For all its madcap eccentricities, The Olympic-Winning Lady lays bares more autobiographical allusions than any other Achternbusch work. As in the film, his father was actually a dentist, his mother a sports instructor during the time of the Olympics (and the year of his conception), and he an illegitimate child who remained unadopted by his father until 1960. Nevertheless, realism and chronological order are quickly set aside as Herbert’s birth, although accurately placed in 1938, unfolds amidst howling sirens and the sounds of a bombing raid that took place well before the onset of the Second World War. What is important for Achternbusch are not the dates or the facts but the pervasive inner state of the country in which he grew up, whose destruction he experienced as a child.