[I defected to the GDR 70 years ago, finding neither Utopia nor
the hunger, poverty and misery American media might have led me to
expect. I hope that new generations learn from the GDR, and not only
from its blunders, nasty habits and limitations.]
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MY SEVENTY YEARS AND THE DEPARTED GDR  
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Victor Grossman
August 24, 2022
xxxxxx
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_ I defected to the GDR 70 years ago, finding neither Utopia nor the
hunger, poverty and misery American media might have led me to expect.
I hope that new generations learn from the GDR, and not only from its
blunders, nasty habits and limitations. _

,

 

It’s a momentous day! Not for the world—for which it’s nothing
special. But for me! Just seventy years ago, in nervous panic, I took
off my U.S. Army jacket, shoes and sleeve insignia and stepped into
the swift Danube River which, at Linz in still-occupied Austria,
divided the USA Zone from the USSR Zone. Although very wet at this
short sector, it was part of the long Iron Curtain. And I was swimming
across it in what most Americans would consider a very wrong
direction!

It was not really my free choice! In 1950 the McCarran Act ruled that
all members of a long list of “Communist Front” organizations must
immediately register as foreign agents. I had been in a dozen;
American Youth for Democracy, the Anti-Fascist Spanish Refugee
Committee, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (I gave them a dollar in
solidarity), the Sam Adams School, the American Labor Party, Young
Progressives and – most heinous of all, the Communist Party. The
maximum penalty for not registering could be $10,000 and – PER DAY!
- 5 years in prison!! Neither I nor anyone else bowed to this
monstrosity !

But in January 1951, during the Korean War, I was drafted – and
required to sign that I was never in any of those on that long, long
list. Should I risk years in prison by admitting my infamy? Or sign
and, by staying mum, hope to survive two army years with no one
checking up? I signed.

However, they did check up! Decades later, thanks to the FOIA, 1100
pages (! ) of FBI files about  me (at 10c/page) revealed that J.
Edgar Hoover’s boys had watched me closely, as a leftist Harvard
student (the names of seven informants were redacted) and as a worker
in Buffalo, where I had hoped to help in saving the fighting 1930s
character of the CIO unions.  

In August 1952 a Pentagon letter listed seven of my memberships and
ordered me to “report on Monday to HQ”. The threatened penalty for
my perjury: up to 5 years, perhaps in Leavenworth. By then dozens of
Communists had been indicted; many were sent to prison. I had luckily
been sent not to Korea but to Bavaria, next to Austria. With no-one to
advise me, I chose the Danube.

Across the river, in a surprisingly quiet landscape, in no way like an
Iron Curtain, the Soviets kept me two weeks in a barred but polite
lock-up, then sent me north to the German Democratic Republic, East
Germany. I was lucky again; the GDR was the most successful, most
untroubled of all in the “East Bloc.” For the next 38 years, as an
American, raised with a broad, varied education (six public schools,
Bronx Science, Dalton, Fieldston, Harvard), I watched, with
left-leaning but not dogmatically limited eyes, the rise, then fall of
this western outpost of socialism (or Communism, “state
socialism”, “totalitarianism,” or whatever).

I found neither Utopia nor, back then or ever, the hunger, poverty and
general misery the American media might have led me to expect. Even in
the crucial, difficult year 1952-1953, less than eight years after the
war, while shop offerings were limited, lacking variety, style, and
often just that very item you were looking for, they were stocked well
enough with the basics. East Germany was much smaller and in terms of
industry and natural resources far poorer than West Germany. It had
borne over 90% of the war reparations burden; the heavily-destroyed
USSR did not drop these until 1953. The GDR lacked the huge
investment possibilities of war criminal monopolies like Krupp,
Siemens, Bayer or BASF, whose factories it nationalized, as well as
the politically-aimed assistance of the Marshall Plan. Large numbers
of its scientific, management and academic staffs, mostly pro-Nazi,
had fled from the occupying Red Army and the leftist, mostly Communist
administrators who came with it – and got jobs with their former
bosses who were soon prospering again along the Rhine and Ruhr. This
seriously weakened the economic revival, but I felt happy that the war
criminals were gone.

