Churchill’s cold stub

Life abounds with opportunities to divulge your home address, and Michael Kuppisch had found that whenever he mentioned the Sonnenallee, the street where he lived in Berlin, people responded warmly, even sentimentally. In Michael Kuppisch’s experience, the Sonnenallee was especially effective in moments of uncertainty or situations of outright tension. Even hostile Saxons almost always turned friendly when they learned they were dealing with a Berliner who lived on the Sonnenallee. Michael Kuppisch could well imagine that when Joseph Stalin, Harry S. Truman, and Winston Churchill were partitioning Berlin into zones, at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Sonnenallee had had something of the same effect. Especially on Stalin; dictators and despots have a well-known weakness for the whisperings of poetry. Stalin didn’t want the Americans to get a street as beautifully named as the Sonnenallee, at least not all of it. He lodged a claim for the Sonnenallee with Harry S. Truman—which the latter naturally rejected. Stalin, however, refused to back down, and things quickly approached the point of blows. As Stalin and Truman squared off, nose to nose, the British premier squeezed in between them, separating them, and stepped over to the map of Berlin. He saw right away that the Sonnenallee was more than four kilometers long. Churchill was allied with the Americans by tradition, and everyone in the room assumed he would deny Stalin the Sonnenallee. Knowing Churchill, they expected him to take a puff of his cigar, ponder for a moment, then release the smoke, shake his head, and move on to the next point of negotiation. But when Churchill sucked on the stub, he was dismayed to find it cold. Stalin was kind enough to give him a light, and as Churchill savored his first puff and leaned over the map of Berlin, he wondered how he could adequately repay Stalin’s kindness. Releasing the smoke, he gave Stalin a sixty-meter smidgen of the Sonnenallee and changed the subject.

That’s how it must have gone, thought Michael Kuppisch. How else could such a long street have been divided so close to where it ended? Sometimes he also thought: If stupid Churchill had only paid attention to his cigar, we’d be living in the West now.

Michael Kuppisch was always looking for explanations because he was all too often confronted with things that didn’t seem normal to him. It never ceased to amaze him that he lived on a street where the lowest house number was 379. He was likewise unable to ignore the daily humiliation of stepping out of his apartment building and being greeted with ridicule from the observation platform on the West side—entire school classes shouting and whistling and yelling, “Look, a real Zonie!” or “Zonie, come on, give us a little wave, we wanna take your picture!” And yet, strange as this all was, it was nothing compared to the utterly unbelievable sight of his first-ever love letter being carried by the wind into the death strip and coming to rest there—before he’d even read it.

Michael Kuppisch, whom everyone called Micha (except for his mother, who’d suddenly taken to calling him Misha), not only had a theory about why there was a short end of the Sonnenallee, he also had a theory about why his years at the short end of the Sonnenallee were the most interesting time there had ever been or ever would be. The only dwellings at the short end of the Sonnenallee were the legendary Q3A buildings, with their tiny cramped apartments. The only people willing to move into them were newlyweds whose one burning wish was to finally live together under one roof. But soon these newlyweds had children, which made the cramped apartments even more cramped. Moving into a bigger apartment was out of the question; the authorities counted the number of rooms, not square meters, and considered the families “provided for.” Fortunately, this was happening in almost every household, and when Micha began to widen his life onto the streets, because he couldn’t stand the cramped apartment anymore, he met a lot of other kids who felt more or less the same way. And because the same sort of thing was happening almost everywhere at the short end of the Sonnenallee, Micha felt part of a “potential.” When his friends declared, “We’re a clique,” Micha said, “We’re a potential.” Even he didn’t quite know what he was trying to say, but he felt it had to mean something that everyone came from the same cramped Q3A apartments and got together every day, wearing the same kind of clothes, listening to the same music, experiencing the same yearning, and feeling ever more strongly, with each passing day, that when they finally reached adulthood they would do everything, everything differently. Micha even considered it a promising sign that they all loved the same girl.


Copyright © 1999 by Thomas Brussig

Translation copyright © 2023 by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson

Introduction copyright © 2023 by Jonathan Franzen