Andreas Kleinert: Dear Thomas

Author and filmmaker Thomas Brasch was a key intellectual voice in post-war Germany. Shot in black and white, Andreas Kleinert’s powerful biopic featuring a tour-de-force performance from Albrecht Schuch distills Brasch’s divided life between East and West into real and imaginary moments, capturing his charismatic personality and the familial and historical contradictions that shaped him and his work.

Eleven-year-old Thomas and his father, Horst, are driving and singing in the car, sharing a joyous moment of father-son bonding. However, Thomas will hate the cadet school of the GDR People’s Army where they are heading. His classmates will bully him for not fully engaging in their activities. After the holidays, he will plead not to return, declaring his desire to become a writer. But Horst insists that Thomas must submit to discipline for the sake of the socialist ideals of the still young GDR, where Horst will rise to be deputy cultural minister in the 1960s.

This tension between father and son, between restrictions and the insistence on artistic self-expression, is a central theme in Andreas Kleinert’s multi-award-winning portrait of Thomas Brasch. The film depicts Brasch as charismatic and passionate, a lover of and loved by women, the focal point of a non-conformist community, a believer in a better society, a supporter of the Wall, but an opponent of the ruling system. This conflict escalates when Thomas joins protests against the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring, leading to imprisonment followed by probation period as factory worker. It culminates when Thomas, unable to have his writings published, leaves the GDR with his partner, actress Katharina Thalbach, to live in the unloved West.

While Kleinert’s film follows a generally chronological order, it is not a meticulous re-telling of Thomas Brasch’s biography. Instead, it portrays the artist through a series of scenes that distill and amalgamate Brasch’s relationships, obsessions, personal characteristics, and writings into often dreamlike and symbolically charged situations. Shot in stunning black and white, the film conveys both an abstract timelessness and a sense of history being told, occasionally supported by archival footage. Brasch emerges as both the quintessential driven artist and the historical figure, who felt and was suppressed in the East and rejected the West and its appropriation of his 'dissident' biography. 

Andreas Kleinert also grew up in the GDR and attended the same film school from which Thomas Brasch was expelled. His portrait of Thomas Brasch has been widely praised for its daring approach and for being as passionate as its subject. However, it has also faced criticism for its representation of women, particularly in the way the camera captures their bodies and relegates them to the role of mere muses, enchanted by Thomas with just a glance.
 

Germany 2021, b/w. 157 mins. With English subtitles.
Directed by Andreas Kleinert. With Albrecht Schuch, Anja Schneider, Ioana Iacob, Jella Haase, Jörg Schüttauf


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