As an ardent (and Jewish) anti-fascist, I rejoiced to find that the
entire atmosphere was anti-Nazi! Unlike West Germany, the schools,
universities, courts, police departments, all were cleansed of the
swastika crowd, even when at first this meant new, barely-trained
replacements, like my father-in-law, a pro-union carpenter, as village
mayor or my two brothers-in-law as teachers. My wife trembled when she
was reminded of her brutal teachers before 1945. Then, in the altered
East German schools, corporal punishment was immediately forbidden.

Of course there were countless problems in a country ruled by Hitler &
Co. for twelve years, where cynicism was widespread and Stalin’s
cultural views and anti-Semitism exerted undue  influence until his
death in 1953. Luckily, the aged Communist leader Wilhelm Pieck was
able to shield the GDR to a large degree in this regard. And from the
start anti-Nazi leftists, often returned Jewish exiles, became leaders
in the entire cultural scene; theater, music, opera, literature,
journalism and film, where true masterpieces were created, often
against fascism, but boycotted and hence unknown in West Germany and
the USA. In the all-powerful Politburo of the ruling party Hermann
Axen had barely survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald (his brother and
parents did not). Albert Norden had escaped to the USA; the Nazis
killed his father, a rabbi, in Theresienstadt. In the GDR, except for
3 or 4 mild word-clichés, I met no anti-Semitism in all those 38
years. Those still infected with fascist ideology were careful, except
with family or buddies, to keep their mouths shut. Which was OK with
me!

Step by step our living standard - of my very dear wife, who saved me
from homesickness, our two sons, and myself, kept improving, like that
of nearly everyone in the GDR, as it pulled itself up by its own thin
bootstraps. Impressing me most as an American: no layoffs, no
unemployment; there were jobs for everyone. Rents averaged less than
10% of most incomes; evictions were forbidden by law. In the early
years large apartments were divided up when needed; no-one slept in
the streets or went begging. Food pantries were unneeded, even the
word was unknown. So was student debt. All education was free and
monthly stipends covered basic costs, making all jobbing while at
college unnecessary.

I participated fully in the generally very normal life. First as a
factory worker, an apprentice lathe operator, then a student, editor,
director of a new Paul/Eslanda Robeson archive, finally as a free
lance journalist, lecturer and author. I was not treated as a
privileged “American,” as some assume, but my last three
occupations meant that - in my series of four little two-stroke
Trabant cars I really “got around”- to nearly all areas, with all
age levels, in all possible milieus.

A monthly medical tax on wages or fees (max. 10%) covered everything:
in my case, nine (free) hospital weeks with hepatitis plus four weeks
at a health spa to recuperate and four more a year later in Karlsbad.
My wife had three rheumatism cures, four weeks each, in the Polish and
Harz mountains. All costs were covered and we also got 90% of our
salaries. Prescribed drugs were fully covered, also dental care,
glasses, hearing aids; I had no need of my wallet or checkbook to pay
for my daily insulin shots or my ten-year active pace-maker. Nor for
my wife’s two maternal leaves (six months paid, the rest, if wanted,
with guaranteed job ). No charge for full child care, participation in
sports, summer camps, not for contraception aid nor for free abortions
after a new law was passed in 1982. So many fears were gone – so
many were totally unknown!

This may really seem almost Utopian. Then why did some risk their
lives to leave? Why was a wall built to keep them in? Why did they
vote to join West Germany – and ditch the GDR? Why did it fail?

There were all too many reasons. East Germany was occupied by a
country it had been taught to hate, whose soldiers had fought it
hardest, were often violent in the first weeks, and were poorer and
more difficult to love than prosperous, hence generous, gum-chewing
GI’s, who came from a wealthy, undamaged homeland. Many but
certainly not all East Germans appreciated the Soviets’ major role
in defeating the Nazis and their pressure and guidance in confiscating
major industry and breaking the power of those worst enemies of the
world and the  Germans, the Krupps, Siemens and IG Farbens, and the
ousting of giant Prussian landowners, the Junkers, who so often
officered Germany into mass bloodshed and disaster.

The Russians offered lots of good culture, such as Tolstoy and
Dostoevski, top quality dancing, to “Peter and the Wolf” and
“The Cranes Are Flying”. But these could rarely compete in mass
popularity with the Beatles and Stones, Elvin Presley and
suspense-laden Hollywood B-films.

