Once, in 1976, the poet Thomas Brasch was admitted to the supreme representative of power in his country.

He walks through endless corridors through the building of the State Council of the GDR until he arrives in the anteroom of the chairman Erich Honecker.

The secretary waves him in.

Then he faces the big man.

But they don't look at each other.

Honecker looks out the window.

And Brasch stares straight ahead.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

The head of state asks the poet about his parents - the mother who died, the father who is a high cultural official. Then he says: “I'm sure you have talent, Tommy.” Brasch asks whether his book can be published. “Of course not,” replies Honecker. "Our citizens are not yet ready for it." Then the poet shows him his teeth: "My book will appear one way or another." No reaction from Honecker. Be silent. The audience is over.

Andreas Kleinert's film “Dear Thomas” is an attempt to tell the history of the GDR from the perspective of an artist. This puts a lot of pressure on the film, both aesthetically and historically. Again and again, what is happening has to be compared with general political events: the cadet school in Naumburg with propaganda images from the 1950s, the year 1968 with documentary recordings of the Prague Spring and the invasion of the Red Army. This creates meaningful gaps. Kleinert does not mention the fall of the wall with any picture. Thomas Brasch, who experienced the events of 1989 from West Berlin, did not deal with the end of the GDR in literary terms. After the reunification he fell silent. In 2001 a narrow volume of prose about a girl murderer was published, a fragment from a bundle of more than ten thousand pages,which is kept by the Berlin Academy of the Arts.

The film indicates the reason for the silence in a ghostly scene. In an East Berlin hospital, Brasch tries in vain to gain access to his father's body. Most of the staff, he learns, have moved to the west. Then the power goes out and the reception room goes dark. In truth, Horst Brasch died in August 1989. It was the wall, not the wave of flight, that prevented his son, who had emigrated thirteen years earlier, from seeing them again. But the film creates its own historical scenario in which the reason for departure, Brasch's signature on the declaration of protest against Wolf Biermann's expatriation, does not appear. For Kleinert, Father State and Father Brasch are two faces of the same coin, so the lights have to go out for both at the same time. Who wants to knowBrasch's poems have to be read why a feature film is about Thomas Brasch in autumn 2021 - for example the one whose individual lines in “Dear Thomas” serve as chapter headings: “I don't want to lose what I have, but / where I am I want don't stay, but / (...) where I die, I don't want to go: / I want to stay where I've never been ”.

In the late 1970s, when Brasch was discovered in the West, these verses rang out the melody of an attitude towards life that had the Cold War behind it and the uprising against the fathers ahead of it.

Existentialism, which had been just a fashion phenomenon in Germany for a long time, found poetic expression in Brasch's poetry and drama ("Lovely Rita", "Rotter", "Lieber Georg").

But then Brasch started making films.

Three of them were shown in Cannes;

the last one, "The Passenger" with Tony Curtis, whose screenplay Brasch had written together with Jurek Becker, was shown in 1988 in front of empty cinemas.

It was the story of a Holocaust survivor.

Brasch's father, a German Jew, had survived National Socialism as a youth in exile in England.