Appearing now for the first time in English, Thomas Brussig’s 1999 novel is a little miracle of a book. Its title refers to a real, five-kilometre-long street in Berlin, ‘a sixty-meter smidgen’ of which found itself in East Germany when the city was partitioned in 1945. Its characters are the residents of that smidgen: people who literally live in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. 

The absurdity of such a place informs the nature of the novel, which treats life under communism with wit and warmth. It put me in mind of V S Naipaul’s Miguel Street. As there, the young male lead, Micha, provides a window onto the colourful characters around him: the hypochondriacal uncle paranoid about asbestos poisoning; the older sister and her revolving door of suitors; the schoolfriend whose sole aspiration is to own a copy of the Rolling Stones’ banned Exile on Main St. 

Remembered by an adult Micha sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall, their escapades have no obvious chronology (as memories tend not to), and the chapters read more like short stories. Only Micha’s pursuit of the most beautiful girl in school forms any sort of continuous narrative. What holds