Thomas Brasch tribute “Dear Thomas” on Arte: Where I’ve never been – culture

This review was first published for the theatrical release of “Dear Thomas” in November 2021. On Monday, February 13, 2022, the feature film will be shown at 10:25 p.m. on Arte.

In “Kargo”, that lyrical large-scale montage that is one of Thomas Brasch’s best-known works, there is a sentence that can be read as a recommendation to future biographers: “Perhaps all stories should begin with ‘Perhaps’ so that the possibility of stories becomes clear and there is no linear biography that is boring.” Andreas Kleinert, who made a film out of Brasch’s life, must know this sentence because he followed the recommendation.

“Dear Thomas” has become such a maybe story, fortunately, and that is why Albrecht Schuch, probably the greatest German cinema star at the moment, plays the young Thomas Brasch exactly as he may have been: rebellious, alcoholic, promiscuous, desiring and desired and in an agonizing conflict with his father, the SED functionary Horst Brasch, whom Jörg Schüttauf shows as a man armored in ideology and sadness.

The Brasch family, as we know from previous films and documentaries and not least from the stories told by daughter Marion Brasch, served as a model for the inner conflict, struggles and humiliations of both German dictatorships. Horst Brasch and his wife Gerda Wenger, both Jewish, met in exile. Thomas was born in 1945 in the northern English town of Westow. After moving to the Soviet-occupied zone, the father rose to become Deputy Minister of Culture in the GDR, remaining a member of the Central Committee until his death in the summer of 1989, hard and doggedly believing in the long-crumbling message of promise of socialism.

At the beginning of the film, father and son drive across the country in a car singing, the journey ends in the cadet school of the National People’s Army. Drills, nosebleeds, urine showers for the coward – there are some of the things that Brasch would later repel as a young adult about socialism forged by cadres. After his father betrayed him to the Stasi, he first went to jail and then had to slave away as a cutter in the transformer factory in Oberschöneweide. Thomas the old man can answer his question about what he learned there: “Dirty, drunk, betrayal, in other words, socialism at its finest.”

During those hard working days, Brasch came across the story of Karl Brunke, who murdered women. It becomes a lifelong obsession for the poet Brasch. Kleinert depicts her in a rather wacky dream sequence: one of the workers from the coal mine comes to Brasch with her sister. Both demand to be shot by him, as the girls asked Brunke to do. Brasch agrees and shoots the women in the bare breasts. Kleinert doesn’t let any motive burn. His brasch is a warrior. He wants to kill what kills him, but he only turns his weapons against himself.

“Dear Thomas” – Kleinert borrowed the title from Brasch’s dark drama about war and death dreamer Georg Heym (“Dear Georg”, 1980). In his diary, Heym dreamed of suffocating himself while skating on the Havel. The thin ice on which Thomas Brasch is also running for his life is the terrain on which the writer fights his battle for the truth. With the state and, by proxy, with the father. The scenes in which Albrecht Schuch and Jörg Schüttauf enact their struggle for what is the truth are among the strongest in the film. The rebel son and the old man, sad and angry from the lies of life, devastate the family each in his own way. The younger son Klaus also admires the older brother Thomas, he wants to be an actor and is destroyed by himself and the circumstances.

Brasch’s artistry begins with the first poems and plays, which nobody in the GDR wants to print or perform. Kleinert directs his film in black and white, that’s the color combination of memory. In the cramped apartments, which are nevertheless extensively bugged, there is partying, dancing and a surprising amount of fucking. Thomas Brasch’s wives are themselves important figures in GDR history: the singer-songwriter Bettina Wegner, who plays Paula Hans, has a son, Brasch, who hardly interests him. But with the dark-voiced Romanian singer Sanda Weigl, after the Soviet troops marched into Prague, Brasch ran through dark-grey East Berlin and handed out leaflets – one of them said “The Pariser Commune is in Prague, she’s still alive,” at least the poet writes line, Wolf Biermann, in his autobiography.

Kleinert lets Brasch write ingeniously wildly, again and again

Brasch’s great love, however, is embodied in the film by Jella Haase, Katharina Thalbach, who plays his first play “Lovely Rita”, which was soon swept off the stage, and accompanies the forbidden poet to the West in 1976. Brasch, the former despiser to escape, goes over after his prose work “Before the fathers die the sons” is banned by a caring Erich Honecker. The head of the State Council, whose role Kleinert also played with Schüttauf in a finely ironic way (whom Honecker parodied in 2017 in the comedy “Vorwärts immer!”), only wants to protect the talented boy from himself. The West is garish, capitalism wants to devour the brilliant poet, Brasch defends himself, in one of Kleinert’s cleverly interspersed murderous fantasies, even together with his dead mother. Then they shoot from the window at police officers and the caretaker, to whom Brasch says to his face: “These eyes saw Auschwitz.” Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin are the godfathers for these discharge illusions.

At some point, however, one gets the impression that Andreas Kleinert is beginning to chase after the life of Thomas Brasch at the latest when the poet begins his reading tour to New York, where he is to become a dollar-heavy export article. The coldly flattering agent, the tossed-down key to the luxury writing apartment in Central Park where Brasch is supposed to write a $100,000 novel; the promised fairy tale and the rebel who refuses the magic – so much honesty hurts the market-bound culture worker when watching.

There is a lyrical leitmotif for the film, drawn from the lines of Brasch’s most famous poem: “I don’t want to lose what I have, but I don’t want to stay where I am…” at the end of which the sad- beautiful dialectic of the unconsoled home seeker: “I want to stay where I’ve never been.” Kleinert lets Brasch compose ingeniously wildly, again and again, in the East as in the West the poet hammers his typewriters. Brasch manically switches from the trace of coke to the line of poetry, the beautiful, unsettling wildness of his poetry, as the film also shows, fortunately has more of the cursed Rimbaud than the calculating Brecht. Kleinert twice shows a naked female body, full of text in the poet’s handwriting. Of course you can allegorize passion, in love as in literature.

In the end, Brasch sinks into silence and the 16,000-page misery of his great novel about the murderer Brunke – the stacks lie on the desk, in between the older Brasch’s face, devastated by coke and dead dreams. His role is now taken over by Peter Kremer, who is tasked with taking the unfortunate German poet Thomas Brasch with him on his final journey. The fact that Kremer looks so brutally like the real Brasch certainly helps to make these last minutes of the film into very large and unforgettable scenes.

Wearing a black suit, he bids farewell to Berlin, drinks a whiskey in the empty Ganymed restaurant, gets into the car, drives back to the gray life of his childhood and finally waves from the plane – someone who has escaped, as if Brasch had ever been there. Shortly before that, young Brasch was seen in front of his dead father’s corpse, in 1989 in the pathology department of the dying GDR. The dead man’s exhausted smile can be found on the face of the dying Thomas Brasch. The sons die before the fathers, yes, that’s true, because the sentence has nothing to do with chronology, but with the poison of lies, against which no such vital body can survive.