The Wall Jumper in Today's Society

In the book The Wall Jumper the day to day struggles of an unnamed character living in Cold War torn Berlin, Germany are given in firsthand accounts in the form of a diary. One could subject that the governments between Nazi Germany, Wall Torn Germany, and Today’s Germany are different, however, I say nein! You can still see the governmental control over history between the three especially in Berlin today, given the fact that no mass organized genocide is occurring today or has occurred since World War II.

Real quickly for recap, when the Nazis took power during the 1930s they also took siege to press in an effort to control how people perceived history by making everything have to be approved by the government. With this change a new wave of publishing which included anti-Semitism and propaganda. Propaganda which showed the Germans as a powerful race and with the ability to have a powerful empire. Not only did Germans control the press, they controlled political oppositions by sending all opponents to concentration camps.

In the Wall Jumper both sides, Soviet East, and “democratic” West should have been allied with the common traits of controlling history. For example the news broadcast that was being transmitted claimed that both had false information and the opposing sides pointed at each other for who were wrong in the Afghan Invasion via the Soviets. The East kept people from leaving, and enforced strict time limits on visitors, for example the narrator’s girlfriend who visited her family, had to leave by 12. Maybe to keep her from seeing too much? In the east a protestor would be arrested for even beginning to spray paint anti-communist statements or even writing a letter to the government as a complaint according to the book. The West didn’t recognize the East, so the East never existed to the Federal Republic of Germany. So the questions relies on how different was it for the Nazi to the Cold War era of Berlin. A war?

Today, the Nazi regime is being criticized by Germans as never really being good for Germany, however, millions of Germans served in the war the Nazi Army, and at one point in time it was widely accepted by the Germans. Also, when you try to search for YouTube videos, half are blocked by the country, especially when it involves WWII or Hitler jokes, yet Germany is ready to user in a new wave of unification.

Germany may have different flags along with different struggles, but it seems that the people in control have always been united in their approach to trying to “write” history.