Thomas Brussig

The Sonnenallee has been split unequally by the Berlin Wall, and Mischa and his friends are growing up on the short end of it, the part that was allocated to East Berlin. They experience the same kinds of problem as kids anywhere else — they fall in love, hopelessly or not, they are exasperated by the behaviour of their parents, they quarrel with teachers and petty authority, they worry about how their lives are going to turn out, and they try to listen to the right music, read the right show more books, and wish for the right clothes, hairstyles and personal transport. Like all young people, they push against boundaries, but in the DDR these boundaries can turn out to be a lot harder than they are elsewhere, leading to comical and sometimes frightening situations.

Brussig wrote this book in a rush, when he realised that he had a lot of extra Sonnenallee material he hadn’t used in the film he wrote it for. Of course, the tie-in novel had to come out no later than the release date of the film, so there was a sharp deadline, and that comes across in the taut, fast-paced narrative and the brilliantly laconic dialogue. (And the scene where Mischa boasts to Miriam about how he records his feelings in his diaries, and then has to write seven years worth of retrospective diary entries for her in a single night...) He makes it clear that this isn’t supposed to be read as an account of East Berlin as it really was, but as “pleasant memories of unpleasant times”. When we remember our childhood, we do so in particular ways, and that always has more to do with nostalgia than with accurate socio-political analysis. It’s a feel-good book, and that’s a good thing, but we shouldn’t try to read more than that into it. show less

Die deutsche Geschichte muss umgeschrieben werden: Klaus Uhltzscht war es, der die Berliner Mauer zum Einsturz gebracht hat! Dabei ist Klaus eigentlich ein Versager par exellence. Als Sohn eines Stasi-Spitzels und einer Hygieneinspektorin wächst er zwischen Jogginghosen und Dr. Schnabels Aufklärungsbuch auf, bleibt im Sportunterricht auf ewig ein Flachschwimmer. Auch sein großer Traum, als Topagent bei der Stasi zu arbeiten, erfüllt sich leider nicht. Dafür aber wird er, der inzwischen show more eine Perversionskartei erfunden hat, zum persönlichen Blutspender Erich Honeckers. Jetzt, da auch noch die Mauer durch - man höre und staune - seinen Penis fiel, packt Klaus aus und erzählt von seinem ruhmreichen Leben. Keiner hat bislang frecher und unverkrampfter den kleinbürgerlichen Mief des Ostens gelüftet als Brussig. Ein Lesevergnügen allererster Ordnung! show less

Brussig makes us look again at the fall of the Berlin Wall and see it as the chaotic farce it really was, by showing us the last months of the DDR through the eyes of his appalling anti-hero, trainee Stasi officer Klaus Uhltzscht, a young man who is unable to write more than three sentences without mentioning his penis. There are some clever and occasionally very funny insights into the dreary ordinariness of what was wrong with the East German state: Brussig wants to establish that the show more state's terrorisation of its own citizens would not have been possible without widespread passive acceptance and active collaboration by ordinary people in what the system was doing. And that Christa Wolf could easily be confused with an Olympic figure-skating coach. But I found the insistent, Martin-Amis-like, blokey bad taste very wearing after a few chapters, and was rather relieved to get to the end... show less

I still sort of remember watching the film as "Eastie Boys" in Prague, I think in German with Czech subtitles. I enjoyed that, and the book as well. I should write something clever about the transcendence of nostalgia for our childhoods - but I'm not going to.