posted on 01 Oct 2020

The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider

Peter Schneider is a novelist and essayist. Born in Lübeck, Germany, in 1940, he has lived in Berlin on and off since the 1960s, when he was an activist and spokesperson for its radical student movement. He has written more than twenty books but is best known for the classic short novel, The Wall Jumper, written in 1982 – seven years before the fall of the Berlin wall. The novel is now nearly forty years old but in 2005 it received a major boost and reached new audiences when it was reprinted in the Penguin Modern Classics series, with a foreword by one of its long-time admirers, Ian McEwan. And yet I suspect it still isn’t widely known or read. This is a shame because it is an extremely interesting book.

First, let me try and explain what it is, for The Wall Jumper is that curiously European thing, a not-quite-novel. It draws on some of the modernist fictional experiments of writers like Milan Kundera and while overall it has the framework and approach of fiction – it has characters, it has a central narrator (Peter Schneider) – it is in fact much closer to reportage, or perhaps essays. It is a novel that seems to dismantle or question itself even as it is being written.

It opens in divided Berlin in the late-1970s – in fact, 1979 as far as it is possible to tell: on an evening when the Schneider/narrator is drinking with a friend in a near-by bar, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan appears on the TV news (December 1979).

Schneider lives in west Berlin. The wall – the wall of shame, if you are a supporter of the West German state; the anti-fascist barrier if you are a supporter of the Soviet-controlled East – is a fact of life. But Schneider has become convinced that its existence is more than its physical presence. “It will take us longer,” he says at one point “to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.” This novel or whatever it is, then, is not just about a period of German history that now already seems almost impossibly distant, it is also about the internalisation of state ideologies. “Where does the state end,” he asks, “and the person begin?”

Schneider lives in workers’ apartments between two equally insanitary restaurant-bars – a German place and an Argentinian place. Their bursting rubbish bags spill rotting food across the pavement and the courtyard of the apartments. He would like to get either – ideally both – closed down for breaches of hygiene but even when he finds that one rubbish bag is stuffed with hundreds of empty cat food tins, suggesting that either the goulash or the Argentinian meatballs have been ‘stretched’ with pet food, there is nothing to tie the bag specifically to either restaurant. It could have come from either; it could have come from both, for despite their differences the restaurants are to some degree interchangeable. And this is a motif that runs throughout the book – East and West, each is a rebuttal of the other, each rehearses partial, self-referential truths; whether something is true is of far less importance than whether it is something that might be said by one’s ideological enemies and therefore something one would at all costs avoid saying oneself.

But while he loathes the two local restaurants, Schneider prefers Berlin to anywhere else in Germany. History is so tangibly present. The sand-coloured frontages are strafed with bullet marks, but whether from the Second World War or from the street fighting of the Weimar period, no one knows or cares. Bars and squats in bomb-damaged buildings host leftwing discussion groups and student radicals and avant-garde jazz sessions. Conversations all take place over endless rounds of vodka and beer chasers in a dense fug of cigarette smoke. Schneider likes the ruin and dereliction.

Meeting a handful of friends – scarcely characters, really, more like ‘sources’ – in local bars, Schneider sets out to gather stories which will exemplify the theories he is developing about partitioned Berlin, divided Germany. But each story he gathers seems somehow unsatisfactory, ambiguous in what it illustrates, more complex, less conclusive. And each friend he recounts these stories to counters them with a better, more sensational story – and all of these stories involve wall jumpers of one kind or another: people driven to cross from sector-to-sector – but rarely for a good or ‘political’ reason. Sometimes they simply want to see American movies; sometimes because a lucrative trade can be had in swapping intelligence for both the Western secret services and the Eastern – there is a thriving ‘skin trade’ and the Soviet controlled East routinely sells dissidents and trouble-makers back to the West for hard currency. But these wall jumpers don’t – as one review says – conquer the wall “as if it doesn’t exist”. I think that misses the point: they conquer the wall as if it is all that exists, drawn to it over and over as if making some point about personal freedom that they can scarcely articulate, even to themselves.

All of this happens in almost a sort of shorthand in a sequence of short episodes. I found some parts of the book slightly obscure (I would need to look up some passing references in order to understand the historical allusions) and some parts startlingly vivid. Its tone darkens, I think, as it progresses and its allusions, the legacy being reflected on, grows weightier and wider until it reaches outwards beyond student politics, beyond radical youth, to the second world war, the legacy of Nazism and the failure of de-Nazification, the dismantling of some of the notorious myths and counter-myths of the destruction of Hitler’s Reich – the butchery and mass rape conducted by the advancing Soviet regiments, for instance.

I’m aware that I have given only the slightest flavour of this strange not-quite-novel. For a short and sparsely written book, it is extraordinarily dense and demands subsequent rereadings. I can see why it fascinated Ian McEwan, who came across it when he was researching his own Cold War novel, The Innocent. But McEwan’s is a very different book indeed, conventional in every way that Schneider’s isn’t, a strange Berlin Gothic confection, over-ripe and grotesque where Schneider is detached, philosophical, enigmatic. The contrast is itself instructive.

The Wall Jumper is a difficult book to do justice to in a short review and I’m not sure that I have. In many ways, it is a book to be experienced – and then make your own mind up about. Personally, I’m sure I shall be rereading it again very soon.

 

Alun Severn

October 2020