• East-West
• songs and words
• time / history

Thomas Brasch is a poet, playwright, film-maker and translator - and a trouble spot in all these fields from the very beginning. Born shortly before the end of war as the child of a Jewish-Communist immigrant family in England, Brasch grew up in the young GDR. While his father becomes deputy minister of culture, Thomas destroys his predetermined career in picture books at an early age through his aesthetic obstinacy. As a young lyricist in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller, Brasch so ruthlessly names the aspirations of a young generation growing up in the GDR that there is no room for him after his first publications. When he emigrated from East to West Berlin at the end of 1976, he also caused offense there because he refused to be turned into a dissident, not by East and not by West. ‘I don't stand for anyone but myself’ is the title of his first Spiegel interview. A few days later, Rotbuch Verlag published his book of prose Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne. The title becomes a proverb and the book, which is not allowed to be published in the GDR, becomes a bestseller. Despite this success, Brasch remained a recluse. From a period of frenzied productivity, Brasch plunged into a writing crisis in the mid-1980s, which he deepened through a ruinous approach to his health. He died in 2001 at the age of 56, marked by too much coke and alcohol, cancer and a heart condition. He is ‘not a fool, not a clown, not a fool, not an idiot’, Brasch wrote in the preface to his Shakespeare translation Liebe Macht Tod. Instead, he could be called ‘The Fool’. As such, he stands between the times, between East and West. His life is a wild play, his writing full of anarchic humour: far removed from ideology and irreconcilable to the end.

Thomas Brasch would have been 80 years old in February 2025. Tom Kühnel and Jürgen Kuttner, who have been shaping the profile of the Deutsches Theater for over a decade with works on Brecht, Müller and many other German-German Berlin subjects, set out to rediscover and follow in the footsteps of an author whose writing and life reflect half a century of contemporary and urban history. An evening of words and songs by and about Thomas Brasch.