Thomas Brasch

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Thomas Brasch 1993

Thomas Brasch (born February 19, 1945 in Westow , North Yorkshire ; † November 3, 2001 in Berlin ) was a German writer , playwright , screenwriter , director and poet .

Life

Brasch was born in exile in England to Jewish emigrants . In 1947 the family moved to the Soviet occupation zone . This is where the political career of his father Horst Brasch (1922–1989) began, which promoted him to the position of Deputy Minister for Culture of the GDR . Thomas Brasch's mother Gerda Brasch came from Austria. She was a journalist and published her son's first poem in a local Cottbus newspaper in the mid-1950s . Brasch had two brothers, Klaus Brasch (1950–1980) and Peter Brasch (1955–2001) and a sister Marion Brasch (* 1961).

Thomas Brasch attended the cadet school of the National People's Army in Naumburg (Saale) from 1956 to 1960 . After graduating from high school, he worked as a locksmith, renovation worker and typesetter . In 1964/65 he studied journalism at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig . He was de-registered for “denigrating leading personalities in the GDR” and again worked as a waiter and road construction worker.

Resistance to GDR censorship

In 1966, the production of his Vietnamese program Seht auf This Land at the Berlin Volksbühne was banned. From 1967 to 1968, Brasch studied dramaturgy at the Babelsberg University of Film and Television . In March 1968, their son Benjamin was born to Bettina Wegner . Because of the distribution of leaflets against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact states in the Czechoslovakia in August 1968, he had to answer in court together with Frank Havemann , Florian Havemann , Rosita Hunzinger, Sanda Weigl , Erika-Dorothea Berthold and Hans-Jürgen Uszkoreit. He was sentenced to two years and three months in prison and was released on parole after 77 days. Afterwards Brasch was employed as an educational measure as a milling cutter in the Berlin transformer works Oberspree (TRO).

On the mediation of Helene Weigel , he worked in the Brecht Archive in 1971/1972 , where he was working on a work that compared the structural elements of the Western with those of the Russian revolutionary film. Since then he has lived as a freelance writer . Several dramas that were written between 1970 and 1976 were not performed because of their subject matter and their often experimental form or were discontinued after a short time. B. the didactic pieces written together with Lothar Trolle The exemplary life and death of Peter Göring and Galileo Galilei - Pope Urban VIII .

Change to the west

In 1976 Brasch was one of the signatories of the resolution against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann . After the publication of prose texts had been refused by government agencies, he submitted an application to leave the country and moved to West Berlin together with his girlfriend at the time, Katharina Thalbach and their daughter Anna Thalbach . His prose volume Before the Fathers Die Sons , which was written in the GDR and was published a short time later by the Rotbuch publishing house , was a great success and brought him lasting recognition from the critics.

In 1976, the then unofficial employee (IM) Anetta Kahane described the brothers Thomas and Klaus Brasch as "enemies of the GDR" in a report for the GDR State Security .

In 1978 Brasch received the Ernst Reuter Prize and in 1979 a Villa Massimo scholarship . In 1982 he became a member of the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany and was awarded the Bavarian Film Prize for the film Engel aus Eisen .

In 1983 he lived in Zurich for a year , where he received the Occhio del Pardo d'argento for the film Domino . His radio play Robert, Ich, Fastnacht and the others was awarded the Kleist Prize . From 1986 he translated several plays by William Shakespeare into German.

In 1992 he received the Berliner Zeitung's Critics' Prize . In 1987 he directed a movie for the last time in The Passenger ; Brasch was able to win US world star Tony Curtis for the lead role.

After the wall came down

After Brasch had been silent for many years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and rumors of alcohol and drug abuse had increased, he surprised everyone in 1999 with his new prose volume, Mädchenmörder Brunke , which originated from a manuscript of more than 10,000 pages. In the same year the dramas Boots must die and Die Trachinierinnen des Sophokles or Macht Liebe Tod was premiered , followed in 2000 by the Women's War. Three overpaintings . His last play, A Fairytale Comedy from Berlin , remained unfinished.

Thomas Brasch died of heart failure on November 3, 2001 in the Charité in Berlin . His grave is in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof in Berlin-Mitte .

On the tenth anniversary of Thomas Brasch's death in 2011, a novel about his life was published under the title The Children of the Prussian Desert . The author is Brasch's longtime friend Klaus Pohl .

