The Short End of the Sonnenallee

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Thomas Brussig’s classic German satire, translated into English for the first time and introduced by Jonathan Franzen, is a comedic, moving account of life in East Berlin before the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The story is centered on the main character fifteen-year-old Michael "Micha" Kuppisch who lives with his parents and siblings, Sabine and Bernd, in a typical East Berlin flat. The story gives a nostalgic yet ironic outlook of living in the shorter end of Sonnenallee, a street which was divided during the creation of the German Democratic Republic, next to the Berlin Wall where the house numbering is comically told to start at number 379. Much of the story is based around Micha's love for the girl Miriam, another Sonnenallee resident, and the day-to-day lives of Micha and his friends. Dr. Alison Efford, associate professor of History at Marquette University, is an expert on German immigration to the United States. She recently collaborated with Viktorija Bilic to publish an edited translation of the correspondence of German American feminist Mathilde Franziska Anneke.”That’s how it must have gone, thought Michael Kuppisch. How else could such a long street have been divided so close to where it ended? Sometimes he also thought: If stupid Churchill had only paid attention to his cigar, we’d be living in the West now.

The Short End of the Sonnenallee is a charming light comedy. (...) The Short End of the Sonnenallee, which first appeared in German in 1999, might be accused of looking at the GDR with the soft focus of nostalgia, and this wouldn’t be entirely wrong: a former East Berliner, Brussig concedes that memory is not an accurate instrument for examining the past. But this novel also performs what the author calls “the miracle of making peace with the past”, and this, he ventures, may be a greater feat." - Maren Meinhardt, Times Literary Supplement 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 Wall A kind of miracle … Not only made me laugh (again and again) but brought tears to my eyes’ Jonathan Franzen He co-wrote the screenplay for a movie of the same name, which had some success (I haven't seen it), and he later wrote this book, claiming that he had some ideas he wasn't able to wedge into the movie. I shall take him at his word...

SIGNATURE INITIATIVES

Thomas Brussig and Leander Haußmann were awarded the Drehbuchpreis der Bundesregierung (Screenplay Prize of the Federal Government) for their script to Sonnenallee 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.