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A LIFE WORTH LIVING  
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Obituary, Victor Grossman 11 March, 1928 – 17 December, 2025
December 20, 2025
The Left Berlin [[link removed]]

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_ Victor Grossman died on 17th December, 2025. He was 97, and for a
long time it felt like he would go on for ever. Phil Butland remembers
a comrade and friend. _

Victor Grossman (second right) at a meeting organised by the Linke
Berlin Internationals about the US elections., Photo: Phil Butland, CC
licensing.

 

I first met Victor in 2013, when we were setting up the Berlin Linke
Internationals, the forerunner of The Left Berlin. Victor was excited
by the idea of uniting International activists both inside and outside
die Linke, and introducing German activists to people who had recently
been involved in the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the
occupation of the squares in Spain.

He was particularly interested in developing new activists, attending
every meeting which he could, and always being available to talk about
his outstanding life, either as a public speaker in a large meeting,
or in an informal chat. Well into his 90s, I would still see him at
demos, where he would march as far as his ageing body would allow him.
He was always keen to talk, and we would regularly march together
until he felt unable to go any further and reluctantly went home.

One particular obsession of Victor’s was Sahra Wagenknecht. He
adored her for fighting against the party bureaucrats who wanted to
sacrifice the party’s opposition to NATO because they had eyes on a
coalition government with the SPD or Greens. At the same time, he was
deeply concerned about her racist populism. Many of the conversations
we had on demos started with him asking me why I thought Sahra had
made her latest “mistake.”

Between 2019 and 2023, theleftberlin.com published Victor’s Berlin
bulletin [[link removed]]—a
weekly account to international friends about political developments
in Germany.  We stopped doing this after someone created a website
for the Bulletin, as there was less need for us to provide what was
available elsewhere. But there was also a feeling that Victor was
losing his sharpness and starting to repeat himself. I still read the
bulletin avidly, though, even after they became less regular.

PRINCIPLED OPPOSITION

I knew of Victor long before I met him. We were both members of die
Linke in Berlin Mitte. We were in different branches, so our paths did
not cross regularly, but he would occasionally pop up at a regional
meeting making a pithy observation warning us not to trust the
leadership. He remained particularly suspicious of a new layer of
careerist party leaders, who he felt would just as easily have joined
the SPD or the Greens.

At the same time, he was faithfully loyal to the party itself. This
was, after all, the man who defected from the USA to the DDR at the
height of the Cold War. Victor remained convinced that 1989 was a step
backwards in German history. He could argue quite persuasively that
following the Second World War, only one half of Germany denazified,
as West Germany filled its government posts with former Nazis.

At the same time, he was never uncritical of the East German state or
of the party leadership; he did believe that the uprisings in East
Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 were organised by the CIA. By
chance he was on a spa treatment in Czechoslovakia in 1968 when
Russian tanks invaded to suppress Czech leader Alexander Dubček’s
reform package called “socialism with a human face.”

In his autobiography, Victor wrote: “I was still torn. ‘Socialism
with a human face’ was a great idea in itself; many of the
improvements, especially regarding the humane climate, were
desperately needed in East Germany. But behind this facade, I had seen
how the country was noticeably sliding to the right, and how left-wing
groups who dared to resist this trend were marginalized, even
threatened.”

This was the dilemma which Victor continually faced. His belief in the
Eastern Bloc was regularly contradicted by facts on the ground. Victor
was honest enough to recognise this, but in the absence of any obvious
alternative, he preferred the Eastern Bloc to rampant capitalism. Like
his hero Berthold Brecht, he insisted that the DDR was the least bad
option.

For this reason, Victor absolutely hated the film The Lives of Others,
not because it criticised the Stasi but because, he maintained, the
Stasi were a joke. Everyone knew who they were, and they didn’t
disrupt ordinary life. You may disagree  with his analysis, but it
was understandable from a man who was threatened with one year in a US
jail because he’d joined some anti-fascist organisations
prematurely.

He retained this critical loyalty for the rest of his life. He joined
the PDS, and then Die Linke, because where else could a socialist
organise? You get the feeling that he felt the same about Die Linke as
he did about Eastern Germany. He was fully aware of the Party’s
shortcomings, but what was the alternative?.

