The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider

First published:Der Mauerspringer, 1982 (English translation, 1983)

Type of work: Social criticism

Time of work: The early 1980’s

Locale: West Berlin and East Berlin

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a graduate student from West Germany who has lived in West Berlin for the last twenty years, occasionally visiting East Berlin and the German Democratic Republic
• Robert, his friend, an emigrant from the German Democratic Republic who now lives in West Berlin
• Lena, the narrator’s former girlfriend, who is also an emigrant from the German Democratic Republic and now lives in West Berlin
• Pommerer, an East German writer who lives in East Berlin
• Dora, the narrator’s aunt, who lives in Dresden in the German Democratic Republic
• Gerhard Schalter, the narrator’s landlord
• Mr. Kabe, the wall jumper
• Walter Bolle, a border violator
• Michael Gartenschlager, a defector from the German Democratic Republic

The Novel

The Wall Jumper is a narrative essay or a collection of short stories assembled by the narrator according to a variation of the Scheherazade principle of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. In The Wall Jumper, the narrator decides to collect and narrate stories about the divided city of Berlin,and whoever he meets is invited to tell him a new and better story. The work defies classification. It is not a novel, a novella, or a diary. It is perhaps best characterized as a narrative essay divided into five parts, mixing memoir with essay, anecdote with meditation, and narrative with political observation.

As part 1 begins, the narrator describes his approach by plane to Berlin. The plane, traveling from West Germany, must cross the city and the Berlin Wall three times in order to land against the wind at Tegel Airport in West Berlin. The narrator then describes the scene of his arrival at Schonefeld Airport in East Berlin to show the confusion of foreign tourists about the divided city. An Eastern European tourist cannot understand why he cannot share a taxi with the narrator to downtown Berlin: There are no taxis from Schonefeld Airport to West Berlin. The place the narrator calls home is not even shown on East Berlin city maps. The narrative then switches to a discussion of the Wall, built in August, 1961, by the East German government, and its depiction on city maps in East and West Berlin. The narrator moved to West Berlin immediately following construction.

The reader is introduced to Robert, the narrator’s friend, whom he regularly meets for breakfast at a cafe. Robert, an emigrant from East Berlin, is an expert at the pinball machines at the cafe. When the narrator informs Robert that he is collecting stories about the divided city, he feigns a lack of interest in the topic. For Robert, the so-called German Question, the question of German reunification, which is part of the West German political agenda, does not exist, although he is deeply influenced by the effects of the partition.

The first story told is that of Gerhard Schalter, the narrator’s landlord in West Berlin, who maintains his expensive West Berlin apartment by buying staple foods in East Berlin. Initially attracted to the other side of the wall by a love affair, Schalter changes his political ideology as a matter of course, coming to see the advantages of the social system in East Berlin. He appears to have moved to the other side of the Wall, as the narrator reports that a moving van took his furniture away.

The next story is about Mr. Kabe, the wall jumper of the novel’s title, a West Berliner who has jumped the wall fifteen times simply because it is there. In East Germany, Kabe is arrested as a border violator but put under psychiatric observation when his interrogators cannot find a political or criminal intent. Finally, Kabe is turned over to the permanent delegation of the West German government in East Berlin, which returns Kabe to West Berlin. Three months later, Kabe promptly repeats his offense. The West Berlin authorities, however, fail to get at Kabe by legal means, because he has only crossed a state border that does not exist in the eyes of the West German government. In terms of constitutional law, Kabe has only been exercising his right to freedom of movement. When the West Berlin authorities incarcerate Kabe in a hospital because of his self-destructive tendencies, they have to release him: Kabe’s repeated jumps only prove that the Wall can be crossed going east without damage to body or soul. Released from the hospital, Kabe returns directly to the Wall to perform one of his fifteen jumps. Even a change of residence to southern Germany does not prevent Kabe’s return to Berlin and a repetition of his urge to overcome the Wall.

Part 2 shows the narrator going by S-Bahn (city railways) from West Berlin to East Berlin, arriving at Friedrichstrasse Station. He recalls a previous visit with his former girlfriend Lena to her family. Lena had left her family during the days of the Wall’s construction. The narrator realized that the family, meanwhile, had become Lena’s homeland. The family fulfilled a need, which, in the apartment they shared in West Berlin, the narrator could not satisfy.

