Achternbusch, Herbert

(1938- )

   Playwright. Achternbusch was perhaps the most idiosyncratic regional talent working in the German theater during the 1990s, staging his own plays and sometimes acting in them. He had little training in any of the disciplines he pursued (which included painting, fiction, poetry, and filmmaking), and the result was an anarchic mix of the autobiographical with the surreal. He nevertheless was invited to stage his plays at both the Bavarian State Theater and the Kammerspiele in Munich — and in 1986 his Gust was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen. His plays, like his films, were subjective and anecdotal to the point of incom-prehensibility—though at times they were oddly funny.