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April 18 @ 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
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In-Person: An Evening with Thomas Brussig
Books & Books and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany Miami present…
AN EVENING WITH THOMAS BRUSSIG
discussing
The Short End of the Sonnenallee: A Novel
(Picador, $18.00)
Consul General Andreas Siegel and Thomas Brussig will lead you through an interesting evening reading selected excerpts and discussing the book. We will have cheese and German wine ready for you!
Tuesday, April 18th, 7:30 PM | Books & Books, Coral Gables
RSVP HERE FOR FREE
Books & Books and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany Miami is thrilled to present an evening with Thomas Brussig discussing his book: The Short End of the Sonnenallee: A Novel (Picador, $16.00). Andreas T. Siegel, the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany Miami, will be introducing.
The translation of this German bestseller also was made into a movie “Am anderen Ende der Sonnenallee”. It was done by no other than well-known American author Jonathan Franzen.
This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! Please RSVP only if you intend to join us. We will have cheese and German wine ready for you!
About the Book:
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
Young 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.”
BUY THE BOOK HERE
About the Author:
Thomas Brussig is the author of several novels, including Wie es leuchtet and Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, FSG, 1997). As a screenwriter, he worked with Edgar Reitz on his Heimat epic. Born in East Berlin, Brussig now divides his time between Berlin and Mecklenburg.
About the Consul General:
Andreas Siegel is a career diplomat with a broad range of international experience in strategic, political, economic and cultural affairs. He holds both a (postgraduate) diploma of the College of Europe, Bruges/Belgium and a Master degree of French, English and American literature/linguistics of the University of Freiburg/Germany.
Andreas has had a long-time connection and affinity with the United States: he was an AFS exchange student in Michigan in the 1970ies. And his first foreign assignment as a diplomat was to serve as a Vice-Consul at the German Consulate General in Boston, Mass.
Before coming to Florida in July 2019, Andreas headed the German Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Previously, he had been working at the German Permanent Representation to NATO in Brussels, focusing on arms control, counter-terrorism and NATO-Russia working groups. Prior to that, he had been working for six years in Strasbourg/France: initially as Deputy Chief of Mission at the German Permanent Representation to the Council of Europe (CoE), and then – on leave from the Foreign Service – as Director of Strategic Planning of the Council of Europe Secretariat. His professional experience also includes: working as a spokesperson of the German Delegation to the European Cultural Policy Committee in Brussels and heading a cross-border cooperation unit at the Foreign Ministry. He also worked as Deputy Head of Mission at the German Embassy in Lilongwe/Malawi (South-Eastern Africa) and spent three years at the Federal Chancellery (Desk for strategic and security issues), followed by a “double-hatted posting” in Morocco as Head of the economic section of the Embassy (in Rabat) and as Consul General in Casablanca.