The Wall

“I’m not writing for the sheer joy of writing; so many things have happened to me that I must write if I am not to lose my reason. There’s no one here to think and care for me. I’m quite alone, and I must try to survive the long, dark winter months. I don’t expect these notebooks will ever be found. At the moment I don’t even know whether I hope they will be.”

As the protagonist introduces her reasons for writing, she references The Weight of Survival in her isolated world. The first challenge is of a physical nature, as she must make it through the dangerous conditions of the weather. The other aspect of her survival is finding the emotional motivation to persist. She has no one with her to care for her, and she even debates if she wants someone to know what happened to her.

“At the time everyone was talking about nuclear wars and their consequences, and this led Hugo to keep a little store of food and other important things in his hunting lodge.”

The disaster that ends the world in The Wall is one that catches the world off-guard, as everyone outside the wall is frozen in the middle of their everyday routine. This reference to the preoccupation some characters have for nuclear war connects the catastrophe of the wall with Cold War fears. Haushofer wrote this novel at the height of the Cold War, and the fear that mutually assured destruction could happen at any time is replicated in the disaster of the novel.

“Baffled, and I stretched out my hand and touched something smooth and cool: a smooth, cool resistance where there could be nothing but air. I tentatively tried again, and once more my hand rested on something like a windowpane.”

This is one of the only descriptions of the wall that separates the protagonist from the rest of the world. It is essentially an invisible wall that allows her to see outside unobstructed, almost as if the wall were made of air.