Lothar-Gunther Buchheim

Lothar-Günther Buchheim, writer, painter, collector, museum founder and publisher: born Weimar, Germany 6 February 1918; married (one son, one daughter); died Starnberg, Germany 22 February 2007.

The author of the bestselling Second World War novel Das Boot, which was turned into a highly successful film in 1981, Lothar-Günther Buchheim was a complex and often difficult man known in Germany for his irascible temper as much as for his work. He was a child prodigy who exhibited his drawings at 15, a gifted photographer and ambitious writer, a volunteer officer in Hitler's navy, and a collector of Expressionist art who founded his own museum.

Born out of wedlock in 1918 to the painter Charlotte Buchheim, he spent an itinerant childhood between the homes of his mother and his grandparents, between his native Weimar and the towns of Rochlitz and Chemnitz, where at 14 he was already writing for several newspapers. At 15 he exhibited his own drawings, and a year later was responsible for the Sunday features pages of a local paper.

Having finished his schooling at a National Socialist institution, the precocious young man travelled to Italy and made a journey by paddle-boat to the Black Sea. This adventure would become the subject of his first book, Tage und Nächte steigen aus dem Strom ("Days and Nights Rise Out of the Stream", 1941).

After studying art in Dresden and Munich, Buchheim decided in 1940 to interrupt his education and volunteer for the Kriegsmarine. He took part in numerous missions, first on minesweepers and destroyers, and then on submarines, as a lieutenant and war correspondent who fixed his impressions of naval warfare in drawings and more than 5,000 photographs.

It was one of these missions, on the submarine U-96, that served as the basis for Buchheim's autobiographical novel Das Boot. The narrator initially portrays the cameraderie and exhilaration of war - sentiments that are quickly turned into horror and naked fear as the submarine runs aground and is all but lost.

Buchheim escaped back home from the French harbour of Brest, and after the war made unsuccessful attempts to establish himself as a gallerist and art auctioneer. He turned to publishing calendars and illustrated monographs on expressionist and modernist painters, whose works, still unrecognised by the art market and sold at derisory prices, Buchheim had started to collect. Soon his collection included works by important painters of the German Expressionist groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter and Alexei von Jawlensky.

Buchheim's fortunes changed in 1973 with the publication of Das Boot. It became one of Germany's biggest-selling post-war novels, and was translated into English as The Boat in 1974. The book was adapted for cinema by Wolfgang Petersen in 1981 with the young Herbert Grönemeyer making his screen début as Buchheim's alter ego on the submarine. Already famed for his cantankerousness and outbursts of temper, the author dismissed the film, which was nominated for six Academy Awards, as insufficiently faithful to its original.

During the 1980s, now wealthy and well known, Buchheim travelled widely and began to concentrate his energies on finding a permanent home for his art collection, which has been valued at £180m. Several organisations in Germany were interested in building a museum for these treasures, but Buchheim's offer came with strings attached. In addition to Expressionist masterworks the collection included wooden horses from merry-go-rounds, thousands of glass paperweights, masks, nutcrackers and folk art - all of which he insisted had to be housed and exhibited as one ensemble. Those interested in the paintings only would be shown the door.

Courted by several German cities, Buchheim confirmed his reputation as a man whose collection came at great cost to those who were after it: when the city of Chemnitz cancelled an exhibition of his wartime drawings because of political concerns the enraged artist returned his honorary freedom of the city; Duisburg built a museum for the collection only to have it refused by Buchheim as unfit to house his treasures; Weimar, Munich and Berlin were similarly dismissed.

To Buchheim this string of failed projects was down to the hypocrisy and philistinism of those who wanted his collection. When the village of Feldafing, his adopted Bavarian home, voted not to allow his villa to be converted into a museum, he berated the inhabitants as "sewer rats" and postponed further museum projects.

He concentrated once again on writing. Two sequels to Das Boot appeared: the epic Die Festung ("The Fortress", 1995) and Der Abschied ("Farewell", 2000), neither of which could repeat the success of the first book.

In 2001 Buchheim's dream of a permanent home of his art collection was realised when the state of Bavaria built a "Museum of the Imagination" for him in Bernried, on the shores of Lake Starnberg, which was officially opened by the Bavarian prime minister, Edmund Stoiber.

Buchheim himself, the "volcano of Lake Starnberg", sat in the first row, radiant in his triumph despite being confined to a wheelchair and wearing an eye patch after a botched operation, physically reduced but still a freebooter on the sea of culture. "Age is shit, worse than anything else," he had told the assembled press on the occasion of his 80th birthday - even if his eruptive energy made his public forget his frailty.

Philipp Blom