One subject on which Victor remained particularly intransigent was on
the issue of Palestine. As a Jewish socialist, Victor knew that his
liberation was bound closely to that of the Palestinians. At a time
when very few people on the German Left, and particularly die Linke,
were prepared to stand up for Palestine, you could always bank on
Victor to speak out [[link removed]],
sign an appeal, or support a demo for Palestinian rights.

AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE

Victor Grossman was born Stephen Wechsler in New York one year before
the World Economic Crisis of 1929. He often humbly boasted that he was
the only person ever to hold degrees from both Harvard and the Karl
Marx University. As a teenager, he became very active in many
Communist and Socialist organisations.

Then, in 1950, he was drafted for the Korean War and sent to train in
West Germany.  Before he was sent, he had to sign a statement that he
was not a member of a list of named subversive organisations. Although
he had indeed joined several of the groups on the list, Victor signed
the statement anyway.

One day in 1952, he was called to appear before a military court in
Nuremberg. Sensing it was to do with his false statement—which could
lead to 1 year in prison—Victor decided to defect. He swam across
the Danube and turned himself in to the bemused Soviet army which was
occupying that part of Austria. 

After 2 months detention, he moved to East Berlin where he started a
new life, first as a factory and railway worker, later as a journalist
and a loyal oppositionist. He befriended the actor Dean Reed—another
defector from the US—who made a series of East German cowboy films
told from the point of view of Native Americans.

Victor published his autobiography _Crossing the River_ in 2014.
Despite its English title, the book is in German, although in 2019 he
did publish a shorter, English, version—_A Socialist Defector: From
Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee_.

Despite his many talents, Victor was a modest man. I will miss his
perception, his energy, but above all his sense of humour. Victor was
a witty man and a born raconteur. We did not agree on everything
politically but he was a passionate internationalist who was prepared
to argue his case and usually ended up on the right side.

INGAR SOLTY FROM THE ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG ADDS

_I am not the only person to miss Victor’s presence. I asked Ingar
Solty from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung about his memories of Victor.
Ingar sent the following text:_

“During the late 1940s, early 1950s, with the victory of the Chinese
Revolution and the beginning of the Cold War, the example of Victor
Grossman shows that not only German socialist and communist survivors
of fascism and world war could consider East Germany as the better
German state insofar as all the demands of the social democrats and in
fact the majority in the West were realized only here:
de-nazification, land reform, and the socialization of industry. 

This is why communist artists like Peter Hacks as well as Wolf
Biermann moved from West to East. The example of Victor, however,
shows that international communists could also be convinced that the
GDR was a safe haven for them against the anti-communist witch-hunts
of the early 1950s, stretching from the House of Un-American
activities in the US to the Adenauer-Erlass in West Germany. 

Victor Grossman then was a key actor with regards to the proletarian
internationalism of real socialism. It was Grossman and the Canadian,
Perry Friedman, who played a key role with regards to the
interculturality connecting the American Folk Revival in the US with
the Burg Waldeck festivals in West Germany and the Oktoberklub and
hugely influential Singebewegung in the GDR. 

Across the Cold War divide, at the height of bloc confrontation right
after the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were socialists in East and West
returning to the folk tradition in order to sing against the threat of
nuclear warfare, for peace and social justice. Grossman’s radio
program in the GDR brought Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Peter Paul and
Mary, and Phil Ochs to an East German audience and even to East Berlin
itself. It also facilitated the particular internationalism which led
to the massive show of solidarity coming from GDR civil society when
Angela Davis was imprisoned. 

In this regard, the other America always had a place in a country
whose solidarity generally stood with the victims of US and Western
imperialism who sought to liberate themselves from it, stretching from
the revolutionaries in Cuba to the defenders of socialism in Chile and
the ANC in South Africa.”

Salud Victor. The world will be a worse place without you.

 

_Phil Butland is a socialist from Bradford, Northern England. He
founded the Berlin LINKE Internationals and is now active with The
Left Berlin and Sozialismus von Unten (SvU). Alongside his political
activities, Phil is the curator of the CinePhil Berliner Film Blog._

 

_The Left Berlin is a community of international progressives in
Berlin. We run an online journalism project hosting a range of
left-wing perspectives in English, as well as collaborating on
progressive campaigns and events in the city. The site is run by a
team of volunteer editors, writers and translators._

_We send out regular weekly newsletters with a digest of leftist
politics around the city. It’s a great way to keep an overview of
what’s happening and how you can stay active regardless of what your
cause is._

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