Heroes Like Us [Hardcover]

John Brussig (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 1997

Provocative and hilarious, Heroes Like Us was the first novel to comment on the downfall of East Germany by an author who had grown up with the Berlin Wall. Klaus Uhltzscht, born in 1968 in East Germany, grows up across the street from the Ministry of State Security, and he is inspired early on to do his share to win the Cold War. Naturally he joins the Secret Police, but his glorious career as an international agent never materializes. Instead, he spends countless hours keeping his fellow citizens under close surveillance -- never quite sure what he is looking for. Frustrated on all counts, Klaus’s life is changed only when a strange accident in the fall of 1989 dramatically alters the size of his penis.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and according to Klaus Uhltzscht, hero of German author Thomas Brussig's novel, Heroes Like Us, he was responsible. Klaus feels responsible for a lot of things, not the least of which is his parents' happiness. It is to please his father--an agent with the notorious East German secret police, the Stasi--that Klaus himself joins up. Once there, he has serious doubts about whether his Stasi is the genuine article or just a decoy to distract attention from the Stasi for which his father works. When the Wall finally falls, Klaus worries that his activities will be distorted in the Western press, so he decides to unburden himself to Oscar Kitzelstein, a New York Times correspondent. The darkly ribald, satirical tale Klaus tells in Heroes Like Us marks the strong debut of an important new voice in the postcommunist literary world.

From Library Journal

If this novel is as funny in the original (it was a best seller in Germany), it's pretty funny, and bravo to translator Brownjohn. It's the story of Klaus Uhlzscht, who even as a child sees himself destined to greatness, even a Nobel prize?all evidence to the contrary. It's about coming of age, his moribund, mysterious father, overly-hygienic mother, summer camp, apprenticeship in the Stasi, but most of all it's about his preoccupation with his (euphemism alert!) member?its uses and abuses, ascensions and dimensions, its promises and purposes. The whole is in the form of an interview with a New York Times reporter, the cause of the interview being Klaus's instrumentality in the fall of the Berlin Wall (see Nobel prize, above), through demonstration of his (euphemism alert!) member, grown through surgical error to gigantic proportion, to awed border guards. Book and characters are funny, but it's the diction (and Brussig would appreciate the two puns above), as in Nabokov, that is hilarious. Recommended but far out.
-?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 262 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st Farrar, Straus and Giroux ed edition (October 31, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374169837
• ISBN-13: 978-0374169831
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,643,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars reading this book you cannot stop laughing, September 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Heroes Like Us (Hardcover)

Originally I gave "Heroes like us" to my stepfather, because I thought it was about the term of history he has lived in, and so he would be interested in a witty story about East Germany. But when he read he was so enthusiastic about it that he could not give it away. I immediately took the book and did not wonder any more about his reaction. The slightly ironic style of Thomas Brussig took possession of me. The action mainly takes place in the area where I was born and so I could comprehend how "hero" Klaus experiences his surroundings. But I think for any other reader this book will also bring perfect entertainment and better understanding of "life in the DDR".

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent story of East Germany, the falling of the Wall, July 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Heroes Like Us (Hardcover)

For anyone interested in life on a day to day basis in the DDR, this is the book. An insight into the working of the infamous Stasi, in a very humorous tone.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must-Read for Cold-Warriors, February 15, 2012

By 

Marshall Emm "Old-school Boffin" (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Heroes Like Us (Paperback)

Brussig's Heroes Like Us is hugely entertaining as a novel and it is also highly educational: it throws open a gigantic picture window on a culture that we "cold-warriors" largely had to imagine for ourselves. East Berlin, East Germany, the Stasi. So many secrets, so much mystery, so much inhumanity. But as we might have guessed, the Stasi was too big and pervasive to be anything but cartoonish. In terms of per-capita employment it was the largest secret police force the world has ever seen and it influenced everyone's life on both sides of the Wall. An East German Portnoy*, Klaus Uhltzscht is the son of a mid-level Stasi functionary and a public health engineer mother. Klaus tells his story to a reporter from the New York Times (rather than to a psychiatrist) and we spend the entire novel trying to figure out how Klaus can lay claim to having caused the fall of the Berlin Wall. The journey is fascinating and fun, and it is also irreverent and obscene. It's an entirely new perspective on late-GDR East Berlin and its inhabitants, who in the end are just heroes like us. The translator gets a lot of credit and his job was so obviously difficult that I will try to find the original in German** and compare notes. I haven't read much German since college, but I think this will be worth the effort.

* Portnoy's Complaint

** Helden wie wir