The director Peter Lilienthal is dead. He died peacefully on Friday in a nursing home in Munich, where he last lived, his lawyer and his supervisor at the German Press Agency in Munich confirmed unanimously. Lilienthal was 95 years old.
Lilienthal became known to a larger audience with films such as “It’s Quiet in the Country”, for which he received the rarely awarded Golden Bowl of the Federal Film Prize in 1975, and “David”, the story of a rabbi’s son who survived the Nazi terror.
With this film Lilienthal won the 1979 Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, which also showed his South American film “The Autograph” in 1984 about the mechanisms of oppression and intimidation of people in dictatorships. His story about a father and his mentally handicapped son “The Poet’s Silence” earned him a gold film in 1987. In 2020, Lilienthal was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit.
Born on November 27, 1927 in Berlin, Lilienthal fled with his family from the National Socialists to Uruguay in 1939. When he returned to Germany to study, his lawyer said he gave his date of birth as 1929. Lilienthal’s film career initially began on television. Award-winning films such as the trilogy “La Victoria” (1973) and “Insurrection” (1980) followed.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Lilienthal was one of the co-founders of New German Film. With colleagues like Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, he rebelled against the “omnipotence of the producers and the heteronomy of the film industry”. From 1985 to 1996 he was the first director of the film and media art department at the Berlin Academy of Arts.
Lilienthal often found his themes in his own life story. In his films he dealt, among other things, with the military dictatorships in Latin America and later also with the experiences of his Jewish descent.
