Thomas Brussig Book Reading

Thomas Brussig, the well-known author of satirical novels about living in the GDR, will be at the GAI for a dual-language book reading event. Brussig’s novel, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, a bestseller in Germany, has recently been translated into English by award-winning American author Jonathan Franzen and Dr. Jenny Watson, professor of German at Marquette University.

The Short End of the Sonnenallee is a moving and miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall. 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.

Thomas Brussig is the author of seven novels, including Wie es leuchtet and Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us). 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.

An excerpt of the recently translated novel will be presented in English.

The reading will be followed by audience Q&A and book signing. Copies of The Short End of the Sonnenallee will be available for purchase before or after the reading.

Free, registration is requested. Seating is limited.

Sponsored by the German Consulate Chicago. In partnership with Subtext Books.