Thomas Brasch – I want to stay where I have never been

I want to stay where I have never been – that is the last line of one of Thomas Brasch’s best-known poems. And it is a key line for the writer, playwright and filmmaker, of whom theatre director Claus Peymann said that his life was a ‘wild novel’, ‘a novel about East and West’. Born in exile in England to Jewish communist parents, he grew up and became a rebel in the GDR, which he left in 1976 – the year the Palace of the Republic was opened – never to arrive in West Germany, let alone in a united Germany. In his poems, theatre plays and films, he confronts social contradictions in an astute, powerful and original way with an urgency that is more topical than ever. In her debut novel ‘Ab jetzt ist Ruhe’, Marion Brasch tells the story of her family. Now she puts her older brother Thomas centre stage. What did he long for and what did he chafe against? What drove him away from his family and ultimately from his country? In a collage of text, scenes and film, she has woven these questions into a story that she brings to the stage together with Albrecht Schuch, who played Thomas Brasch in the film ‘Lieber Thomas’.