The stubborn artist as the subject of a revue? At the Deutsches Theater Berlin they tried it with Thomas Brasch.
Photo: Thomas Aurin
I want to stay where I’ve never been” is a well-known final verse from a poem by the writer and filmmaker Thomas Brasch (1945-2001) from 1977. The verse (and basically the poem from which it is taken) describes the Mixture of dissatisfaction and desire that tormented the writer, quite good. He did not want to give up the utopia of a society beyond the capitalist one, which reduces the individual to a container of labor and a consumer, but the authoritarian, petty-bourgeois corduroy socialism of the GDR was also not the state system he had wanted. From the GDR, where his plays were canceled and banned one after the other, he, the son of a high-ranking GDR cultural politician, went to the Federal Republic in 1976, where he was allowed to publish his art, but became thoroughly unhappy in another way.
The Thomas Brasch evening “Shut up, Kassandra!”, staged by Jürgen Kuttner and Tom Kühnel, ends with the verse mentioned at the beginning, which is wildly compiled from poems, pieces of prose, letters and interview passages by the poet as well as film snippets in which you can hear him speaking sees or hears. Brasch’s constant unease of being in favor of the GDR as an idea but having to reject it in its actual form corresponded with his unwillingness to be dependent on the Federal Republic of Germany as a place of residence and to have to live with its everyday mess and lies.
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What does a Brasch character so beautifully say when he retreats to a cabin in the forest to protest the ugliness of cities? “It’s not ideal here either.” A dichotomy that forms the leitmotif of this evening at the theater: Thomas Brasch, the insubordinate, the unruly, the recalcitrant, the one who cannot be integrated. The disagreeing wanderer between the worlds of FRG and GDR. The anarchist, state-skeptical artist who opposes his father, the authoritarian communist functionary. The socialist and believer in utopia who does not want to be ingratiated and marketed in the West as an anti-communist “model dissident”. Unforgotten is how Brasch described the relationship between the media, audience and artist in an interview with journalist Georg Stefan Troller after moving to the West: “You are the waiter, the television viewers are the guests, and I am the schnitzel.”
This dichotomy is probably also the reason why in this montage of scenes and texts the actors involved, who – sometimes quietly, sometimes singing, sometimes declaiming – recite the writer’s texts or move their lips while his voice comes from the tape, all appear in glittering harlequin costumes. An innuendo!
The harlequin figure, we read on Wikipedia, “has a subversive effect on the ordering structures of the world, made possible by (…) restless jumping between (…) opposing poles. The Harlequin can play, with anything (…) Through this game he creates spaces and opens doors that allow in creativity and utopia.»
Brasch, we are told rather bluntly, was a kind of harlequin figure who had reservations about strict “order structures” and made adhering to utopia as well as the experience of the continued failure of utopia the theme of his life: “The utopian moment of the GDR, even in its most grotesque distortions” (Kuttner), the poet Thomas Brasch defended.
There is no skimping on revue-like parts: well-known songs by Ideal and Ton Steine Scherben are performed, and for some reason the ensemble sometimes wears the colorful fantasy uniform jackets that you can see from the cover of “Sgt. Pepper” album by the Beatles. You don’t always understand what that means. But everything should be fine with me. It’s just the standard postmodern thing: a lot helps a lot.
After a while you even get used to the fact that Kuttner appears on stage as the emcee every now and then in this revue and does what he does best, namely talking quickly and a lot. And the audience also likes it when the Berlin all-round artist explains in his hectic, relaxed and fluffy way who Thomas Brasch was (“he didn’t fit into any of the molds in which German dissidents are baked”) or who Kassandra is (“the seer of antiquity, which proclaims the coming disaster”) and improvised in his own way with the title of the evening: “Imminent climate catastrophe? Shut up, Cassandra! Merz becomes chancellor? Shut up, Cassandra! Scholz remains chancellor? Shut up, Cassandra!”
Next performances: December 3rd, 7th and 8th.
www.deutschestheater.de
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