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Das Boot (das ˈboːt, The Boat) is a 1981 West German war film written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, produced by Günter Rohrbach, and starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer and Klaus Wennemann. It has been exhibited both as a theatrical release (1981) and a TV miniseries (1985). Also, several different home video versions, as well as a director's cut (1997) supervised by Petersen, have been released. An adaptation of Lothar-Günther Buchheim's 1973 German novel based on his experiences aboard , the film is set during World War II and follows U-96 and her crew, as they set out on a hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. It depicts both the excitement of battle and the tedium of the fruitless hunt, and shows the men serving aboard U-boats as ordinary individuals with a desire to do their best for their comrades and their country. Development began in 1979. Several American directors were considered three years earlier, before the film was shelved. During production, Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, the captain of the real U-96 during Buchheim's 1941 patrol and one of Germany's top U-boat "tonnage aces" during the war, and Hans-Joachim Krug, former first officer on , served as consultants. One of Petersen's goals was to guide the audience through "a journey to the edge of the mind" (the film's German tagline Eine Reise ans Ende des Verstandes), showing "what war is all about". Produced on a DM32 million budget (about

18.5 million, equivalent to € million ), the high production cost ranks it among the most expensive films in German cinema, but it was a commercial success, grossing nearly

85 million worldwide (equivalent to

220 million in 2020). Columbia Pictures issued both German-language and English-dubbed versions in the United States theatrically through their Triumph Classics label, earning

11 million. Das Boot received positive reviews, and was nominated for six Academy Awards; two of these (Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay) went to Petersen himself. He was also nominated for a BAFTA Award and DGA Award.

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Related concepts (5)

Type VII submarine

Type VII U-boats were the most common type of German World War II U-boat. 703 boats were built by the end of the war. The lone surviving example, , is on display at the Laboe Naval Memorial located in Laboe, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. The Type VII was based on earlier German submarine designs going back to the World War I Type UB III and especially the cancelled Type UG. The type UG was designed through the Dutch dummy company NV Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw Den Haag (I.v.

Das Boot

Battle of the Atlantic

The Battle of the Atlantic, the longest continuous military campaign in World War II, ran from 1939 to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, covering a major part of the naval history of World War II. At its core was the Allied naval blockade of Germany, announced the day after the declaration of war, and Germany's subsequent counter-blockade. The campaign peaked from mid-1940 through to the end of 1943.