The Wall Jumper

The manner in which The Wall Jumper is written expresses how someone might feel who lived along the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. The book tends to jump around quite a bit from story to story, which causes the reader to become somewhat confused. Schneider is trying play on that confusion, and portray the back and forth emotions people felt that lived in Berlin during this time and how they adapted to their unique circumstances. It also allows the author to show that humans do not need repressive governments to build boxes for them; people are quite capable of doing that themselves.

The narrator is from West Berlin, therefore naturally he sides with the minds of the West Berlin Government. As the stories progress he begins to understand how each government is trying to mold the thoughts of its people to suit the needs of their social system; concluding that no matter which side of the wall a person maybe living on, they are still being manipulated. This reduces the wall to a metaphoric allusion of its time, allowing Schneider to explore the boundary between the state and the individual.

There is an argument with a friends because they interpret exactly the same news item through entirely different views: “…I take what I see at face value; Robert has been trained to read between the lines. Where I perceive merely an event, maybe an accident, Robert perceives a plan that he has to decipher.” Showing how differently the two states are taught to think.

Throughout the many stories there are East Germans who have moved to West Berlin in search of freedom and there are those who have chosen to stay in East Germany because they are convinced that the bounty of the West is just a mirage. The book best states it by saying, “It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.”