Mental Conditioning

A recurring theme in The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider is how the once-unified German people have, after World War II, been conditioned to suspect and stereotype one another. The anonymous Narrator admits that he is not a neutral observer. He cannot understand why Easterners would stay where they are if the opportunity to come West appears. Several such cases occur as the DDR allows dissidents to be ransomed by the BRD for large sums of money.

The Wall has just gone up when the Narrator moves to Berlin. After the initial shock, West Germans see it as both a symbol of a detested social order and as a mirror showing them to be the fairest of all. The Narrator's forays into East Berlin show the two half-cities physically alike but the people subconsciously obeying fundamentally different laws in how they talk and behave—after a...