German Writer Thomas Brussig with Jonathan Franzen

German novelist Thomas Brussig, The Short End of the Sonnenallee, appears with English translator award-winning writer Jonathan Franzen.

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 Wall.

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.”

The event is a cooperation with the Mechanics' Institute and the German Consulate General San Francisco.