The Short End of the Sonnenallee

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Thomas Brussig and Leander Haußmann were awarded the Drehbuchpreis der Bundesregierung (Screenplay Prize of the Federal Government) for their script to Sonnenallee A charming comedy of mid-80s East Germany; funny and tender, [this book] damns totalitarianism through its warm focus on ordinary, riotous teenage life." — The Guardian Das neue Buch von Thomas Brussig ist sein drittes und leichtestes. (...) Brussig, der das Schützenfest beschreibt, bleibt unversöhnt.Mit der Diktatur, und im Grunde auch mit der Kindheit." - Mechthild Küpper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung I)t is a pitch-perfect takedown of the totalitarian experience. A reminder that no matter the harshness of a situation, a community can still live with hope and humour." - Ben East, The Observer

The Sonnenallee is a real street in Berlin with the loveliest of names: “Boulevard of the Sun”. The “short end” of the boulevard, to which the title of Thomas Brussig’s novella refers, is the one that ended up on the wrong – that is to say, the Eastern – side of the Berlin Wall, protruding tragically from West Berlin into the Soviet Zone. The involvement of Franzen gives this entertaining translation of Brussig’s charming East German novel plenty of star quality. But you can see why the American was so keen to bring this superb slice of life behind the Berlin Wall to a wider audience. Written in 1999, each chapter from the point of view of teenager Michael, it is a pitch-perfect takedown of the totalitarian experience. A reminder that no matter the harshness of a situation, a community can still live with hope and humour. Oxblood Thomas Brussig’s classic German novel, The Short End of the Sonnenallee , now appearing for the first time in English, is a moving and miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the WallLaugh-out-loud funny and unabashedly silly, Brussig's novel follows the bizarre, grotesque quotidian details of life in the German Democratic Republic. As this new translation shows, the ideas at its heart – freedom, democracy and life’s fundamental hilarity – hold great relevance for today.

He pursues her throughout the novel, managing to get into a fair amount of trouble along the way -- though no less than many of his friends. This is an entirely charming tale of “rich memories” and “making peace with the past”." - John Self, The GuardianAm kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (On the Shorter End of Sun Avenue) is the third novel by author Thomas Brussig. The novel is set in East Berlin in the real-life street of Sonnenallee sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. The film Sonnenallee, also written by Brussig, is based on the same characters but depicts a significantly different storyline. [1] Unusual is the fact that the screenplay for Sonnenallee served as the basis for the novel, rather than the other way around. Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the nubbin of a street, the Sonnenallee, whose long end extends beyond the Berlin Wall outside his apartment building. Like his friends and family, who have their own quixotic dreams―to secure an original English pressing of Exile on Main St., to travel to Mongolia, to escape from East Germany by buying up cheap farmland and seceding from the country―Micha is desperate for one thing. It’s not what his mother wants for him, which is to be an exemplary young Socialist and study in Moscow. What Micha wants is a love letter that may or may not have been meant for him, and may or may not have been written by the most beautiful girl on the Sonnenallee. Stolen by a gust of wind before he could open it, the letter now lies on the fortified “death strip” at the base of the Wall, as tantalizingly close as the freedoms of the West and seemingly no more attainable.

Mr Brussig's unseriousness is programmatic. (...) Nothing very bad happens. It is rather like a Billy Bunter book, japes and scrapes of the boys of the Remove. Not so bad; after all we had lots of fun. Is that how the GDR looks, ten years after its demise ?" - The Economist Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the nubbin of a street, the Sonnenallee, whose long end extends beyond the Berlin Wall outside his apartment building. Like his friends and family, who have their own quixotic dreams―to secure an original English pressing of Exile on Main St. , to travel to Mongolia, to escape from East Germany by buying up cheap farmland and seceding from the country―Micha is desperate for one thing. It’s not what his mother wants for him, which is to be an exemplary young Socialist and study in Moscow. What Micha wants is a love letter that may or may not have been meant for him, and may or may not have been written by the most beautiful girl on the Sonnenallee. Stolen by a gust of wind before he could open it, the letter now lies on the fortified “death strip” at the base of the Wall, as tantalizingly close as the freedoms of the West and seemingly no more attainable. One of the most brilliant satirical novels about life in East Berlin, in the shadow of the wall (quite literally)”. —Daniel Kehlmann, The New York Times Book Review Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the nubbin of a street, the Sonnenallee, whose long end extends beyond the Berlin Wall outside his apartment building. Like his friends and family, who have their own quixotic dreams—to secure an original English pressing of Exile on Main St., to travel to Mongolia, to escape from East Germany by buying up cheap farmland and seceding from the country—Micha is desperate for one thing. It’s not what his mother wants for him, which is to be an exemplary young Socialist and study in Moscow. What Micha wants is a love letter that may or may not have been meant for him, and may or may not have been written by the most beautiful girl on the Sonnenallee. Stolen by a gust of wind before he could open it, the letter now lies on the fortified “death strip” at the base of the Wall, as tantalizingly close as the freedoms of the West and seemingly no more attainable.

Although The Short End of the Sonnenallee is refreshingly unserious in tone and content, its form reflects a deeper kind of seriousness. When a state has collapsed and vanished, when a crushingly thorough political experiment has failed, all that remains is memory. What matters afterwards is less the GDR itself than how those who experienced it recall their lives in it: how they choose to recall them. Theirs is a world in which a misdemeanour at school will result in the students having to deliver self-abasing lectures on their ideological crimes, with titles such as “What Quotations from the Classical Authors of Marxism-Leninism Have to Say to Us Today”. One cheeky boy, invited by his school sports coaches to train for Olympic cycling, replies, “Training’s not my thing. Pole-vaulting’s as far as I’ll go.” But why pole-vaulting of all things? “Because it means practicing clearing three meters forty-five,” he replies, to bemused coaches who don’t seem aware of the significance of that number: the height of the Wall. German author Thomas Brussig’s novel, The Short End of the Sonnenallee, is a novel set in Communist East Germany in the decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a rich, at times funny, at times sad, account of a group of interrelated individuals living in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, as the regime is showing signs of decay from within.