Slipping the boundaries
On the perpetual struggle to overcome the systems that divide and shape us in intimate ways—in Peter Schneider's The Wall Jumper.
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily & this is a newsletter about trying to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
“Having come to distrust the hastily adopted identity that both states offer him, he feels at home only on the border.”
I wonder if every newcomer to Berlin suffers, initially, from the same affliction: a tendency to attribute certain cultural characteristics to east and west Germany, even if they no longer exist as capitalised entities. It feels like the long shadows of the Cold War, immortalised in countless films and books—seemingly defining, and so inadvertently clichéd—still loom large in any tourist’s experience of the once divided city, still exact a power over our collective imaginations.
Reading the late Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper (1982) some five years after my first acquaintance with Berlin, so long after the fall of the Wall, which stood from 1947 to 1991, I recognised my younger self in this enamoured naïveté, and what Schneider’s protagonist describes as “the stupidity of first impressions”—and the cautionary mental reins that soon tense to hold it in check. When suppositions appear to come to readily, too neatly, a natural scepticism begins to creep in, casting a healthy dose of doubt on one’s powers of deductions.
The novel’s unnamed narrator is—like Schneider was—a journalist from West Germany. When we meet him he has been living in West Berlin for some two decades. He had moved there soon after the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, began building the Wall on 31 August 1961—for various reasons, but not least because it was an opportunity to escape military service, since the West Berlin authorities had waived the draft to attract people to live in its enclave: bounded by East Berlin on the right and in any case entirely surrounded by the enemy GDR. As Ian McEwan wrote in his foreword to the book, this was why Nikita Khruschev had so vividly described as the “testicles of the West”: “When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”
When our curious narrator makes his forays into East Berlin, he is on a mission to write something about the Wall: he is looking for stories. Understandably then, he is highly attuned to every detail, trying to deduce what’s implicit in them, as writers and journalists can’t help but do. In one scene, while riding a taxi, he notices that the ‘VW’ insignia has been removed from every VW Golf he passes. His guess: “that they were taken off before delivery to eliminate free advertising for the West German company.” But immediately, he rejects his first guess, for he knows that he is not an unbiased observer: “I suspect motives where there are only material flaws, centralized command in a simple case of collectors’ mania.”
How many times have I gone through the same ritual upon landing in any country new to me or when beginning to report a story? This constant supposing and questioning to try to understand an unfamiliar place or subject, armed with only the most essential facts about a place but with the conceit that with enough noticing and listening and paying attention one will eventually figure out the underlying picture—or, at least, get as close to it as possible. In every detail we imagine to be telling, we grasp for an “impression that pushes for generalization”.
People, too, could be unwittingly subject to the same blunt scrutiny. Once, while sitting in a cafe in Kurfürstendamn, West Berlin (a once-capitalised entity which no longer exists), the two friends have an argument about a street riot that breaks out, with young people smashing shop windows. Robert remarks triumphantly that it must have been set up by the police so that they could use it as an excuse to cordon off the inner city, in order to prevent a real riot—to which the narrator, incredulous, accuses his friend of ascribing far too much omnipotence to the state. To Robert, the narrator thinks, “Everything that happens is preprogrammed, monitored, controlled by invisible hands”.
The quarrel begins when 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 he has to decipher. A friend who is in my view shy, in Robert’s view is only pretending to be shy. A colleague doesn’t just succeed; he has a formula for success. As Robert sees it, Western society is essentially a well-organized syndicate deliberately kept in a state of disorder by a few people in the know.
Our narrator’s presumptions infuriates Robert, who exhorts him not to judge him too quickly. Our narrator observes: “Nothing else I say can make him quite so mad as the comment that something about him is typically DDR.”
The two political systems that govern their lives—which seem to exist only in opposition to one another—shape their psychologies, their interpretations of things: how they see the world. Whenever a point of contention comes up, both sides proffer the same “canned language”, the same “state grammar”, the “lesson dutifully learned”—“true to the states whose influence we no longer recognise”. Robert, the narrator thinks, has a tendency to always lay the blame on something outside himself, “sheltered by a state that takes responsibility for everything”—in implicit contrast, he seems to mean, to West German society: where the assumption is that every initiative, every decision, and every success, or failure, is one’s own. How well you do, or are seen to do, in life, then, very much depends on which system you live under, and how faithfully you depend on their underlying philosophies.
