Paul Michael Lützeler Peter Schneider’s Never-Ending Reflections on the »Mauer«-Metaphor

The most famous of all of Peter Schneider’s quotes is a line in his book Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper). It reads: »Die Mauer im Kopf einzureißen wird länger dauern, als irgendein Abrißunternehmen für die sichtbare Mauer braucht«.1 The wall in our head, the wall in our imagination: that is a meta- phor for prejudices, for blindness to reality, for intellectual laziness. Peter Schneider’s aesthetic and ethical aim has always been to tear down the walls in our minds, as one can easily tell when one remembers his essays and nar- ratives. As a student activist in the 1960s, he wanted to tear down the wall that existed between students and professors, or rather students and the university administration; and with his first narrative work, Lenz (1973)2 he made us aware of the wall in our head regarding the difference between theory and practice, dogma and emotion, object and subject, presence and future. Schneider’s ›Berlin tetralogy‹3 anticipated the disappearance of the Berlin Wall – the sym- bol of the division between East and West Germany. He told stories about average (or not so average) individuals who tried to ignore or overcome the Berlin Wall. Two years after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, a young East German author, Christa Wolf, published a book with the title Der geteilte Himmel4 (Divided Heaven). That novel deals with the love relationship of two young people, Manfred and Rita, and with Manfred’s flight to West Germany. The

1 Peter Schneider, Der Mauerspringer. Erzählung, Darmstadt/Neuwied 1982, p. 117. 2 Lenz. Eine Erzählung, Berlin 1973. 3 Als ›Berlin-Tetralogie‹ werden gezählt: Peter Schneider, Der Mauerspringer. Erzählung, Darm- stadt und Neuwied 1982; Paarungen, Berlin 1992; Eduards Heimkehr. Roman, Berlin 1999; Berlin Now. The City After the Wall, Translated from German by Sophie Schlondorff, New York 2014. This latest of his books appeared first in English, and half a year later in German under the title: An der Schönheit kann’s nicht liegen. Berlin – Porträt einer ewig unfertigen Stadt, Köln 2015. Cf. see also: Michael Blumenthal, »Peter Schneider Takes Berlin’s Erratic Pulse«, The New York Times 25.06.2000; Paul Michael Lützeler, »›Postmetropolis‹: Peter Schneiders Ber- lin-Trilogie«, in: Gegenwartsliteratur 4 (2005), p. 91-110; Christine Weller, »Peter Schneiders Berlin-Trilogie: (Zwillings-)Paare und Trennungen, oder: Die amoklaufende Metapher«, in: Gerhard Fischer and David Roberts (Eds.), Schreiben nach der Wende. Ein Jahrzehnt deutsche Literatur 1989-1999, Tübingen 2001, pp. 291-300. 4 Christa Wolf, Der geteilte Himmel, München 1973.

© Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783846761939_007 66 Paul Michael Lützeler book reflects on the German past and discusses problems of East and West Germany in a complex manner. Obviously, the story about the divided country is told from a GDR point of view. The love story, which ends unhappily with the enforced separation of Manfred and Rita, touched the hearts of many read- ers, but this did not contribute to the overcoming of the wall in our minds. Two decades passed before a young West German author who was ten years Christa Wolf’s junior was able to write such a book: in 1982, Peter Schneider published Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper). Unlike Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven), Schneider’s story sets out to overcome the wall in our minds and hearts. The central character of the book Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper) is not a person but an artifact – namely, the Berlin Wall. This wall extended north and south of Berlin for close to a thousand miles all the way through Germany, and was known by the name of the German Wall or the German/ German border. Of course, for thousands of years of human history, walls have been erected between countries and regions: The Great Wall of China, the Roman Limes in Germania Superior, Hadrian’s Wall in England, or, nowadays, the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico all come to mind.5 But there was something quite distinctive about the Berlin Wall. While the border forti- fications of earlier times were built to protect the population against so-called ›barbarians‹, unwanted migrants, or attacking enemy armies, the Berlin Wall or German Wall had the opposite function: rather than keeping foreigners out, it was designed to prevent the country’s own population from running away. The propaganda of the East German government declared the purpose of the Wall to be ›Anti-Fascist Protection‹ (›Antifaschistischer Schutzwall‹6), but in reality it served as a means of confining the East German populace. Anti-Soviet movements in Central and Eastern Europe had, without ex- ception, been crushed by the Russians during the Cold War Period; think of the uprisings in 1953 in East Germany,7 in 1956 in Hungary,8 and in 1968 in

5 Cf. Astrid Nunn (Ed.), Mauern als Grenzen, Mainz 2009. 6 SED-Bezirksleitung (Ed.), Fünf Jahre Antifaschistischer Schutzwall: Rededispositionen, Berlin 1966; Manfred Weissbecker (Ed.), Rassismus, Faschismus, Antifaschismus, Köln 2000; Christian Jung, Geschichte der Verlierer: Historische Selbstreflexion von hochrangigen Mitgliedern der SED nach 1989, Heidelberg 2007. 7 Klaus Harpprecht, Der Aufstand. Vorgeschichte, Geschichte und Deutung des 17. Juni 1953, Stuttgart 1954; Ulrich Mählert (Ed.), Der 17. Juni 1953: Ein Aufstand für Einheit, Recht und Frei- heit, Bonn 2003. 8 György Litván, and János M. Bak (Eds.), Die Ungarische Revolution 1956. Reform – Aufstand – Vergeltung, Wien 1994; György Dalos und Erich Lessing, 1956. Der Aufstand in Ungarn, München 2006; Paul Lendvai, Der Ungarnaufstand 1956 – Eine Revolution und ihre Folgen, München 2006.