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. This novel . . . performs what the author calls ' the miracle of making peace with the past' . . . Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson offer a stylish and elegant Sonnenallee." —Maren Meinhardt, The Times Literary Supplement

Another prominent character is Uncle Heinz, Micha's uncle from West Berlin. The character shows how many living in West Berlin had a tainted, sympathetic and often condescending view on life on the other side of the wall. Uncle Heinz often smuggles small gifts for the Kuppisch family on his trips, despite the fact that everything he "smuggles" is, in fact, legal to bring into the GDR.Michael Kuppisch was always looking for explanations because he was all too often confronted with things that didn’t seem normal to him. It never ceased to amaze him that he lived on a street where the lowest house number was 379. He was likewise unable to ignore the daily humiliation of stepping out of his apartment building and being greeted with ridicule from the observation platform on the West side—entire school classes shouting and whistling and yelling, “Look, a real Zonie!” or “Zonie, come on, give us a little wave, we wanna take your picture!” And yet, strange as this all was, it was nothing compared to the utterly unbelievable sight of his first-ever love letter being carried by the wind into the death strip and coming to rest there—before he’d even read it. Visiting relatives from the other side bring them Western goods, at considerable personal risk, and the teenagers obsessively record songs onto audio cassettes from Western radio stations. As Franzen nicely puts it, “they may be continually deprived, but the texture of their daily lives is paradoxically one of fullness. In their scavenging and resourceful way, they experience the West more vividly, and appreciate it more deeply, than Westerners themselves do.” A delicious slice of life in 1980s East Berlin . . . Comedy, which comes through perfectly in the sharp translation, is essential to Brussig’s project as he subverts the dread and paranoia of East German life by portraying a small world with love, tenderness, and humor hidden within it. There’s a lot to love in this flipping of the Cold War script." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

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. Michael Kuppisch, whom everyone called Micha (except for his mother, who’d suddenly taken to calling him Misha), not only had a theory about why there was a short end of the Sonnenallee, he also had a theory about why his years at the short end of the Sonnenallee were the most interesting time there had ever been or ever would be. The only dwellings at the short end of the Sonnenallee were the legendary Q3A buildings, with their tiny cramped apartments. The only people willing to move into them were newlyweds whose one burning wish was to finally live together under one roof. But soon these newlyweds had children, which made the cramped apartments even more cramped. Moving into a bigger apartment was out of the question; the authorities counted the number of rooms, not square meters, and considered the families “provided for.” Fortunately, this was happening in almost every household, and when Micha began to widen his life onto the streets, because he couldn’t stand the cramped apartment anymore, he met a lot of other kids who felt more or less the same way. And because the same sort of thing was happening almost everywhere at the short end of the Sonnenallee, Micha felt part of a “potential.” When his friends declared, “We’re a clique,” Micha said, “We’re a potential.” Even he didn’t quite know what he was trying to say, but he felt it had to mean something that everyone came from the same cramped Q3A apartments and got together every day, wearing the same kind of clothes, listening to the same music, experiencing the same yearning, and feeling ever more strongly, with each passing day, that when they finally reached adulthood they would do everything, everything differently. Micha even considered it a promising sign that they all loved the same girl. Micha's Uncle Heinz, who generously regularly comes to visit his poor sister and her family in the East, smuggles in candy for the kids and worries about the asbestos in the family's tiny apartment giving them all lung cancer. Brussig won't make it into my little pantheon of German stylists with his simple, paratactic sentences and his omniscient narrator, but I did enjoy the occasional use of Ossi colloquialisms.(**) And he did make me laugh, even though there was no subtlety to the humor. 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.

CONTACT CfAH

Throughout the novel Brussig shows almost perfect comic timing, the humour almost never too forced, and adding one or two layers to each situation in pushing it to the limits of the believably absurd. 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 This book, for some reason never previously translated into English, has found an influential champion in the American novelist Jonathan Franzen. Franzen’s collaboration with Jenny Watson, an academic scholar of German, has produced an airy, cheerful translation that delivers on everything Franzen’s introduction promises. Brussig’s Berlin, Franzen writes, is “neither a dystopia nor a utopia”. It is, simply, one more place for human beings to be human – and more specifically, for teenagers to be teenagers. It plays the sorry situation of its teenagers – living so close to the Wall that they can hear the voices of western gawkers even while aware they may never get to visit them – as gentle comedy. 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 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 satire set, literally, on the Sonnenallee, the famed "boulevard of the sun" in East Berlin. 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. OxbloodThroughout the story there is much focus on low-level rebellion by Micha and his friends, such as Wuschel's desire to listen to illegal music such as the Rolling Stones. 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. Our main character, Micha Kuppisch, is a fifteen-year-old teenager living with his family in a typical East Berlin household. He has a sister who frequently changes boyfriends and a brother aspiring to be in the military. Other than that, he has an uncle called Heinz living in West Berlin who frequently “smuggles” goods for his family, despite the fact that most of the stuff he smuggles is actually legal to be brought to East Berlin. Also central to Micha’s life is his yearning for the affection of Miriam, the girl who is described as the most beautiful girl in the Sonnenallee and who often makes out with a guy from West Berlin on many public occasions. Rather than painting grim images of East Berlin under the GDR regime, Thomas Brussig tries to bring closer images of typical East German people’s lives. He points out that characters still listen to Western music such as the Rolling Stones or read and discuss Sartre’s works to the point of becoming an existentialist in the story. Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee is the book to the film, Brussig's novelization of the film Sonnenallee he wrote with Leander Haußmann. 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.”

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. 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 Cine doreste cu adevarat sa pastreze tot ce s-a intamplat nu trebuie sa se lase in voia amintirilor. Amintirile oamenilor sunt un fenomen mult prea placut pentru a reusi doar sa pastreze lucrurile asa cum s-au petrecut; sunt exact opusul a ceea ce se doresc a fi. Pentru ca amintirile sunt in stare de mai mult, de mult mai mult: cu perseverenta lor infaptuiesc minunea de a te determina sa faci pace cu trecutul, o pace din care dispare orice urma de manie si in care valul moale al nostalgiei se asterne peste tot ceea ce odata a fost perceput ca ascutit si taios.Thomas Brussig is a German writer best known for his satirical novels that deal with German Democratic Republic. Brussig's first novel, Wasserfarben ("Watercolors") was published in 1991 under the pseudonym "Cordt Berneburger." In 1995, he published his breakthrough novel, Helden wie wir(Heroes Like Us , FSG 1997), which dealt with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The book was a critical and commercial success and was later turned into a movie. Two movies of his books have been released, "Helden wie wir" and "Sonnenallee ". With "Sonnenallee", Thomas Brussig tried to take a new approach to telling a story set in the GDR: His intention was not to explain the last German dictatorship, but to humourously reflect what it felt like to be a teenager who lives under these circumstances in East Berlin ("Sonnenallee" is an actual street that was divided by the wall). And it was the humour in the movie and the novel that provoked some critcism: Is it allowed to laugh when discussing the Stasi, the Todesstreifen ("death zone" were people got shot at the wall), the despotism, the Siberian labor camps? Brussig points out that his story is not about "Ostalgie", the nostalgic longing for the lost East, or about making light of the crimes of the GDR. Rather, he wanted to represent the experiences of young people who grew up in the system, who were longing for the same things as teenagers everywhere, who fell in love, who wanted to try things out and prove themselves, to find their crowd and fit in, but who were living with very particular restrictions. 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 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...