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7:00 PM
Annekatrin Hendel: The Brasch Family
Film Screening|Goethe-Kino+ Thomas Brasch (Cinema Screening)
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Goethe-Institut London, London
- Price £6, £3 Concessions and for Goethe-Institut language students & library members.
- Part of series: Goethe-Kino 2025, Thomas Brasch
A moving portrait of author and filmmaker Thomas Brasch’s family told through archive footage and interviews with his sister Marion, with friends and lovers, including Christoph Hein, Bettina Wegner and Katharina Thalbach.
The Brasch family is one that simply demands to be written about and have a film dedicated to them. The father, Horst Brasch, a Jew raised as Catholic, came to the UK with the Kindertransports. He helped to create and chaired the UK branch of the FDJ, which would become the mass youth organization in the GDR. Horst returned to East Germany in 1946 to help build the socialist state and rose to the position of deputy minister of culture. The mother, Gerda Brasch, a Jew who had fled to the UK from Vienna, met Horst through their political activities. Together with their first child, Thomas, she reluctantly followed her husband to East Germany, where she had two more sons, Klaus and Peter, and a daughter, Marion. While the sons, especially Thomas, struggled with the GDR regime and their father’s uncompromising loyalty to it, the young daughter avoided the conflicts within the family and with the state. Born in 1961, Marion is the only surviving sibling and has taken on the task of telling the Brasch family’s story. A visit to New York to present the resulting book Ab jetzt ist Ruhe - Roman meiner fabelhaften Familie (2012) frames Annekatrin Hendel’s film.
What inspired Hendel, who was born in 1964 in East Berlin, to make her film was her mother’s wish to see her make a film like Heinrich Breloer’s docudrama about Thomas Mann’s family (Die Manns – Ein Jahrhundertroman [The Manns – The Novel of a Century], 2001). Hendel said, “I immediately thought of this family of writers from East Germany [i.e. the Brasch family]. But it was also the thought that the filming of a real GDR family saga was long overdue.” For her saga, Hendel draws on interviews with friends, lovers, and companions, mainly of Thomas Brasch, such as singer-songwriter Bettina Wegner, actress Katharina Thalbach, writer Christoph Hein, painter Florian Havemann, and film producer Joachim von Vietinghoff, who sheds light on the making of Thomas Brasch’s films Engel aus Eisen (Angels of Iron, FRG 1981) and Der Passagier – Welcome to Germany (The Passenger: Welcome to Germany , FRG 1988)
The film thus broadens the scope beyond Andreas Kleinert’s feature film, introducing other perspectives that question and confirm some of the myths of the fiction film, and gives a voice to some of the women drawn into the life of the Brasch family. (Quotations from: Director Annekatrin Hendel about Her Film The Brasch Family (March 2025, DEFA Film Library, UMMASS, Amherst, USA)
Germany 2018, colour, 103 mins. With English subtitles.
Directed by Annekatrin Hendel. With Marion Brasch, Katharina Thalbach, Christoph Hein
Florian Havemann, Bettina Wegner, Ursula Andermatt, Joachim von Vietinghoff, Benjamin Schlesinger.
Please note that we do not show any advertising and that the programme starts on time.
I portray three generations of the Brasch family, who deal with the tensions of history within their own family—between East and West, art and politics, communism and religion, love and betrayal, utopia and self-destruction. (…) The Brasch Family is a panorama of time that brings history to life as family history, an epic about the decline of the ‘red aristocracy,’ a GDR version of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.”(Annekatrin Hendel about her film)
The Brasch family is one that simply demands to be written about and have a film dedicated to them. The father, Horst Brasch, a Jew raised as Catholic, came to the UK with the Kindertransports. He helped to create and chaired the UK branch of the FDJ, which would become the mass youth organization in the GDR. Horst returned to East Germany in 1946 to help build the socialist state and rose to the position of deputy minister of culture. The mother, Gerda Brasch, a Jew who had fled to the UK from Vienna, met Horst through their political activities. Together with their first child, Thomas, she reluctantly followed her husband to East Germany, where she had two more sons, Klaus and Peter, and a daughter, Marion. While the sons, especially Thomas, struggled with the GDR regime and their father’s uncompromising loyalty to it, the young daughter avoided the conflicts within the family and with the state. Born in 1961, Marion is the only surviving sibling and has taken on the task of telling the Brasch family’s story. A visit to New York to present the resulting book Ab jetzt ist Ruhe - Roman meiner fabelhaften Familie (2012) frames Annekatrin Hendel’s film.
What inspired Hendel, who was born in 1964 in East Berlin, to make her film was her mother’s wish to see her make a film like Heinrich Breloer’s docudrama about Thomas Mann’s family (Die Manns – Ein Jahrhundertroman [The Manns – The Novel of a Century], 2001). Hendel said, “I immediately thought of this family of writers from East Germany [i.e. the Brasch family]. But it was also the thought that the filming of a real GDR family saga was long overdue.” For her saga, Hendel draws on interviews with friends, lovers, and companions, mainly of Thomas Brasch, such as singer-songwriter Bettina Wegner, actress Katharina Thalbach, writer Christoph Hein, painter Florian Havemann, and film producer Joachim von Vietinghoff, who sheds light on the making of Thomas Brasch’s films Engel aus Eisen (Angels of Iron, FRG 1981) and Der Passagier – Welcome to Germany (The Passenger: Welcome to Germany , FRG 1988)
The film thus broadens the scope beyond Andreas Kleinert’s feature film, introducing other perspectives that question and confirm some of the myths of the fiction film, and gives a voice to some of the women drawn into the life of the Brasch family. (Quotations from: Director Annekatrin Hendel about Her Film The Brasch Family (March 2025, DEFA Film Library, UMMASS, Amherst, USA)
Germany 2018, colour, 103 mins. With English subtitles.
Directed by Annekatrin Hendel. With Marion Brasch, Katharina Thalbach, Christoph Hein
Florian Havemann, Bettina Wegner, Ursula Andermatt, Joachim von Vietinghoff, Benjamin Schlesinger.
Please note that we do not show any advertising and that the programme starts on time.
Location
Goethe-Institut London
50 Princes Gate
Exhibition Road
London SW7 2PH
United Kingdom
50 Princes Gate
Exhibition Road
London SW7 2PH
United Kingdom