Bøger af Thomas Brussig

Micha, Mario, Wuschel, Brille, der Dicke and Miriam all live in the shadow of the Wall. We are in the GDR before the fall of the Wall. This is not a political story, but a humorous story about some young people and their problems in GDB - and about the big love!

Thomas Brussig's classic German novel, The Short End of the Sonnenallee, now appearing for the first time in English, is a moving and miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the WallYoung 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.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. 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."

Provocative and hilarious, Heroes Like Us was the first novel to comment on the downfall of East Germany by an author who had grown up with the Berlin Wall. Klaus Uhltzscht, born in 1968 in East Germany, grows up across the street from the Ministry of State Security, and he is inspired early on to do his share to win the Cold War. Naturally he joins the Secret Police, but his glorious career as an international agent never materializes. Instead, he spends countless hours keeping his fellow citizens under close surveillance -- never quite sure what he is looking for. Frustrated on all counts, Klaus's life is changed only when a strange accident in the fall of 1989 dramatically alters the size of his penis.