Theater: This is the world we live in

The Berlin Brasch Festival is entering its next round. After Jürgen Kuttner took a deep dive into the life of Thomas Brasch with his production “Shut up, Kassandra” at the Deutsches Theater in November, the writer Marion Brasch dedicated an evening to her dead brother Thomas at the Berliner Ensemble a few days ago to mark his 80th birthday. Now Lena Brasch, the daughter of Kuttner and Marion Brasch, is staging a performance with texts by her uncle in the studio of the Maxim Gorki Theater.

The exegesis of Thomas Brasch's personality and work on Berlin stages remains in the family, which is, in this case, extremely good news. If that isn't enough of a memorial service 24 years after the poet's death at just 56 years of age, you can of course watch Andreas Kleinert's horribly macho Brasch film "Dear Thomas" , bathed in genius-cult kitsch, in the ARD media library, or leaf through the 877 pages of the volume of Brasch's collected prose ("You must run against the wind"), recently published by Suhrkamp. Fortunately, Lena Brasch's very casual, clever and personal production in the Gorki Studio ("Brasch - The old doesn't work and the new doesn't either") never has the unpleasant aftertaste of parasitic exploitation of the legend of the wild GDR beatnik for the sake of posthumous fame. One reason for this is that one hears well-known lines by Brasch (“the sons die before the fathers”, “and a sky of steel closes over us”) here as if for the first time. On this evening, they sound as if they come directly from the present and from a homeless, almost defenseless, angry attitude to life, shortly before the AfD takes over the country.

Unlike Kuttner, who with his Brasch production undertakes something like excavation work in German-German history and sunken communist ideology, and even more unlike the slightly sticky outcast hero cult of the biopic, Lena Brasch uses Thomas Brasch's work like a quarry in her production. She takes the sentences and scenes that she can use to make something quite unique out of them, for example melancholic pop (music: Paul Eisenach, Wenzel Krah).

The decontextualization does the sampled Brasch lines a lot of good. Jasna Fritzi Bauer sings the verses of a poem ("what do the machines dream of") as a very elegiac techno track in the fog. Klara Deutschmann and Edgar Eckert throw the fragments of dialogue between a desperado and a sex worker from the piece "Mercedes" to each other. Suddenly the anarcho-romanticism that an intelligent person can only become an "artist or a criminal" sounds like something from an early Godard film, so very cool, and no longer like a wide-legged Brecht imitation.

The strenuous pose with which Brasch stylizes himself a little too obtrusively as a classic is as if blown away. Brittle lines of poetry ("how many of us are actually left") seem like a message in a bottle, the last messages from a stranger or a distant friend. Because Germany's history of violence is always very present in Brasch's work, a dream recording becomes a report of today's horrors: "A man without a head and covered in wounds screams that the war is beginning." Jasna Fritzi Bauer says this harshly, but also with matter-of-fact matter-of-factness: This is the world we live in.