The Short End of the Sonnenallee

Product Information

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. The Short End of the Sonnenallee, is a satire set, literally, on the Sonnenallee, the famed "boulevard of the sun" in East Berlin.

Dr. Jenny Watson, associate professor of German in the department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the at Marquette University. Dr. Watson's research interests include Swedish author, Selma Lagerlöf, East German literature and history, German-Swedish poet, Nelly Sachs, and German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht. Event organized by: Michael Koch, Sebastian Luft, John Pustejovski, and Jenny Watson in conjunction with the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities (CFAH). 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. 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.”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 The officials tend to believe wholeheartedly in the system, and try to impose their beliefs, but with little success. 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. 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. Centered around young Micha Kupisch and his family and friends, the novel relates a variety of episodes exposing the bizarre and grotesque everyday lives of those living in the German Democratic Republic.

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. 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.

SIGNATURE INITIATIVES

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. The Rolling Stones* подвинули другие кумиры, а от Стены остались только сувенирные фрагменты (осенью 1989, когда мы приехали на новое место службы отца в ЗГВ, она уже дышала на ладан и все поездки в Берлин были поездками в уже объединенный город). 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.” 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)

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. 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 SpiegelThroughout 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. 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. 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

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. 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.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. A kind of miracle … Not only made me laugh (again and again) but brought tears to my eyes’ Jonathan Franzen 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.