a satire of life in East Germany, written after the Wall came down. Thus unexpurgated! Very, very funny, but not without painful moments. A short but very rewarding read.

This captivating book offers a compelling glimpse into life on the Eastern side of Berlin, situated in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Against the backdrop of a politically charged environment, individuals grapple with the intersection of their aspirations and the constraints imposed by their circumstances. The narrative unfolds as characters navigate a landscape where limited choices shape their destinies, prompting them to confront a series of obstacles. Amidst the tension, the pursuit of personal goals often gives rise to comical situations, injecting a touch of humour into their struggles.

This literary work holds particular value for me as it provides profound insights into the realities of life in Eastern Germany during the era of separation. Through the characters' experiences, the book sheds light on the challenges faced by individuals striving to carve out meaningful lives within the confines of a politically divided nation. The narrative not only serves as a captivating tale of resilience but also serves as a lens through which to understand the unique dynamics and everyday realities of a bygone era in Eastern German history.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if it were in a bookshop. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

Interesting book about life in the Eastern side of Berlin just right next to Berlin wall.. The political situation in combination with personal goals lets people to make limited choices in their lives.. Trying to reach what they want they constantly have to overcome different obstacles and very often that leads to comical situations.
For me the book is valuable because it gave me understanding about life in Eastern Germany when it was separated from the rest of the country.

NO SPOILERS
The publisher’s description tells you all you need to know except this is absolutely superb. I didn’t laugh out loud but I did chuckle plenty and read this very short book (just over 100 pages) with a constant smile.

The everyday lives of a group of teenage boys (everyday for them being life in East Berlin) making the best of everything. It’s charming, so beautifully observed, funny, absurd and just brilliant. The perfect way to show the restrictions and failings of the regime.

Please, if you have an afternoon to spare, put the kettle on, put your feet up and read this. All humour aside, it’s a rather important read.

Thomas Brussig’s novel was shortly released after the film “Sonnenallee” in 1999, the script of which he wrote too. Since I already watched the film several years ago, I could not help but compare the novel to its film adaptation. Both follow a similar trajectory in their focus on the life of the residents of the short end of the Sonnenallee, a street strangely divided by the Berlin Wall, whose house numbering starts at number 379, and whose long end goes in West Berlin. The residents of the Sonnenallee are used to the curious look of the Westerners who often peek at their activities through an observation deck.

Their lives as described by Thomas Brussig are the very antithesis of the common depiction of lives behind the Iron Curtain. Right from the choice of the setting, the author chooses the Sonnenallee (literally means Sun Avenue) to highlight that people’s lives in East Berlin are not always black and white. They still lived their lives like people everywhere else did, making memories, experiencing happy and sad moments, and falling in love with each other, and there were moments of rebellious acts with navigable access to Western goods and relatively easy travels for relatives from the West.

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.

As I’ve never felt directly how it would be like living behind the Iron Curtain, Thomas Brussig’s novel offers an alternative point of view, to look into the history of the GDR behind its political clout, that not everything in the GDR needs to be politicised and that not everything is bad about the GDR, bringing stark contrasts to grim accounts of life under totalitarianism which are popularised through works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera, or Václav Havel, among others. Whilst not fully defending the GDR, Thomas Brussig shows that people in the GDR could live a fulfilling life and their stories should not be negated completely following the German reunification.

This is a captivating short novel about the everyday lives of a group of East Berlin teenagers, their families and neighbours before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite - or in spite of - ever-present state restrictions, officious enforcers and over-optimistic parental expectation, the teenagers behave just as typical teenagers in the West would, and the author vividly describes their escapades in laugh out loud vignettes. It has been very well translated into English.

Human nature is fundamentally the same under whatever political regime people happen to live, and I have not been surprised to discover that this book has been a set text in German schools.

I fear I don't have the same sense of humour as this author, which is problematic given it is a comical novel... The little window into life in the GDR was interesting, but there were also elements that felt so dated it wasn't really fun.

