In the end, the author and his father are broken personalities.

Their faces are lined, their looks erratic, their clothes are soaked.

Nothing can save father and son except death.

“I never want to stay where I am,” they say.

The apartment blocks of East Berlin flicker in the background.

Kevin Hanschke

volunteer.

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Then the quiet applause of the audience dies away in the hall, which has emptied over the course of two hours, because it was a bizarre theater evening, which the Staatsschauspiel in Dresden with "Before the fathers die the sons" based on the book by the GDR author Thomas Brasch and brought to the stage under the direction of Sebastian Hartmann.

Actually, his prose volume is explosive - it contains revolutionary and worker romanticism, the reckoning with the authoritarian East and the consumer-oriented West.

And it is the story of a father-son relationship that develops into a tale of woe that both men perish from.

The texts he collects are new-objective and surreal at the same time.

Thirty!

And still achieved nothing!

There are conversations from changing rooms, canteens and milling halls.

"I thank the circumstances for their contradictions" is a guiding principle in Thomas Brasch's work.

Hartmann lays out his production like a collage of the book chapters and focuses on the conflict between father and son.

Viktor Tremmel, Marin Blülle and Yassin Trabelsi alternate in the role of the author.

While Trabelsi plays Brasch as a virile man bursting with self-confidence, Tremmel's intense playing indicates the writer's decay, his drug addiction and his penchant for the destructive.

"He did not make it.

It's thirty," the ensemble shouts in unison.

Blülle and Trabelsi embody the "ideal son", a role that the author himself was never able to fill, to the chagrin of his father, who is portrayed by Torsten Ranft as a careworn old man.

Brasch was born in Westow in British exile in 1945.

The family is Jewish and believes in communism, which is why they moved to the Soviet occupation zone in 1947.

Here began the political career of father Horst Brasch, who quickly rose to become Deputy Minister of Culture in the GDR.

From then on, the rebellious son becomes a thorn in his side.

Hartmann describes this biography loosely, because the book is a reckoning with the strict father figure who shaped Thomas Brasch's youth when his father sent him to the cadet school of the National People's Army.

Of self-pity and loneliness

When Brasch distributed leaflets after the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, the worst confrontation ensued.

Brasch had to go into production, on probation, for the act, which the GDR condemned as "subversive".

In the Berlin transformer factory “K.

Liebknecht” he was employed after having been imprisoned for 77 days.

The monologue from prison is haunting.

“Jail leaves you feeling like you have nothing left in your head, who can do nothing but feel sorry for yourself.” The ensemble adopts the fast staccato tone that Brasch used in his language: “Zelle.

I alone, open the door, close the door."