“You still don’t recognise me,” says an angel, naked from the waist up, his eyes flirting with camera and audience. His wings flap gently as he gyrates slightly. “I am the DDR. Again you have closed the door before me and again a blow from me will open it. Blast the door. Again you have bolted the windows before me, so you can shut out the dawning light of the present and fall asleep.”
But Jörg Pose’s incarnation of East Germany isn’t the only spectre that’s haunting the Deutsche Theater stage, insisting we wake up to uncomfortable realities. Thomas Brasch, the poet, translator and filmmaker who would have been 80 in February, lies below him. In this scene from Halts Maul, Kassandra!, an exciting, if lengthy medley of Brasch’s genre-spanning oeuvre, the supine Brasch figure receives blows from this emissary of the land he left. It’s an adapted scene from Brasch’s 1974 play Herr Geiler – unstaged in his lifetime – about a layabout who clings to his idea of an ideal collective against partisans of the DDR and western capitalism.
This moment from Halts Maul, Kassandra! offers an apt encapsulation of Brasch’s guiding attitude, his unceasing resistance to the status quo as well as all powers that sought to impose one. Born in Yorkshire, England in 1945, Brasch grew up in East Germany, where his father, a German Jew brought up Catholic and turned ardent Communist, was a government dignitary. From resisting the rules at military school to protesting the crackdown on the Prague Spring, Brasch’s youth was spent in opposition. For political reasons he was expelled from university – twice.
He went to jail (denounced by his own father, who then later secured his early release). When he couldn’t get an unexpurgated version of his first book of prose printed in East Germany, he left for West Berlin in 1976. From then on, he worked at a frenetic pace. He wrote theatre plays and poetry, translated Shakespeare and made films, winning prizes across his pursuits – all the while repudiating West Germany’s pretensions of freedom. His life after the Wall came down is a rather sad coda; he essentially stopped publishing and died in 2001, at only 56 years old, from congestive heart failure.
And yet, the afterlife of this beruhmter Berliner, still too little known or translated in the Anglosphere, is healthy. Yesteryear’s radical is today the literary – or theatrical – establishment. Brasch may have passed on, but you don’t have to look far to find living connections on centre stage. His former partner, the well-known actor Katharina Thalbach, has a regular gig as Hercule Poirot at the Komödie am Kurfürstendamm. His sister, who wrote a memoir about the family, Ab jetzt ist Ruhe, in 2012, has a podcast at the Berliner Ensemble – where Brasch’s niece, Lena, debuted It’s Britney, Bitch! in 2022. Lena’s father, the radio presenter and actor Jürgen Kuttner, is responsible for co-writing and directing the Brasch medley at the Deutsches Theater.
The question for these stagings of Brasch today, in both Halts Maul, Kassandra and Lena Brasch’s Brasch – Das Alte geht nicht und das Neue auch nicht (“the old doesn’t work and neither does the new”), a three-person play at Studio Я, is whether Brasch can still stand as – to quote his friend Alexander Polzin in an interview with The Berliner – “a plea for radicalism.”
© Ute Langkafel MAIFOTO
Lena chooses to interpolate Brasch’s 1983 play Mercedes with extracts from the play Lovely Rita (first performed in 1978) and his 1982 film Domino, so that a character can proclaim that “For people with sense, there are only two possibilities: artist or criminal.” And yet, Lena’s play fails to realise this promised transgression. Its looping absurdity takes its audience nowhere but in claustrophobic Beckettian circles, with the well-performed pop music (as to be expected from Lena Brasch) the only respite.
Today, Brasch’s work and person are received irrevocably differently than in his life. Halts Maul, Kassandra understands this, placing a clip of Brasch accepting a 1981 Bavarian Film Prize at its centre. Here, a stiff Brasch grudgingly accepts the award and delivers a caustic speech, critiquing West Germany, thanking the Filmhochshule der DDR for his education, and naming the dead criminals that had inspired his film as examples. The gasps from the crowd, and the intervention of the Bavarian minister-president Franz Josef Strauss, who insist that Brasch’s very platform is a “living demonstration” of Bavarian liberalism, highlight that Brasch really did dare to venture beyond the boundaries of acceptable discourse.
Indeed, as much as I’ve enjoyed seeing Brasch’s sharp words artfully rendered on stage recently, these performances lack Brasch’s signature brashness, his perhaps foolish predilection for parrhesia. It’s left me wondering: where today is the Berlin theatre that speaks truth to power, which will still speak out when power, winged or not, looms above it and threatens it with blows – or defunding?
