Peter Schneider

A resident of West Berlin from around the time that East Germany erected the Wall in 1961, Peter Schneider wrote that on the day in 1989 that it came down he was at Dartmouth College “writing a reply to a question posed to me by members of the German department: ‘What would happen if the Berlin Wall came down?’ The news reached me at 2 p.m., giving me just enough time to change all my verbs from the conditional to the past tense.” Schneider is the author of the novels The Wall Jumper and Eduard’s Homecoming.