RAUM + ZEIT

The world premiere of ‘Mädchenmörder :: Brunke’ by the multi-award-winning theatre collective RAUM+ZEIT on 27 January brings the writer Thomas Brasch (1945-2001) back to life and brings him to Braunschweig for a reading. The case of Karl Brunke, a true Braunschweig story, caused a sensation at the beginning of the 20th century, as Brunke murdered two young women, allegedly at their request. Brasch withdrew in the 1990s and researched this crime obsessively. More than 14,000 manuscript pages were collected and are now archived. Brasch's publishing house published a volume of just one hundred pages in 1999.

The production, directed by Bernhard Mikeska, takes the audience, who are equipped with VR glasses, into Brunke's world again and again during the course of the reading and offers a new kind of theatre experience with the change of narrative levels: the story with which Brasch wanted to explore his own abysses devours the ageing author. The realities overlap in the course of the evening, the boundary between Brasch and Brunke becomes blurred. It soon becomes questionable which of the participants is actually the victim of this story.


Thomas Brasch was a German author, playwright, poet, screenwriter and director. He was born in England as the son of Jewish emigrants and moved with his family to the Soviet occupation zone in 1947. His texts were increasingly censored by the GDR government. In the mid-1970s, he applied to leave the country and moved to West Berlin with his partner Katharina Thalbach and her daughter Anna. His best-known works include ‘Lovely Rita’, ‘Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne’ and ‘Der schöne 27. September’. Thomas Brasch also made a name for himself as a film director. His debut film ‘Engel aus Eisen’ (1981) won several awards. Thomas Brasch died of heart failure in Berlin in 2001.