Over the past weeks I have been reading Clemens Meyer’s cult novel While We Were Dreaming. It is a book which chronicles the period of upheaval immediately before and after the reunification of Germany in 1989. It is often poignant, sometimes darkly humorous, but it can also be unremittingly violent and it is taking me some effort to complete its 500+ pages. I’m sure I’ll get there, but in the meantime, I’ve read a couple of other books including, as it happens, another work inspired more or less by the same period of recent history – the final years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m referring to Thomas Brussig’s The Short End of the Sonnenallee, a novella which as its title implies, is set in Berlin’s famed “Sun Avenue”, precisely in the end of the road which, up to 1989, lay in East Germany, right beyond the notorious wall.

Brussig’s novella is well-known in Germany (where, as far as I understand, it is also a set text in schools), but it is only now making its foray into the English-speaking world, thanks to a collaborative translation between Jenny Watson and Jonathan Franzen, who also provides an introduction. The book is split into several brief, episodic chapters, centred around teenager Micha, the protagonist, and his family and friends, all of whom live in the Sonnenallee – so near to and yet so far from the freedom which beckons just beyond the Wall. Sonnenallee is a wry comedy, with absurdist and even magical realist elements. Its recurring “hook” is Micha’s obsession with Miriam, the prettiest girl in school, and a love-letter – supposedly from her – which ended in the Dead Zone beyond the checkpoint and which Micha spends the whole book trying to get hold of.

Brussig does not minimize the suffocating atmosphere of life in the GDR, its deprivations, dangers and paranoia. Yet, everything is seen through farcical glasses. There are many laugh-out loud moments. Micha’s increasingly silly and desperate plans to nab both Miriam and the love-letter (one strategy involves a vacuum cleaner with a long pipe contraction) are hilarious. There’s a stand-out Wodehousean scene in which a drunken party ends with the destruction of a valuable collection of antique instruments. Despite its ultimately earnest message, the novel simply refuses to wallow in tragedy and self-pity and, instead, discovers human warmth and uplifting comedy in the most unexpected of places.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2023/04/short-end-of-the-sonnenallee-thomas-brussig-franzen-watson.html

An absolute gem!

A very hilarious fictional journey through the last follies and idiosyncrasies of East Germany society prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This short novel was a great discovery with its sparkling writing and its endearing cast of exquisitely drawned characters. There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments in this delicious literay treat that will remain in my mind for a long time! It really deserves to be enjoyed without any moderation whatsoever!

Many thanks to 4th Estate and Netgalley for this terrific ARC!

This is a delightfully warm, humorous, and fun short novella from Thomas Brussig, translated from the German by Jonathan Franzen, who provides a wonderfully insightful introduction, and Jenny Watson. The Sonnenallee (Boulevard of the Sun) is a real street, the short end being the part in the GDR, the name echoing the slant taken by the author, focusing on the ordinary lives and close knit supportive community, rather than the heavily monitored, by the Stasi, nation. Micha Kuppisch is part of a group of teenagers that are representative of teens the world over in their desires, behaviour, interests, discussions, and parties, rather than ideologies and limitations, with the Wall just being part of the everyday.

Micha, like all the boys, adores and is obsessed by the prettiest girl in school, Miriam, who is only interested in boys from the West, but this makes no difference to his feelings. When he receives what he believes may be a love letter from her, it blows away to land in the dangerous death strip before he can read it, there is nothing he will not do to try and retrieve it. He lives in a cramped apartment with his parents, and has an older brother and sister. Everyone has their own particular offbeat dreams, such as travelling to Mongolia, subversive efforts to buy land and escape, desperate efforts to attain the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street, an album that is instrumental in saving a life. Micha's mother wants him to be seen as the ideal young socialist who wants to study in Moscow, that we can see is just not going to happen.

