"The Wall Jumper" by Peter Schneider

 The 'Wall' is the Berlin Wall which divided the German city from 1961 to 1989. The narrator lives in West Berlin (when it was "a half-city, a walled-on enclave set within a surly, repressive state"; Introduction) but frequently visits East Berlin where he visits relatives, goes to bars and collects stories of those who 'jump' the wall. There are some remarkable stories, including three teenagers who live close enough to the early wall to leap from the roof of their apartment block onto the wall; they make use of this facility to go to movies in the west, returning each night, only being caught after western journalists record their adventures. Another wall jumper goes from west to east. 

The main thrust of the book is to explore how growing up under two different systems, the capitalist West Berlin and the communist East Germany, affects the characters of the inhabitants.

The Introduction (by novelist Ian McEwan) calls this book a novel although there is little novel-type structure (it is difficult to discern a plot and the character of the protagonist does not seem to be affected in the way that the hero of a novel normally is). It is more like reportage, although the narrator is anonymous and one presumes that the other characters are pseudonymous, perhaps even fictional.

It's a very short book (120 pages in the Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition) and I read it quite quickly. It fascinated me but it didn't always hold my interest which may have been due to the lack of a normal novelistic structure.

It is an interesting insight into the thoughts and feelings of people growing up in East Germany. For example, one character makes the point that it is wrong of the West German leader to lecture the East German leader about remembering the Nazi massacre of the Jews, since during the Second World War the West German leader had fought in the Wehrmacht and the East German leader had formed part of the resistance, spending ten years in Nazi jails.

In the Introduction, Ian McEwan makes the following points:

• The people living in West Berlin "tended to be the more adventurous spirits ... leaving behind them the prosperity and stifling conformity - as they saw it - of other German cities ... [for] cheap, shabby, once grand apartments. Those high ceilings echoed to the sound of radical political talk and avant garde jazz sweetened by the reek of cannabis. It was the presence of the Wall ... that made West Berlin both edgier and yet intellectually more vital than other cities in the West." 
• "Their stories are unfolded artfully, in a Scherezade-like manner, as bar-room anecdotes, cleverly overlapping throughout"

Selected quotes:

• "The difference between German and Latin American cooking becomes trivial when you see the garbage cans." (Ch 1)
• "A joke is always an epitaph for a feeling that has died." (Ch 1)
• "Smoke rises among exotic trees, light glows behind windows, human silhouettes become visible." (Ch 1)
• "Even more telling are the colors: pale gray, olive gray, wine gray, dove gray." (Ch 2) NB: My copy was an English translation published by a British publisher ... yet it uses American spellings! Why?
• "I leave the lines for name a title blank." (Ch 2) The narrator is anonymous throughout.
• "The Russian formula for concrete: a third cement, a third sand, a third microphone." (Ch 2)
• "If a human right is trampled anywhere in the world, she seems to come out of it with bruises of her own." (Ch 2)
• "What would happen to me if I stopped finding fault with myself, as I've been taught to do, and blamed everything on the state? Where does a state end and a self begin?" (Ch 3) This last sentence is repeated near the end of the book.
• "The street looks scoured." (Ch 3) 
• "Lena's stories seemed to me the product of a wishing so strong that the conditional past became the past pure and simple; they were not lies." (Ch 3)
• "The use of the subjunctive, even where grammatically appropriate, was artificial, showed lack of feeling and directness." (Ch 3)
• "I am entering a state where even things that will happen anyway require authorization." (Ch 4)
• "Pommerer, an intellectual under socialism, has about as much contact with the workers as I do in the West. He gets to know them when a water main bursts, a facade is restored, or a chair stands vacant at a barroom table." (Ch 4)

June 2022; 120 pages

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God