WALL JUMPERS OF BERLIN
Peter Schneider’s superb novel, The Wall Jumper, reminds us that, even in difficult times - in this case a city gripped by the effects of the Berlin Wall - there’s plenty room for a little imagination, creativity and determination. This excerpt makes the point, albeit with a decent helping of irony...
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
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