Such enticements, which included some of high quality, based on an
unusual American mix of Anglo-Scot, Irish, Jewish, Italian and
especially Black cultures, were cleverly misused to increase political
and economic influence and power in the world, especially in the East
Bloc. They were paired, above all in Germany, with clever propaganda
adapted from both Goebbels and that master peddler-publicist of
anything from toothpaste to capitalism, Edward L. Bernays. They
threaten the great old cultures of France, Italy, India, even China.
While GDR leaders, in full power, did aim at noble goals, how could
such elderly men, hardened by years of life-and-death struggle against
Nazi murderers but usually trained with Stalinist clichés, grow
flexible enough to find rapport in printed or spoken word with the
average, changeable citizen? There were indeed successes – but too
few and far between.

In the 1980s difficulties increased, upward trends slowed and slipped
downward. The USSR, with its own problems, offered no assistance. Such
problems were difficult but, in a changing world, hardly rare or
insurmountable - except that here every problem was utilized in the
unceasing attempts to retake East Germany, use its skilled but
exploitable working class and move eastwards from there. The State
Security or “Stasi,” created to oppose such doings, was crude
enough to make the situation worse.  

And yet the GDR had probably come closer than any country in the world
to achieving that legendary goal of abolishing poverty, while sharply
decreasing the frightful, growing rich-poor gap based on an obscene
profit system. But it could not afford the immense assortment of goods
– foods, apparel,  appliances, electronics, vehicles and travel
which the West offered, above all the USA and West Germany. The GDR
citizenry took all its amazing social advantages for granted and
dreamt of scarce bananas and unavailable VWs, of Golden Arch and
Golden Gate – without realizing that these are largely available and
affordable due to the poverty of children in West Africa or Brazil, of
exploited pickers in Andalusian or Californian fields and orchards.
Some are just now beginning to realize that those billionaire giants,
after cheating so many people of color, wrecking world climate and
wielding ever deadlier weapons of annihilation, may soon feel impelled
to squeeze and break the comfortable middle classes in their own
countries. The start is already felt by many families.

I look back at my seventy years as an ex-pat, and still consider
myself a patriotic American – never for the USA of Morgan or
Rockefeller but for that of John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Eugene Debs
and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, DuBois, Robeson, Malcolm and Martin.

I also love and admire great Germans: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
Karl Liebknecht, the great Polish-German Rosa Luxemburg - or great
writers: Lessing, Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht.
And I respect and empathize with people from all lands, my brothers
and sisters, from Guam to Guatemala - and Gaza.

I can only hope that new generations learn from the GDR, and not only
from its blunders, nasty habits and limitations, born of its history
and all too realistic fears of being overthrown.

It was finally overthrown and stands no longer as a barrier to renewed
billionaire expansion - economic, political and military - to the
south and east. It is still being belittled or maligned – largely
out of fear that it has not yet been sufficiently erased and
forgotten. Despite my sometime feelings in those years of despair,
even anger at mistaken paths or missed opportunities, I still look
back with a mixture of nostalgia, regret and also pride at its many
hard-won achievements, in culture, in living together, in partly
overcoming the cult of greed and rivalry, in unflinching GDR support
for the Mandelas, the Allendes and Ho Chi Minhs, for Angela Davis, too
- and not, like its ultimately stronger and victorious opponents in
Bonn, for the Pinochets, Francos, racists and apartheid tyrants. I
recall our achievements in avoiding war and striving for lives without
fear or hatred. By and large they were good years. I am glad I lived
through them.

_Victor Grossman, born in NYC, fled McCarthy-era menaces as a young
draftee, landed in East Germany where he observed the rise and fall of
its German Democratic Republic (GDR). He has described his own life in
his autobiography Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left,
the Cold War, and Life in East Germany
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Massachusetts Press, 2003), and analyzed the GDR and questions of
capitalism and socialism in Germany and the USA, with his provocative
conclusions, along with humor, irony and occasional sarcasm in all
directions, in A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee
[[link removed]] (New York:
Monthly Review Press). His address is wechsler_grossman [at] yahoo.de
(also for a free sub to the Berlin Bulletins sent out by MR Online)._

* GDR
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* West Germany
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* socialism
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* McCarthyism
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