This time, the narrator visits Pommerer, a writer living in East Berlin, who tells him the story about the two Willys and Lutz, three filmgoers. The three boys, who live in a house directly at the East Berlin side of the Wall, jump the Wall every Friday for the sole purpose of going to see motion picture Westerns in West Berlin and then return to East Berlin after the show, until they are discovered and found guilty of repeated violation of the passport law and illegal border crossing. The narrator’s visit with Pommerer introduces the reader to the special difficulties that intellectuals face in the German Democratic Republic—for example, obtaining travel permits to the West or gaining approval of publication.

Part 3 features the story of Walter Bolle and the reactions of the narrator and Robert to a violent street demonstration in West Berlin, reactions which reveal their different backgrounds. Bolle, who has spent seven years in East German prisons for various border violations after he attempted to escape across the Wall, becomes a double and triple agent when he is released to West Germany for a ransom, with the sole mission of destroying the Wall. Declaring a single-handed war on the German Democratic Republic, Bolle only endangers people in the West. When given a suspended prison sentence in West Berlin, he disappears as a confused man, having lost all identity.

A violent street demonstration on West Berlin’s Kurfurstendamm Street reveals the different perspectives of the narrator and Robert, whose mentalities are determined by their backgrounds. While the narrator, with his Western perspective, views the demonstration as a spontaneous protest, Robert perceives it as a police-organized provocation to justify future crackdowns, basing this on his experience in the German Democratic Republic. Similar differences are revealed when the narrator’s relationship with Lenais recorded.

At the center of part 4 is the story of Michael Gartenschlager, another defector from the German Democratic Republic, who is driven to dismantle the self-triggering explosive devices installed along the border. At his third attempt, he is killed by automatic rifle fire from East German border guards.

The rest of part 4 deals with Pommerer’s public protest on behalf of a fellow writer who was fined because he had published a novel in the West without permission from the East German copyright office and with the narrator’s visit with his Aunt Dora in Dresden, where he is not allowed to meet with his cousin who is doing his military service. (Soldiers in the East German army are forbidden any Western contacts.) The narrator admits, “[I]t will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.” If Germans still have a common fatherland, it survives only in their language.

In part 5, the Iron Curtain comes down to put an end to the narrator’s visits to East Berlin. It is as though he has challenged the border guards one time too many. They take his car apart completely, only to find nothing. The narrator is then denied permission to enter the German Democratic Republic and, in accordance with international protocols, given no reason.

The Characters

The narrator and protagonist of The Wall Jumper is to some extent an autobiographical figure. Like his narrator, Peter Schneider has lived in West Berlin since 1961, was a student at the Free University, and found himself confronted with the Wall, built to shut off the flight of an ever-increasing number of citizens to West Berlin. While living in West Berlin, Schneider went very often to East Berlin and also made trips into the German Democratic Republic. Schneider’s protagonist is a man caught between the “here” and the “over there” of the Wall, between two states and their political cultures. The narrator’s memories of his earlier life—his childhood, World War II, the defeat of Germany, and its occupation by Soviet and American troops—explain his state of mind, which is as divided as his nation. There is, so to speak, a wall in his head which he cannot tear down. Although his trips beyond the Wall begin as a campaign to overcome the Wall and deconstruct the divisions that it has caused, the narrator realizes the futility of his attempts when he is finally denied permission to enter East Berlin. The other characters of the novel, even the narrator’s friend Robert and his girlfriend Lena, are not fully developed; they serve as examples of the division between East and West Germany.

Critical Context

The Wall Jumper is Schneider’s second important work. With his first novel, Lenz (1973), modeled after a novella by Georg Buchner, a nineteenth century revolutionary German author, Schneider became the spokesman for a whole generation of young Germans involved in the student movement and alienated from the political culture of the government in office during the 1960’s.

In The Wall Jumper, his first novel published in the United States, Schneider confronts the issue of the division of Germany, symbolized by the Berlin Wall. Rich in documentary references, The Wall Jumper is a primary example of the literature of facts of the 1980’s.

Schneider has also published a novel entitled Vati (1987; dad), which concerns the biography of Josef Mengele, the infamous concentration camp doctor who escaped from justice to South America, as seen from the perspective of his own son. Mengele’s son belongs to Schneider’s own generation, which has yet to face its Nazi heritage, and Schneider’s novel is an attempt to meet this obligation.

Bibliography

Booklist. LXXX, February 1, 1984, p. 805.

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Demetz, Peter. After the Fires: Recent Writings in the Germanies, Austria, and Switzerland, 1986.

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Houston, Robert. “Up Against the Wall: The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider,” in The Nation. CCXXXVIII (March 17, 1984), p. 328.

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Publishers Weekly. CCXXIV, November 18, 1983, p. 59.

Rushdie, Salman. “Tales of Two Berlins: The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX (January 29, 1984), p. 13.

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