Event series
28 May - 11 June 2025
Thomas Brasch
Film Series | A Life Between East and West
Born just a few months before the end of World War II, playwright, poet, translator, and film director Thomas Brasch emerged as one of the most distinctive intellectual voices of the German post-war period. In the year of his 80th birthday, we present Andreas Kleinert’s acclaimed 2021 fictional portrait Dear Thomas (Lieber Thomas), Annekatrin Hendel’s 2018 archive and interview-based documentary The Brasch Family (Familie Brasch), and Thomas Brasch’s 1981 directorial debut Angels of Iron (Engel aus Eisen), an anarchic gangster tale set in divided Berlin during the Airlift of 1948/49, that catapulted him directly into the First Film Competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
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Thomas Brasch was born in Yorkshire in 1945 to Jewish emigrants and committed communists—his mother from Vienna and his father from Berlin. He grew up in East Berlin alongside two brothers and a sister. While he believed in the possibility of a better society in the GDR, he criticised its repressive regime, in which his father, Horst, rose to the position of deputy cultural secretary. Thomas Brasch’s political activities led to his expulsion from university and the film academy, and eventually to his imprisonment in 1968 for protesting against the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring. His two-year sentence was later commuted to an "educational" labor sentence as a milling-cutter in a factory. Unable to obtain permission to publish his writings, he reluctantly left the GDR in 1976 with his partner, the actress Katharina Thalbach.
Starting the publication of his collection of stories Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne (Before the Fathers Die the Sons) in 1977, which was written while he was still in the GDR, Brasch quickly rose to literary fame. The collection Kargo. 32. Versuch auf einem untergehenden Schiff aus der eigenen Haut zu kommen (Cargo. 32nd Attempt to Get Out of One's Own Skin on a Sinking Ship) (1977), a carefully composed collection of poems, plays, scenes, reflections, photos, and documents, which reflects Brasch's penchant for experimenting with hybrid forms, was well received. 1977 also saw the publication of one of his most significant plays, Rotter, about an opportunist who rises to prominence both under the Nazis and in the GDR. Although celebrated by critics and the media, Thomas Brasch consistently resisted being labeled as a GDR dissident and sharply criticized West German society.
Following the success of his first film, Angels of Iron (1981), he quickly began work on his next film, Domino (1982), in which Katharina Thalbach plays an actress and single mother who loses control of her life. His subsequent project, Mercedes (1984), was a more experimental low-budget adaptation of his stage play of the same title, produced for Dutch television.
For his next and final film, The Passenger – Welcome to Germany (Der Passagier – Welcome to Germany, 1988), Brasch ambitiously cast Tony Curtis as a successful Jewish Hollywood director who returns to Germany decades after World War II. The American's plan is to make a film based on his own experience of being pulled out of a concentration camp, alongside other prisoners, to be extras in an antisemitic Nazi propaganda film. It is also the director’s attempt to work through the guilt he feels for causing the death of another prisoner while trying to save his own life.
Although another film script was discovered among the writings he left behind, Brasch did not pursue further filmmaking and instead returned to his literary work. He translated and adapted plays by William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky. Much of his creative energy was devoted to a prose project centered on the real-life murderer Karl Brunke, which inspired one of the scenes in Kleinert's Dear Thomas and which ultimately resulted in only a small publication in 1999. Several of his plays were staged, including Stiefel muß sterben, Die Trachinierinnen des Sophokles oder Macht Liebe Tod, and Frauenkrieg. Drei Übermalungen. Brasch passed away in November 2001 in Berlin due to heart failure.
Please scroll down for dates and times.
Thomas Brasch was born in Yorkshire in 1945 to Jewish emigrants and committed communists—his mother from Vienna and his father from Berlin. He grew up in East Berlin alongside two brothers and a sister. While he believed in the possibility of a better society in the GDR, he criticised its repressive regime, in which his father, Horst, rose to the position of deputy cultural secretary. Thomas Brasch’s political activities led to his expulsion from university and the film academy, and eventually to his imprisonment in 1968 for protesting against the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring. His two-year sentence was later commuted to an "educational" labor sentence as a milling-cutter in a factory. Unable to obtain permission to publish his writings, he reluctantly left the GDR in 1976 with his partner, the actress Katharina Thalbach.
Starting the publication of his collection of stories Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne (Before the Fathers Die the Sons) in 1977, which was written while he was still in the GDR, Brasch quickly rose to literary fame. The collection Kargo. 32. Versuch auf einem untergehenden Schiff aus der eigenen Haut zu kommen (Cargo. 32nd Attempt to Get Out of One's Own Skin on a Sinking Ship) (1977), a carefully composed collection of poems, plays, scenes, reflections, photos, and documents, which reflects Brasch's penchant for experimenting with hybrid forms, was well received. 1977 also saw the publication of one of his most significant plays, Rotter, about an opportunist who rises to prominence both under the Nazis and in the GDR. Although celebrated by critics and the media, Thomas Brasch consistently resisted being labeled as a GDR dissident and sharply criticized West German society.
Following the success of his first film, Angels of Iron (1981), he quickly began work on his next film, Domino (1982), in which Katharina Thalbach plays an actress and single mother who loses control of her life. His subsequent project, Mercedes (1984), was a more experimental low-budget adaptation of his stage play of the same title, produced for Dutch television.
For his next and final film, The Passenger – Welcome to Germany (Der Passagier – Welcome to Germany, 1988), Brasch ambitiously cast Tony Curtis as a successful Jewish Hollywood director who returns to Germany decades after World War II. The American's plan is to make a film based on his own experience of being pulled out of a concentration camp, alongside other prisoners, to be extras in an antisemitic Nazi propaganda film. It is also the director’s attempt to work through the guilt he feels for causing the death of another prisoner while trying to save his own life.
Although another film script was discovered among the writings he left behind, Brasch did not pursue further filmmaking and instead returned to his literary work. He translated and adapted plays by William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky. Much of his creative energy was devoted to a prose project centered on the real-life murderer Karl Brunke, which inspired one of the scenes in Kleinert's Dear Thomas and which ultimately resulted in only a small publication in 1999. Several of his plays were staged, including Stiefel muß sterben, Die Trachinierinnen des Sophokles oder Macht Liebe Tod, and Frauenkrieg. Drei Übermalungen. Brasch passed away in November 2001 in Berlin due to heart failure.