusch's low-budget monumental talk cinema.

Achterbusch didn't scratch the paint on the baroque facades

In the past, he was sometimes seen sitting over a wheat beer in the Weißen Bräuhaus in the valley. And the last thing he needed in moments like this were fans, cinéphilie, who would have approached him about his films. Achternbusch listened to people talking more and more nonsense – he was, in a way, a Mack Sennett or Buster Keaton of Bavarian film: in the silent film era, the biggest crackpots were collected from the streets and invited to script meetings, so that there was no narrative logic downplay the anarchist gags.

Yes, if you haven't seen a film by him for a long time, the memories merge into the great Achternbusch oeuvre - a film that you would definitely misunderstand if you took the humor in it for cabaret or cabaret and the whole gesture for something critical Folklore. No, Achterbusch didn't scratch the paint on the baroque facades; he suggested that if you look long and hard enough, the evil spirits of history, which the Munich and Bavarians love to repress, would become apparent. Born in 1938, as a child he still experienced the total ruin of those people, the downfall of the party that had grown up as a regional force in the capital of the movement. Which in itself was reason enough for him to despise everything popular.

And at the same time he loved the possibilities and, above all, the impossibilities of the Bavarian language, this inauthenticity, which not only reveals itself in cascades of subjunctive moods, but also in the fundamental refusal of words and sentences to simply be attached to facts like labels.

In 2002 he stopped filming

This country has destroyed him, and he will stay until the country notices it, said one of the most serious Motti Achternbuschs - and then his cinema kept looking for locations in the eternal ice, in Greenland for example, where he lost his bleeding heart hoped to cool.

Herbert Achternbusch was mostly the main actor himself, a character that viewers didn't get used to very quickly. Because in one moment he seemed wise, old, like the prophet of a religion that had become incomprehensible. And in the next scene, it was so silly it almost hurt to laugh at his jokes. And sometimes you wanted to cover your ears in the hope that Achternbusch's constant soliloquy, which revolved around German guilt and its consequences, might be heard more clearly.

In 2002 he stopped filming.

Even the CSU, which twenty years earlier had been so outraged by its blasphemous Jesus film “The Ghost”, was no longer an opponent.

In any case, his main occupation was a painter;

he painted a thousand pictures, including quite a few good ones.

And he wrote thousands of pages of prose and plays that no one played anymore, although everyone was quite impressed when they came out in the eighties and nineties.

Oh, Herbert Achternbusch died.

You will already feel in Bavaria how much he is missing.