Works

literature

Gravestone for Brasch by Alexander Polzin in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof
  • It goes, it does not go. Play, 1970
  • The exemplary life and death of Peter Göring. Play, together with Lothar Trolle , 1971
  • Galileo Galilei - Pope Urban VIII. Play, together with Lothar Trolle , 1972
  • From fat Mr Bell who invented the telephone. Radio play, Berlin 1974
  • Mr. Geiler. Play, 1974
  • The swineherd. The wild swans. two radio plays based on Hans Christian Andersen , Berlin 1975
  • Lovely Rita. Play, 1975
  • Poetry album 89. Berlin 1975
  • The Argentine night. Comedy based on Oswaldo Dragún , Berlin 1975
  • The sons die before the fathers. Prose, Berlin 1977
  • Cargo. 32. Attempt to drive out of your own skin on a sinking ship. Frankfurt (Main) 1977
  • Rotterdam. And further. A diary, a play, a performance. Frankfurt (Main) 1978
  • Paper tiger . Musical theater piece. Music: Raymond Benson . Austin, TX (USA) 1976; New York, NY (USA) 1980
  • The beautiful September 27th. Poems, Frankfurt (Main) 1980
  • Dear Georg. A pre-war ice art skater drama. Artistic director: Claus Peymann . Actors: Georg Heym : Manfred Karge. Bochum Schauspielhaus, Bochum 1980
  • Angel made of iron. Book for the film of the same name, Frankfurt (Main) 1981
  • The king in front of the camera. Children's book, Olten 1981
  • Domino. Book for the film of the same name, Frankfurt (Main) 1982
  • Mercedes. Play, premiere in Zurich 1983
  • Anton Chekhov's pieces. in the translation by Thomas Brasch, Frankfurt (Main) 1985
  • Lovely Rita, dear Georg, Mercedes. Theater plays, Berlin 1988
  • Lovely Rita, Rotter, Dear Georg. Theater plays, Frankfurt (Main) 1989
  • Women war comedy. Theater play, Frankfurt (Main) 1989
  • Three wishes, said the golem. Poems, prose and plays, Leipzig 1990
  • The jump - description of an opera . Music: Georg Hajdu . WP 1999
  • Girl killer Brunke. Prosaband, Frankfurt (Main) 1999
  • Love makes death. Pieces and materials, Frankfurt (Main) 2002
  • Shakespeare translations. Frankfurt (Main) 2002
  • Whoever wants to get through my life has to go through my room. Poems, Frankfurt (Main) 2002
  • What i wish for. Poems, Frankfurt (Main) 2007
  • You lonely, you beautiful imp. Audio book, Katharina Thalbach and Anna Thalbach read Thomas Brasch, Hoffmann & Campe 2007
  • Girl killer Brunke . Radio play. Director: Martin Engler , editing: Matthias Baxmann , speaker: Sylvester Groth , Astrid Meyerfeldt , Linda Olsansky , 53 min, Deutschlandradio Kultur 2008.
  • I only remember myself in chaos. Interviews 1976–2001, Frankfurt (Main) 2009
  • They call it scream. Collected poems (edited and provided with an afterword by Martina Hanf and Kristin Schulz ). Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin, 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-42345-5 .

Movies

Honors

literature

Movies

Web links

Commons : Thomas Brasch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Kerstin Decker : Pain in the eye. Tagesspiegel , November 2, 2011, accessed October 20, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b Stephan Suschke : The unbending one. The poet Thomas Brasch and the year 1968. January 26, 2008, accessed on April 23, 2012 .
  3. ↑ Uwe Müller : Birthler authorities invited Stasi informers. Welt Online , September 25, 2007, accessed October 20, 2019 .
  4. ↑ On the crime that was the basis of Brasch's book, see Karl Brunke (Girl Murderer)
  5. ↑ Kai Luehrs-Kaiser : Tragically mistaken promise. Die Welt , November 5, 2011, accessed October 20, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Ralph Gerstenberg: novel of the key to the 10th anniversary of Thomas Brasch's death. Deutschlandfunk , November 3, 2011, accessed on October 20, 2019 .
  7. ^ Sonja Luyken: Artist on the Abyss. In: Weser Kurier, 9./10. February 1980, p. 25.
  8. ^ Brasch and Franz Josef Strauss - Scandal at the award of the Bavarian Film Prize in 1981 . YouTube video.
  9. ↑ Lessing Prize to Jean Amery , in Pforzheimer Zeitung of April 13, 1977, p. 1
  10. ↑ Boos for GDR director , in Pforzheimer Zeitung of January 19, 1982, p. 10
personal data
SURNAME Brasch, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer, playwright, poet
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Westow , Yorkshire
DATE OF DEATH November 3, 2001
Place of death Berlin