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First, the wall was overcome with a ride on the suburban railway. And then in prose, as well. But not just any prose; a comedy was needed! In the second part of his essay, Thomas Brussig tells how a state and a street became literature and a cinematic lie.

Return to the first part of the essay

The schoolyard wall of my vocational school in Berlin-Altglienicke was simultaneously the Berlin Wall, emblazoned with the all too familiar sign: “Border area – entry forbidden!” My first flat in the Griebenowstrasse was also only 200 metres from the wall; my journeys often took me directly along it. I had a friend, Ulf, who lived at Sonnenallee (Sun Avenue) No. 410 in Treptow.

Sonnenallee sounded like a boulevard, like Schlossallee on the German Monopoly board (equivalent to upmarket Mayfair or Park Lane on the English version of the game). However, when I visited Ulf in his Sonnenallee there was just a minute end-section of street, maybe 60 or 70 metres long. The lowest house number was 379, followed by the barracks of a border crossing. Sonnenallee was actually a West Berlin street, only a worm-like appendix extended into the East. This fracture of the promise awoken by the street name Sonnenallee, so rich in associations, and the reality characterised by the wall and the division, triggered something in me. When I began to write, I had the first-person narrator of my debut novel Wasserfarben (Watercolours) live at Sonnenallee No. 410, without going into this address any further. I devoted only one paragraph to a short description of the special feature of this place of residence.


It was only after the fall of the wall that I could deal with the wall. Its physical disappearance occurred so quickly, and a lack of foresight by local Berlin politics has ensured that no section of the wall remains where one can see it as it functioned back then as a secure border. There are memorials, museums, illustrated books and a section of the death strip, which, however, has been artistically enhanced. How the border functioned – the challenges that faced those people willing to flee – this is nowhere to be seen today. Even the East Side Gallery is a forgery, as the wall was only painted in the West. The East Side Gallery was only established in the spring and summer of 1990. It is a work of art and a document of die Wende, that intermediate period when the state power of the GDR had broken down and a constitutional order of the West German variety had not yet been installed on GDR territory.

That I was able to really deal with the wall only after it had fallen is due to the fact that it was no longer an oppressive, overpowering phenomenon. I could overcome the wall on a daily basis by getting on the suburban railway. Now it was also possible to conquer it in prose. And as I read in a film review of Andreas Dresen’s Stilles Land (Silent Country) that the reviewer would like to see a GDR film in the style of Woody Allen’s Radio Days, I knew that I had to write a comedy about the wall. Now that the wall was gone and could no longer harm anyone, a comedy was needed.

The wall has been the site of a host of stories, which, due to its presence, all took a slightly different course as in other places. And that the wall itself had given rise to a plethora of stories – one only has to think of all the narratives of flight and separation – goes without saying. These stories needed to be told or otherwise they would be lost once and for all. That I wanted to tell these stories in the form of a comedy has to do with my temperament, but also with my conviction that something that can be laughed over is no longer the same as it was before. This is probably what is meant by “healing laughter.”



And so I had the idea of a young man who lived in Sonnenallee, whose first love letter landed in the death strip as the result of a stupid accident, before it could be read. The entire personnel of this story was composed of a kind of petting zoo of individuals subject to a typical Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) socialisation, including an anxious mother, a grandiloquent father, a best buddy, an unobtainable school beauty, a strict school directress, a gullible beat policeman, an ominous (Stasi?) neighbour and a patronising uncle from the West. The episodes of the story quickly acquired a legendary character. At the same time it was clear to me that I would have to direct a mild, forgiving gaze at those who had hurt me. (That is easier to say the smaller the wounds). I wasn’t at all interested in settling scores – judging between the goodies and the baddies – and deciding what my position was in the whole affair. No, everyone should fail in their attempts, everyone should experience that life always gets in the way, despite the best-laid plans. When it comes to failing, everyone is equal, and it is this equality that is the matter for laughter.

The material was filmed by Leander Haussmann, who naturally made such inessential corrections as dispensing with the basic idea of the love letter. And he had difficulties with the idea of a wall comedy; he was more concerned with producing a cult film. We agreed that we wanted to draw a romantic, idealised picture of the GDR, one which would make West Germans jealous that they were not allowed to live there – fully aware that we, Leander and I, dreamed of being in the West back then. We didn’t have a bad conscience, quite the reverse: it is well known that one goes to the cinema because of the cinematic lie.

If one can make jokes about the wall, or expressed more elegantly, make comedies, then one can also make jokes about the Yugoslavian war, or about the Near East conflict, or Islamic terrorism, or Apartheid. Comedy is tragedy plus time: the deeper the wounds the more time must pass. And it is for this reason that I can stand in front of an astonished audience in many parts of the world and quietly and calmly state, “The day will come when a comedy will be made about that which currently threatens to drive you to despair.” Then people look at me as if I am mentally ill, completely vulgar or an agent. Then I say, “But first it needs to be over. To make a comedy about the wall while it still stood would have been cynical. And I hope you will experience this comedy,” and if I am speaking in front of students, I say, “Maybe one of you will write this comedy.”

And when people confront me with statistics, according to which 13 percent of Germans want the wall back, I answer, “Let’s be honest, 13 percent of your country is also made up of political idiots. You will always find one dud amongst eight Egyptians (Poles, Portuguese, Brazilians or Japanese), and we Germans are, unfortunately, no better.”

Yes, travelling: that remains an unresolved wall trauma for me. Just as my parent’s generation having experienced the hunger of the war and post-war years reacted with a wave of binge eating, and to this day “can’t throw away any bread,” so I am unable to refuse any invitations to travel abroad. The wall has inoculated me with an inextinguishable longing for distant places, and no rational ecological arguments, such as an itemisation of my personal energy account, can prevent me from boarding an aeroplane and travelling to distant countries. When we have the eco-dictatorship and all the former Lufthansa senators have been sentenced to riding a bike for the rest of their lives, I will give the impression of being repentant, however, deep down inside, I will feel like the last victim of the Berlin Wall.

Return to the first part of the essay