This is probably not going to anybody's picture of life behind the Iron Curtain and the GDR, it highlights that even amidst draconian controls, people are people, retaining their humanity, forgive, keep their sense of the ridiculous, one should not be so quick to judge. After all, as Franzen points out, the public realm can be a nightmare in the West too, Google and Facebook know far more about citizens than the Stasi ever managed, whilst now blue state American cities are as ravaged by 'criminality' as East Germans were taught to believe the West was. Brussig might be deemed to be viewing the past through nostalgic, rose tinted memories, but its an approach that offers a means to coming to terms with the past, understanding very little is black and white in the world. There is a joyous humanity, charm, rich memories, quirkiness, and chaos here that I think many readers will appreciate. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

The Short End of the Sonnenallee
by Thomas Brussig

When I went looking for books set in Berlin in anticipation of an upcoming trip this summer, particularly set in East Berlin during the days of the Berlin Wall and the Iron curtain, little did I expect to find one that was so funny and so relatable. It turns out that I'm having a run of good luck with authors of my own age who are writing about their youth in inhospitable places. You can't get much more inhospitable than that particular time when the German Democratic Republic was the darkest, most secretive, most inaccessible place in Europe, where stories of curtailment of freedom of travel, speech and individuality along with deprivation, terror of the Stasi, paranoia and surveillance were all we knew about the place.

The Sonnenallee (Sunny Avenue) is a main thoroughfare through Berlin and a short length of it was divided by the Berlin wall creating the close knit community that is the setting for this short (160 page) book. With a cast of richly drawn characters it plays out rather like a soap opera and for me it was such a surprise to encounter so much wit as the teenagers, mostly boys, don't get bogged down with their highly controlled environment, but are more occupied with what all boys of their age were doing the world over at that time; growing their hair, sourcing music (illegally), drooling over girls, lusting after bikes and cars.

"The remarkable thing about the Wall was that the people who lived there didn't find the Wall the least bit extraordinary. It was so much a part of their daily life, they hardly noticed it, and if the Wall had secretly been opened up they would have been the last to notice"

The writing style is reminiscent of that in the "Barrytown" Trilogy by Roddy Doyle and also puts me in mind of "Derry Girls". It is a treatise on memory and how we review and edit our past. On memory:

"it stubbornly performs the miracle of making peace with the past, wherein every old grudge evaporates and the soft veil of nostalgia settles over all things that once felt sharp and lacerating"

Originally published in 1999 in German it is now translated into English by Jonathon Franzen and Jenny Watson with an introduction by Jonathon Franzen that is a must-read if you are new to this time and place.

Publication date: 4th April 2023
With thanks to #netgalley and #4thestate for the ARC

The quality of books in translation has improved so much in the last decade. So many people say they don't read books in translation, but I give them books to try and explain that they would never know it was a translated book. This book took me back to the bad old days of clunky translation where sentences tie themselves into knots trying to stay an exact translation of the authors original words. I would love to read these tales, but couldn't get past the English rendition of them. Sorry

Was I expecting to enjoy this book? The Short End of the Sonnenallee by Thomas Brussig is a classic German novel, and chronicles life in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall.
It is an easy read. The short episodes of the story often make you laugh but also make you think.

I'd expected The Short End of the Sonnenallee to be good, but not this good. It's a short, satirical novel, which manages to be both very funny and acute in its portrayal and criticisms of life in the former East Germany, not far from one of the less well-known border-crossing points into West Berlin. It centres on the (mis)adventures of Misha Kuppisch and his late adolescent friends as they attempt to do what teenagers do - get a girlfriend, learn to dance (to win over said girlfriend), launch an attempt to buy East Germany from under itself, that kind of thing. The absurdities of life in East Germany/Berlin are captured with a lightness of touch that might not be expected from a celebrated German novelist and the translation is both fluent and obscure in all the right places. I can't recommend this enough, although the fact that I lived for a while on the longer end of the Sonnenalle a few years after the DDR allowed itself to be bought out should be taken into account.