Mon April 17, 2023
German novelist Thomas Brussig in conversation with the award-winning writer and translator Jonathan Franzen
SEE EVENT DETAILS
Thomas Brussig's contemporary classic German novel, The Short End of the Sonnenallee, is finally available to an American audience in a pitch-perfect translation by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson. It is a moving and miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall. This is the first time this moving, miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall has been published in English. 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."
"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)
ABOUT THE NOVEL
"In a world of scarcity and distrust, in which absolutely everything is political, the one thing the people of the Sonnenallee can count on is each other. The remarkable ease and closeness of their friendships is central to the novel's charm. (I'm hard pressed to think of a novel in which people treat their neighbors with more consistent kindness.)" (Jonathan Franzen)
Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the short end of the Sonnenallee, a street, 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATORS
"The East German writer who can portray a community so lovably and laughably is a writer whose sense of humor and capacity for forgiveness survived totalitarianism miraculously intact."
"You could be angry about the decades of privation and repression, the betrayals by your neighbors, the lies in which you'd been forced to participate, the corruption and hypocrisy of the Party leadership. Alternatively, if you were a worker who'd had a decent life under the regime, you might feel regret for the passing of the proletarian dictatorship, resentment of the crass materialism and economic insecurities that the conquering West brought with it. Either way, looking back, you were serious. And this is the miracle of Thomas Brussig. When he looks back, in The Short End of the Sonnenallee, he does it without anger or regret. What he sees is neither a dystopia nor a utopia but something poignant. He sees people being people, the way people have always been and always will be. He also, miraculously, sees something silly." (Jonathan Franzen)
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 five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
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"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)
ABOUT THE NOVEL
"In a world of scarcity and distrust, in which absolutely everything is political, the one thing the people of the Sonnenallee can count on is each other. The remarkable ease and closeness of their friendships is central to the novel's charm. (I'm hard pressed to think of a novel in which people treat their neighbors with more consistent kindness.)" (Jonathan Franzen)
Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the short end of the Sonnenallee, a street, 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATORS
"The East German writer who can portray a community so lovably and laughably is a writer whose sense of humor and capacity for forgiveness survived totalitarianism miraculously intact."
"You could be angry about the decades of privation and repression, the betrayals by your neighbors, the lies in which you'd been forced to participate, the corruption and hypocrisy of the Party leadership. Alternatively, if you were a worker who'd had a decent life under the regime, you might feel regret for the passing of the proletarian dictatorship, resentment of the crass materialism and economic insecurities that the conquering West brought with it. Either way, looking back, you were serious. And this is the miracle of Thomas Brussig. When he looks back, in The Short End of the Sonnenallee, he does it without anger or regret. What he sees is neither a dystopia nor a utopia but something poignant. He sees people being people, the way people have always been and always will be. He also, miraculously, sees something silly." (Jonathan Franzen)
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 five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Thomas Brussig's contemporary classic German novel, The Short End of the Sonnenallee, is finally available to an American audience in a pitch-perfect translation by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson. It is a moving and miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall. This is the first time this moving, miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall has been published in English. 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."
"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)
ABOUT THE NOVEL
"In a world of scarcity and distrust, in which absolutely everything is political, the one thing the people of the Sonnenallee can count on is each other. The remarkable ease and closeness of their friendships is central to the novel's charm. (I'm hard pressed to think of a novel in which people treat their neighbors with more consistent kindness.)" (Jonathan Franzen)
Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the short end of the Sonnenallee, a street, 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATORS
"The East German writer who can portray a community so lovably and laughably is a writer whose sense of humor and capacity for forgiveness survived totalitarianism miraculously intact."
"You could be angry about the decades of privation and repression, the betrayals by your neighbors, the lies in which you'd been forced to participate, the corruption and hypocrisy of the Party leadership. Alternatively, if you were a worker who'd had a decent life under the regime, you might feel regret for the passing of the proletarian dictatorship, resentment of the crass materialism and economic insecurities that the conquering West brought with it. Either way, looking back, you were serious. And this is the miracle of Thomas Brussig. When he looks back, in The Short End of the Sonnenallee, he does it without anger or regret. What he sees is neither a dystopia nor a utopia but something poignant. He sees people being people, the way people have always been and always will be. He also, miraculously, sees something silly." (Jonathan Franzen)
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 five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
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"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)
ABOUT THE NOVEL
"In a world of scarcity and distrust, in which absolutely everything is political, the one thing the people of the Sonnenallee can count on is each other. The remarkable ease and closeness of their friendships is central to the novel's charm. (I'm hard pressed to think of a novel in which people treat their neighbors with more consistent kindness.)" (Jonathan Franzen)
Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the short end of the Sonnenallee, a street, 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATORS
"The East German writer who can portray a community so lovably and laughably is a writer whose sense of humor and capacity for forgiveness survived totalitarianism miraculously intact."
"You could be angry about the decades of privation and repression, the betrayals by your neighbors, the lies in which you'd been forced to participate, the corruption and hypocrisy of the Party leadership. Alternatively, if you were a worker who'd had a decent life under the regime, you might feel regret for the passing of the proletarian dictatorship, resentment of the crass materialism and economic insecurities that the conquering West brought with it. Either way, looking back, you were serious. And this is the miracle of Thomas Brussig. When he looks back, in The Short End of the Sonnenallee, he does it without anger or regret. What he sees is neither a dystopia nor a utopia but something poignant. He sees people being people, the way people have always been and always will be. He also, miraculously, sees something silly." (Jonathan Franzen)
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 five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
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