Uwe Nettelbeck, who has died aged 66 from cancer, is known to British "krautrock" aficionados as producer of the legendary group Faust. For a generation of Germans in the 1960s, however, he was the country's leading film critic, and with his wife Petra, he was at the heart of the artistic and political ferment of the time. Between 1976 and 2006, they wrote and edited the review Die Republik, somewhat after the manner of Karl Kraus, the Austrian satirist of the early 20th century.

To guests at his adopted home in the Gironde, Uwe was also proof that a foreigner could master the art of French cooking to the highest level.He grew up in a middle-class family on the shores of Lake Constance in south-west Germany . He attended lectures at Gottingen University in German literature without bothering to get a degree. In 1960, aged 20, he began submitting reviews to Enno Patalas' Filmkritik monthly and their clarity and quality soon earned him the post of chief film critic for Die Zeit.

He had met Petra at the 1962 Oberhausen film festival, and after marriage and the birth of two children, they built themselves a modernist house on the Luneburg Heath outside Hamburg. I met them in London on assignment to cover our "psychedelic underground".

As a member of the 1968 Oberhausen festival jury, Uwe championed a short film Petra had produced, mockingly titled Of Particular Merit (after a German film classification) and starring a talking penis. Amid great furore, the town mayor banned the film. The following year Uwe published an article in Die Zeit about the trial of Red Army Faction leader Andreas Baader which provoked a warning from the editor that his copy would, in future, be vetted. Uwe felt it important to "force the other side to show its true colours; they won't react in a liberal way as they would like, but in an authoritarian way as they must when things get serious". He stopped writing for Die Zeit and became editor of Konkret, Germany's leading underground publication.

A chance meeting with Horst Schmolzi of Polydor records led to the 1969 deal under which Uwe produced recordings by Faust and Slapp Happy that altered the face of German rock music. Faust's transparent-vinyl trompe-l'oeil first album of 1971, with an X-ray of a fist (faust) silkscreened on the outer sleeve, became an international cult success, but domestic marketing men hated them and sales were modest. Schmolzi was eventually fired and the group's financial support withdrawn.

In 1975 Uwe bought an elegant typeface and with it produced the first of 124 editions of Die Republik. It could be said that he followed Kraus' turn-of-the-century Viennese example in publishing "documentary satire", but that would be too simple. This immense body of work includes, for example, the transcript of a radio hookup among Chancellor Helmut Kohl, President Ronald Reagan and a group of astronauts including the first orbiting German. There were critical essays on Herman Melville, Flaubert and Peckinpah, while one volume, "Cosmic", is reported by German readers to include some of the most hilarious passages ever written in the language.

The subjects of his books include the surreal and bloody battles that took place on a glacier in the Dolomites during the first world war and the early years of balloon travel. In 1992, dismayed by the triumphalism and racism of post-unification Germany, he and Petra found an isolated farmhouse in the Gironde.

There, he rose before dawn every day to cook and to write. On cooking: "The essence of sauces comes from bones; meat, vegetables, herbs and spices may improve the taste, but fundamentally it is a messy business. I cook alone." On time: "The very new is like a fossil. Only the ancient is alive." On Melville: "A man who lived a life against himself, sparkling like a diamond; from the brilliance of his books come flames of everlasting fire and undying genius."

He is survived by Petra and their daughters Sandra and Anouchka.

· Uwe Nettelbeck, critic, born August 7 1940; died January 17 2007