German writer Peter Schneider, "whose novels like Lenz and The Wall Jumper charted his country's tortuous course through the late 20th century, from the social tumult of the 1960s through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the uneven reunification of West and East," died March 3, the New York Times reported. He was 85.
Early in his career, Schneider wrote speeches for future German Chancellor Willy Brandt before drifting into revolutionary Marxism and Maoism, becoming a leader of the 1968 student protest movement, the Times noted. "Though he never disavowed his left-wing beliefs, he soured on the violent radicalism of the 1968 movement, a disillusionment that he documented in his first novel, Lenz, which appeared in 1973 and immediately cemented his reputation as a writer."
His most successful novel, The Wall Jumper (1982), established his international literary reputation. It contained what became Schneider's most famous sentence: "It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see."
He was also interested "in the way that Germany's sense of guilt over the crimes of the Nazi era percolated and transmogrified through the generations. Like other German intellectuals, he struggled with the tension between his country's seemingly endless moral debt and the need to somehow, someday move on," the Times wrote.
In a 1987 Harper's magazine essay, Schneider examined how the generations that came after World War II had mishandled their country's shameful legacy: "We will truly have the right to talk freely about Israeli politics only when we have admitted our very real historical inhibitions. For the moment, one suspects that the sins of the fathers are passed on both to the sons and the grandsons, and will continue to be until the sins have been acknowledged."
Schneider's left-wing activism brought him into contact with many young Germans who later took the movement in a violent and criminal direction, and he grew disenchanted with the extreme left.
"The most important achievement of the 1968 movement in Germany remains its mass, and perhaps permanent, break with the culture of obedience," Schneider wrote in his memoir, Rebellion and Delusion (2008), adding that "its leaders ultimately succumbed to a fundamentally anti-democratic doctrine and turned a blind eye to the crimes of their revolutionary role models in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia and China."
In the 21st century, Schneider remained a harsh critic of what he considered the botched reunification of East and West Germany. "Let's not kid ourselves: Reunification has gone wrong," he said in a 2025 interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau. "The worst part is that the AfD emerged from it, and the other parties have no idea how to deal with this outcome."