The Wall Jumper

The Wall Jumper is a complicated story about a West Berliner's trip to the East to visit some old friends. The book takes place during the period of the Berlin Wall. Throughout the book, short stories are told about people's attempts to jump the wall from one side to the other. However, most of these stories seem to be false and are in fact just myths as the author begins to explain how unlikely it was to just jump the wall back and forth. At the Checkpoint Charlie Museum I read about a boy who attempted to climb the wall and was shot in the middle of "no man's land" and was dragged back to the side he came from. In real life very few people made it to the other side without a Visa. In one of the earlier stories, we learn about a man, Kabe, who jumped the wall fifteen times because he was bored with nothing to do. Doctors said that it was just a "pathological desire to overcome the wall", and this is what the book was basically about. The people of Berlin had a desire to see what life was like on the other side; it was curiosity. During my stay here in Berlin, I have began to notice that the separation that the wall once maintained still feels in existence today. West Berlin is very lively and full of capitalism as it once was, but the East on the other hand was very quiet and had an "old" fell to it. However, the people seem happy about the fact that they can move freely between the two sides now. Even though the fragmentation of the stories made it difficult to read, the book gave me a better understanding of the way Berlin is today.