Impossible then, not to wonder, where the state ends and the self begins. Impossible not to wonder, “What would I have become, how would I think, how would I look, if?” Would one adhere to the rules of one’s government, or rebel? Either way, a citizen would be reacting to the state they live in, its architecture of politics and feeling.
It’s only human that we do this: read into contextual details to explain how people behave. The trouble, Schneider seems to say, is when we turn people into symbols, into “political phenomenons”, and treat them only as such—as if they have no agency to direct their own fates or the fates of their fellow travellers. It’s important to question not just the influences the other side lives by but also the influences we ourselves live by, so that we don’t perpetuate such divisions, or give them the air of a fait accompli. People can surprise us, systems can change, and change in one can lead to transformation in the other.
All this feels very relevant to the present day, where the world is so divided into polarised blocs across so many issues: pro-Israel vs. pro-Palestine, Left vs. Right, pro-Russia vs. anti-Russia, Global North vs. Global South. As our unnamed narrator muses, “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.” It’s tempting, for the sake of community and strength in numbers, or one’s mere sanity, to cleave to the boundaries set by one side or the other. We’ve seen how such deep divisions cow most people into playing it safe with their opinions, their principles. At a time when history is so weaponised, so Instagrammed, leaked of complexity and obscured from any larger context in order to win an argument, to align more cohesively with a ‘rightful’ perspective. For instance: at a time when the ‘Western’ powers have been shown to be wearing no clothes, one knee-jerk reaction has been to disavow them on every level, to hold up one’s own hitherto imperfect and corruptible small nation as yes, being imperfect, but at least authentic, more human in their imperfections. More often than not, it seems like:
What matters is whether people with whom you wouldn’t want to be identified might make the same observation, not whether it’s true.
Even for the proverbial wall jumpers, things are not straightforward. Any sympathy felt for the other side can lead one to gesture wildly in overcompensation. While visiting Pommerer, an acquaintance in East Berlin, on an extended trip to better understand the divided metropolis, our narrator meets a fellow guest of Pommerer’s from the West who harbours “the sense of having come from the worst of all possible worlds”, who “tries to override any reference to limitations on life in the East by telling horror stories from the West”.
If the conversation turns to food shortages in the East, she cites figures on the unemployed back home, who see oranges in shop windows and can’t buy them. There may be more housing in the West, but no one can afford it. True, it can take as long as twelve years to receive delivery of a car in the East, but the cars you get so easily in the West clog traffic and pollute the cities. Granted that you can voice criticism in the West, but it has absolutely no effect.
The narrator describes this as a “conversational rite in which the progressive visitor from the West attempts to reconcile his Eastern friend to his situation by showing him that things are even worse in the West”, as a way of commiserating. Within this context, the narrator calls this the “disease of comparison”, where it becomes impossible to take each place on its own terms. Surely, one cannot “cure the madness of one state by referring to the madness of the other”?
In the end, it can feel like the only safe place to be is on the border—not so much ‘sitting on the fence’ so much as being your own person: really thinking about what you believe in and what you stand for, with no concern for which camp would try to claim you for your beliefs, even if you risk finding yourself in partial agreement with your apparent philosophical enemies. (Superimposing this onto our present world, I’m reminded of how some people seem to reject veganism because it’s also practised by Hindu nationalists, when there are many sound reasons—for animal rights, the environment, or public health—for being vegan.)
But even the border dwellers are not spared the tendency to compare, to bristle when they bump up against criticism, lobbed by the other side, of the place they come from, no matter how imperfect. Unable to fully embrace a new existence, and unable to fully abandon the familiarity of their own, they will never feel the comfort of belonging to any tribe. But that’s a fair price to pay, I think, for being true to oneself. Because if, in order to avoid feeling at odds with the world, one throws in one’s lot with one side or another, one might end up—as our narrator does with his ex-girlfriend Lena: who, like Robert, is an East German transplant to West Berlin—losing one’s own compass, slowly absorbing their point of view, learning it “like a foreign language without comprehending its inner structure”.
So, to read?
