Lothar-Günther Buchheim

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.