The story
A long walkway runs out from this building and ends above the water of Lake Starnberg, south of Munich. The architects, the Behnisch practice from Stuttgart, gave the museum the feel of a moored ship, which suits its founder. Lothar-Günther Buchheim had sailed as a war correspondent on a German U-boat and later turned that experience into Das Boot, his bestselling novel of 1973.
He was also a painter, a publisher of art books and, above all, a collector. In the years after the Second World War he bought the Expressionists of the Brücke group, the Dresden painters around Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, while their work was still cheap after the Nazis had condemned it as degenerate. The museum opened in 2001, after an earlier site at Feldafing was voted down by local residents. Among the Kirchners here are Bathers on the Beach at Fehmarn, from a summer on that Baltic island in 1913, and Interior with Painter of 1921. Alongside the paintings, Buchheim's other passions fill the rooms, from Bavarian folk art and African carvings to circus objects and life-size papier-mâché figures.
