The Short End of the Sonnenallee
by Thomas Brussig
Translated by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson
Happy people have bad memory but rich memories...
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. Because...
[H]uman memory is far too comforting a process to simply capture the past; it’s the oppoiste of what it pretends to be. For memory is capable of more, much more: 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 the things that once felt sharp and lacerating.
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