The Short End of the Sonnenallee

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Description

Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the nubbin of a street, the Sonnenallee, whose long end extends beyond the Berlin Wall outside his apartment building. Micha is desperate for one thing, and it's not what his mother wants for him-to be an exemplary young Socialist and study in Moscow. What Micha wants is a love letter that 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 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.

Reviews

"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)

"An airy, cheerful translation . . . funny [and] rueful."--Nikhil Krishnan, The Telegraph (UK)

Author Bio

Thomas Brussig is the author of seven novels, including Wie es leuchtet and Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, FSG, 1997). As a screenwriter, he worked with Edgar Reitz on his Heimat epic. Born in East Berlin, Brussig now divides his time between Berlin and Mecklenburg. Jonathan Franzen is the author of six novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, Purity, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, most recently The Kraus Project and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Jenny Watson is an associate professor of German at Marquette University. Since receiving her PhD in German and Scandinavian literature, Watson has published many books and articles, including German Milwaukee, "Selma Lagerlf: Surface and Depth," and Scandinavia and Germany: Cross-Cultural Currents. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.