Brussig shows the proper restraint in this novel -- unlike his earlier, more obvious efforts, where the humour sometimes is too heavy-handed. 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. 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. 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 Except that he warns the reader a few times too often in advance that the outcome of a given situation was to come out worse than anyone could have anticipated (an unnecessary warning), Brussig shows great command in his presentation, unfolding the story beautifully.

Brussig vermag es, dieser so unendlich oft erzählten Geschichte von der ersten großen Liebe Anmut und Witz zu geben. (...) DDR-Nostalgie der feinen Art." - Volker Hage, Der Spiegel Event organized by: Michael Koch, Sebastian Luft, John Pustejovski, and Jenny Watson in conjunction with the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities (CFAH). Best laid plans -- regardless of whose they might be -- stand no chance for those living in Sonnenallee -- but failure is also not as terrible as it might be elsewhere, with a pervasive sense of family and camaraderie uniting almost all. 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. 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.

Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee is the book to the film, Brussig's novelization of the film Sonnenallee he wrote with Leander Haußmann. 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.

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. Invariably, each time a devoted follower of the regime seeks to prove the system's superiority over the West things go terribly wrong. The Short End of the Sonnenallee, finally available to an American audience in a pitch-perfect translation by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson, confounds the stereotypes of life in totalitarian East Germany. Brussig’s novel is a funny, charming tale of adolescents being adolescents, a portrait of a surprisingly warm community enduring in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. As Franzen writes in his foreword, the book is “a reminder that, even when the public realm becomes a nightmare, people can still privately manage to preserve their humanity, and be silly, and forgive.” 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. 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.”

Customer reviews

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.

Sonnenallee seems so skimpy, and relies so heavily on shallow effects and ill-judged surprises, that I wonder if the film -- which I haven’t seen -- didn’t come first. (...) All this goes well beyond inattentiveness or sloppiness into indifference. Why read a book put together with such flawless contempt? Why translate it? But people translate books in the teeth of all sorts of obstacles and few, for all sorts of reasons and none. Jenny Watson is a Germanist in the Midwest who teaches Brussig to her classes; Jonathan Franzen is perhaps bored with the US." - Michael Hofmann, The New York Review of Books 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.

SIGNATURE INITIATIVES

The officials tend to believe wholeheartedly in the system, and try to impose their beliefs, but with little success. Join author Thomas Brussig, and translators Jonathan Franzen and Dr. Jenny Watson for a panel discussion of the book and its surrounding historical context. Joining them in conversation will be Dr. Alison Efford and Dr. Sebastian Luft. 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 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