Yes! For such a slip of a novel it is dense with detail and insights and memorable characters, and as a relative newcomer to Berlin I feel it helps to explain some of its aspects quite profoundly. Schneider brings a journalist’s roving eye and handle on the facts without ever resorting to historical exposition, and only just a few footnotes. The material and logistical realities on both sides of the Wall are folded seamlessly into the characters’ actions and lives, leaving enough ambiguity between what’s factual and what’s exaggerated for you to wonder and Google at what was real and not real. But equally, much of what was real sound sufficiently fantastic that one can’t help but think that the mythologised parts, which in the book often take on a charming allegorical tone, could well have been real too. Definitely one of the books to read to better understand Berlin.
My 2026 book tally
*favourites
Current read:
Peter Schneider’s 2014 book of essays, Berlin Now: The Rise of the City and the Fall of the Wall.
Last finished:
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room*, for the new Chapters bookshop’s Romantic & Ruinous Book Club. This was my first book club in Berlin! The last proper one I attended was years ago at a London pub, where some fifteen of us just sat around a cluster of tables and chattered. At Chapters, we were free to take our seats at one of several small tables. Then, we were prompted with questions: first discussing them in our small groups before loosely ‘presenting’ what we talked about collectively to the room. This format, held in the hush of a bookshop after dark, did feel somewhat classroom-like, but from what I gathered, the bookshop was trying out a new format that night; usually, everybody sits around joined tables and speaks whenever they want to? Either way, it felt very rewarding to discuss a book I loved—so slim, so much contained within it!—with other readers. Interesting, too, to see how people bring their selves to the material. I, for one, rather identified with the ‘drifters’ in the book (who seem uncommitted even in their drifting), even as I found myself to be a little critical of them 😅
Other books read:
Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad, Eliza Filby (nonfiction)*—basically, all about how the haves and have-nots of our age will be determined by whether they stand to inherit anything from BOMAD, the Bank of Mum and Dad. An introduction here with Trevor Noah.
The Little Virtues, Natalia Ginzburg (essays)*—really, a necessary manual for living. Found “Portrait of a Friend”, “Human Relationships”, and the concluding essay, from which the book is titled, particularly thought-provoking.
Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte (short fiction)—loved a couple of stories, others exhausted me: I’m sure they were meant to affect a reader so, and consequently I couldn’t read them in succession, breaks were needed between stories. I laughed out loud many times, but it felt like most of the stories didn’t edge beyond satire?
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, Ruby Tandoh (nonfiction)—interesting read on how food trends came to be, considering the question of how much are our tastes are, in fact, our own?
Good and Evil and Other Stories, Samanta Schweblin (short fiction)*—was first introduced to her work in George Saunders’ newsletter. She has a spot on my ‘Favourite Writers’ list.
(My 2025 reads listed here.)
‘Strange Books Club’?
Here’s an idea, just me testing the waters: I’ve been thinking that I would like to be part of a casual, probably irregular-timed, reading group: in-person in Berlin. We’ll discuss the book over a meal or drink, a picnic in warmer weather, maybe online when no other workaround is possible.
Since last year, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to books with dark, strange, uncanny hearts, books set in otherworlds just one remove from ours. Maybe this inclination took hold because of what’s happening in the world, and the darkness offers a sort of weird escapism? Or maybe the books offer unexpected comfort: the possibility of darkness being overcome—if only in fiction, if only by a faint glimmer. I’m still trying to figure out why I’m drawn to such books at this particular time, but if this describes you too, let’s figure it out together?
I think many books could fall under this amorphous umbrella, so it wouldn’t be too prescriptive. For an idea, some recent-ish examples I’ve read: Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive My Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Shirley Jackson’s We’ve Always Lived in the Castle, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, John Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen.
As for titles we could start the book club with: Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, Yōko Tawada’s The Last Children of Tokyo, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Many others, too: I’ll have to consult my cobbled list when I find it.
If you’re keen on reading together, just comment or write me at movableworlds-AT-gmail. Let me know if you’re looking to meet in person, or online (if you’re not based in Berlin but this speaks to you very strongly). Feel free to suggest other titles, fiction or nonfiction, you would like to read or discuss too.
Until the next!
–Emily