Biopic
Albrecht Schuch as rebel author Thomas Brasch
Albrecht Schuch as Thomas Brasch and Jella Haase as Katarina in a scene from the film “Dear Thomas”. Photo: Peter Hartwig / Wild Bunch Germany / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Thomas Brasch was a writer against it. Someone who was not satisfied with the ordinary and who constantly longed for the new. «Dear Thomas» is a film about his (literary) radicalism.
“Here bread is not cut with a knife, but chopped off with an ax.” The immoderate force of the German-German poet Thomas Brasch is already evident in the preface to his only collection of poems published in the GDR, “Poesiealbum 89”.
Almost exactly 20 years to the day after his death, a brilliant black and white biopic is now coming to the cinemas with “Dear Thomas” – based on the life of the writer, screenwriter, translator and director. Albrecht Schuch, who recently had brilliant roles in “Fabian” or “Schachnovelle”, shows the rebellious poet with fierce verve. As a grounding opposite pole, Jella Haase (“Fack ju Göhte”) plays his partner Katarina (in real life the actress Katharina Thalbach) with wonderful originality.
He doesn’t want to adapt
Brasch, who was born in England in 1945 as the eldest son of Jewish parents, is someone who is always offensive. While his father (in the film: Jörg Schüttauf) is making a career in the GDR, the son is targeted by the Stasi. In the meantime, his mother (Anja Schneider) withers away from the smallness of the socialist state in the Berlin prefabricated apartment. “The world changes, but not if you are satisfied with it,” says Brasch. The relationship with the father has been shattered all his life.
With the filterless in the corner of his mouth and open, sometimes manic eyes, Schuch plays his brasch as a truly obsessed man. As an indomitable one who seeks the exuberant – in literature, in love, in life. “You mustn’t bore the audience, you have to awaken them with the ax,” he says. Because his book “Before the Fathers Die Sons” cannot appear in the GDR, Thomas, Katarina and their daughter travel to West Berlin in 1976.
“Farewell to tomorrow, arrival yesterday, that is the German dream,” says Brasch there. He pulls the coke through a 100-mark note with the portrait of Karl Marx. In the interplay between the literary business and writing work, the poet finds no fulfillment in the West either.
The plot is interrupted by dream sequences in which motifs from Brasch’s works such as the film “Engel aus Eisen” or the story of the “girl murderer Brunke” are woven. What’s real, what’s going on in your head? “Dear Thomas” takes a lot of liberties and does not stick rigidly to the secured biography.
The camera stays very close to the protagonist. Director Andreas Kleinert (“Tatort”) impressively captures the mood with jazz variations. Fragments from Brasch’s poems are recited over and over again. They show what an important writer he actually is to this day. One of them ends with “I want to stay where I’ve never been”. Until the end he remains driven.
Dear Thomas, Germany 2021, 150 min., FSK from 16, by Andreas Kleinert, with Albrecht Schuch, Jella Haase, Jörg Schüttauf