Thomas Brasch

Thomas Brasch was forced to take his leave of the German 'workers' and peasants' state' in the year of the Wolf Biermann Affair (1976), a furious rebel whose career as an author had not really been able to begin properly because of his continual conflicts with the powers that be. Expelled from his studies of journalism, sent down from studying film, and sentenced to 2 years 3 months in prison (for using flyers to protest against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw-Pact troops). In the meantime he was still actively writing, but his plays were never published. When it became clear that a West Berlin publisher was ready to bring out a collection of his prose writings in 1977, the troublemaker was shown the door to the West, and he left.

This volume, with a very clear message in its title, confirmed in artistic terms what the media had published about his political-biographical characteristics. An 'angry young man' deeply frustrated in his social needs and therefore wilfully self-obsessed, intensively individual and non-conformist. He was also of uneven temper, yet all the more clear in his poeticism of existential anarcho- individualism, convincing in gesture and tone. Doubtless the book also had the powerful effect it did because here was someone who had not just complained verbally, but had resisted with his whole being. His writing reflected living experiences, rather than being a substitute for them. From the beginning his direct reference to the mythical dimension was also clear. Into a story of illegal emigration ending in death Brasch injects the Marsyas legend, scattered in between highly vivid passages about everyday unbearableness: he shows the contest with Apollo as a kind of kamikaze attack of anarcho-pride, as flaying oneself for the salvation of human dignity.

In her eulogy for Brasch when he won the 1987 Kleist Prize Christa Wolf described as "Kleist-like" Brasch's position "between two value systems, both of which confronted him with false alternatives". His opposition actually reaches far beyond the borders of GDR dissidence.