The director Klaus Lemke, the great anarchist of the German film industry, died on Thursday at the age of 81.

This is reported by the "Münchner Merkur" and the magazine "Stern" and refers to artistic companions.

Klaus Lemke had his very own style.

He shot with mini-budgets and amateur actors, without a script and hated the "state cinema" financed with public money or by broadcasters and produced great road movies and films that were very popular because of their flair and their natural portrayal of the milieu.

His film "Champagne for the Eyes - Poison for the Rest" premiered a few days ago at the Munich Film Festival and was enthusiastically celebrated by the audience.

Lemke was born on October 13, 1940 in Landsberg/Warthe (in present-day Poland).

His parents fled with him from the former eastern German territories via Dresden to the west.

After graduating from high school in Düsseldorf, Lemke worked as an asphalt paver in Berlin.

After dropping out of his studies in art history and philosophy, he worked for a year in 1963 as an assistant director in Düsseldorf and Munich.

From 1964 Lemke wrote reviews for the magazine "Film".

In 1965 he made his first short film, "Kleine Front".

In 1966 "Henker Tom" followed.

The sixty-eights and the rocker milieu

The road movie "48 hours to Acapulco" attracted a lot of attention.

Lemke oriented himself to directors Howard Hawks and Jean-Luc Godard, also in "Negresco: A Fatal Affair" (1968).

From then on, Lemke worked for television.

In “Brandstifter” (1969) he investigated the causes of the violence surrounding the 1968 and the terrorist group Red Army Faction.

His film "Rocker" (1972), shot in the Hamburg scene, received the greatest attention and recognition because of its closeness to reality. This was followed by the films "Sylvie" with the top model Sylvie Winter and "Teenagerliebe", in which a worker who had escaped from the youth detention center in a Girl from a good family in love.

Lemke mostly worked with laypeople he discovered on the street and in bars.

That's how Dolly Dollar and "Cleo" (Ingeborg Maria) Kretschmer came to their first appearances.

and Iris Berben.

Lemke retired from the film business in the 1980s.

In 1987 he shot "Zockerexpress" with Dolly Dollar, a story about a gambling-mad disco owner who stole all his belongings in one night and ended up gambling his three girlfriends.

Lemke was successful again with the television film "Ein behexter Sommer", the story of a father-son conflict.

That was "far away from his former Schwabing films", wrote the FAZ at the time and praised the "moods, so to speak, between the lines" of the dropout epic filmed in Ireland.

In the 1990s, Lemke lived in the United States for a time, shot commercials,

50 euros per day for the actors

The comedy "The Flittchen und der Totendigger" (1995) then appeared to critics as a sequel to "Amore" and "Honeymoon" in an American ambience with the successful film couple Cleo Kretschmer and Wolfgang Fierek.

A WDR retrospective showing five of his films, shown in 2005, brought Lemke back to the attention of the public.

This was followed by “Finale” (2007), a sex-enriched episode about the soccer World Cup, shot in the Hamburg neighborhood, again without a fully formulated screenplay with amateur actors and a minimum budget of 50,000 euros that Lemke himself advanced.

The actors received a flat fee of 50 euros per day.

Lemke categorically rejected subsidies.

With his discovery of Saralisa Volm, Lemke then filmed the award-winning psychological thriller "Dancing with Devils", which was shown on ZDF in 2009.