Todos conocemos el muro de Berlín, los reflectores y las alambradas, la tierra-de-nadie y las fugas fallidas. Pero ¿quién ha oído hablar de un berlinés occidental que saltó al Este sin ninguna razón «comprensible»? ¿O del trío de amigos que saltan el muro cada semana en dirección opuesta para ver la última película de Hollywood? ¿O del organizador de dos falsas redes de espionaje simultáneamente en ambas Alemanias? Tan sorprendentes anécdotas puntúan esta novela sobre el Berlín actual, el más significativo símbolo de un mundo dividido. El narrador es un joven escritor que comienza a reunir historias sobre un país desgarrado, no le mueve a ello el sentimiento de una situación insoportable, sino la desconfianza ante la ausencia de tal sentimiento.

This short book calls itself a story, but it reads more like an extended essay. Schneider playfully explores the way ordinary people were dealing with the phenomenon of the Berlin Wall at a point in the 1980s where it had been in existence for a good twenty years and wasn't showing any sign of ever going away again. He talks about his own experience as a West Berlin resident occasionally visiting the East, and about his friends on both sides — his girlfriend, who has moved from East to West leaving her family behind; a neighbour who moves from West to East; East German writers and their friends, and so on.

He also gives us various case-studies of individualists who challenged the existence of the border in odd ways: the eponymous "wall-jumper," who repeatedly vaulted the wall from West to East on the apparent grounds that he couldn't be bothered to walk round to the official crossing point (the West Berlin authorities couldn't prosecute him since they didn't recognise the border; those in the East didn't know what to do with him other than sticking him in mental institutions to cool his heels before sending him home); the three East Berlin lads who discovered a weak point in the wall and used it to spend their Saturday afternoons in a West Berlin cinema (no-one noticed until a West German journalist got hold of the story); a man who drove the intelligence services on both sides crazy by repeatedly crossing over to offer his services as a double- triple- or quadruple-agent; another who spent his time raiding the border fortifications to steal East German military hardware; and so on.

The point seems to be that in the real world, people are able to accommodate themselves to almost any weird situation, even a city arbitrarily split in two, and just find ways to get on with normal life. But also, it's a reminder to West Germans not to make too many easy assumptions about the intrinsic superiority of their system. The DDR had a lot of things wrong with it, but there was always another side to the argument, and — up to a point — it continued to function because there were enough people who still believed in the ideals of socialism and were not bursting to move away but cherished the hope that the country's deficiencies could be repaired. ( )

A figment of some anarchic imagination and a fascinating glimpse of Berlin life before the wall came down, by Peter Schneider ( )

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2015/12/05/postgermanlitmonth-a-st... ( )

An interesting exploration of the absurdity of a city and more so a country that is divided against itself. The basic synopsis of the story is that the narrator constantly travels back and forth between West and East Berlin collecting stories about people who have jumped the Berlin Wall. What the author seems to find is that the people on each side inevitably become mouth peaces or their prospective government. The best example of this can be seen at the end of the book when the narrator and his east German friend are watching the Olympic Hockey game between the USA and Russia when there is a referee call. The man from East Germany sees a bogus call stating that the American player pushed the Russian player pining the goalie. While the narrator who is from West Germany sees an acceptable goal for the USA. There’s also an interesting concept about how in the west we re-innovate while in the east they build. The writing is a little hard to get into at first as it's written almost like a journal or a collection of newspaper clippings but once you get past that it flows rather well. Each chapter is set with the narrator on one side of the wall or the other (ie ch1 in the east ch2 west ch3 east ect). Overall an interesting little novel about how people can change in a short span of time and how people are shaped by where they grow up as well as how trying to isolate a population has its own troubles. ( )