Obituary

Wolfgang Petersen, world-famous director and responsible for wonderful blockbusters such as "Air Force One", "Outbreak", "Line of Fire", "The Tempest" and "Troy", passed away in Los Angeles on 12 August. The son of a naval officer, he was born in Emden on 14 March 1941. We don't know whether his childhood in Transvaal near the harbour and in Hamburg Bramfeld was the reason for his affinity with ships and the sea, but as the RND reports, "our man in Hollywood" was particularly proud of "Das Boot".

This world-famous film from 1981 starring Jürgen Prochnow, Jan Fedder, Uwe Ochsenknecht and Herbert Grönemeyer, among others, is the film of his life, as he himself admitted. And if those of us who have lingered in the fairs of ships and boats are completely honest, it is also a cult film of the navy. Not only among submariners, but everywhere you look there is someone who can speak the dialogue. "Sack rats" became socially acceptable little animals, "water pressure" took on a different tonality. And we now know that "wet-behind-the-ears blokes" can also be called weeds. Oh, of course: men are photographed when they sail in. If your name is Thomsen and you go to sea, you'll be familiar with the banter. You read in my January commentary that you need "good people". And Gerrit Reichert described what it was really like in his book "U96", published by Koehler. More of this can be found in Bernried at the Buchheim Museum of the Imagination. The fact that Lothar-Günther Buchheim was a controversial war correspondent and author, who claimed in his book "Das Boot" to describe the bitter truth about an insane and hopeless war, inspired Petersen. The painful experience of thousands of sailors in the war is material that has been presented as a heroic epic for too long. But Petersen has made it so dirty, so loud and so fear-filled that you want to watch the film over and over again. Not on politically correct Netflix, but in the smelly and wet original. We always felt a little close to the protagonists. Petersen has created a cult film that is also watched with enthusiasm in foreign navies. I had the pleasure of experiencing American sailors who had "undubbed" the film.

"Das Boot" has been with us for 40 years and will forever be our "cult".

Thank you, Wolfgang Petersen.