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Victor Grossman - A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee

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Victor Grossman A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee
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The circumstances that impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Europe, to flee a military prison sentence were the icy pressures of the McCarthy Era. Grossmana.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard and, briefly, as a factory workerleft his barracks in Bavaria one August day in 1952, and, in a panic, swam across the Danube River from the Austrian U.S. Zone to the Soviet Zone. Fatei.e., the Sovietslanded him in East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic. There he remained, observer and participant, husband and father, as he watched the rise and successes, the travails, and the eventual demise of the GDR socialist experiment. A Socialist Defector is the story, told in rare, personal detail, of an activist and writer who grew up in the U.S. free-market economy; spent thirty-eight years in the GDRs nationally owned, centrally administered economy; and continues to survive, given whatever the market can bear, in todays united Germany.Having been a freelance journalist and traveling lecturerand the only person in the world to hold diplomas from both Harvard and the Karl Marx UniversityGrossman is able to offer insightful, often ironic, reflections and reminiscences, comparing the good and bad sides of life in all three of the societies he has known. His account focuses especially on the socialism he saw and livedthe GDRs goals and achievements, its repressive measures and stupiditieswhich, he argues, offers lessons now in our search for solutions to the grave problems facing our world. This is a fascinating and unique historical narrative; political analysis told with jokes, personal anecdotes, and without bombast.

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A SOCIALIST DEFECTOR A SOCIALIST DEFECTOR From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee - photo 1

A SOCIALIST DEFECTOR

A SOCIALIST DEFECTOR

From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee

by Victor Grossman (Stephen Wechsler)

Picture 2

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

New York

Copyright 2019 by Victor Grossman

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Grossman, Victor, 1928 author.

Title: A socialist defector : from Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee / by Victor Grossman (Stephen Wechsler).

Description: New York : Monthly Review Press, [2019] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018058321 (print) | LCCN 2018058697 (ebook) | ISBN 9781583677407 (trade) | ISBN 9781583677414 (institutional) | ISBN 9781583677384 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781583677391 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Grossman, Victor, 1928 | DefectorsGermany (East)Biography. | DefectorsUnited StatesBiography. | JournalistsGermany (East)Biography. | AmericansGermany (East)Biography. | Harvard UniversityAlumni and alumnaeBiography. | CommunistsUnited StatesBiography. | Germany (East)Description and travel. | Cold War.

Classification: LCC DD287.7.G75 (ebook) | LCC DD287.7.G75 A3 2019 (print) | DDC 943/.4087092 [B] dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058321

Typeset in Bulmer Monotype and Bliss

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK

monthlyreview.org

5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

1Wrong Way?

I was ten years old in the summer of 1938 when a jolly, somewhat nutty airplane mechanic named Corrigan, instead of flying back from New York to California in his air jalopy as officially authorized, flew it solo, secretly and illegally, across the Atlantic to Ireland. On his return he got a hilarious confetti welcomeand the term wrong-way Corrigan went into the language of the day.

Fourteen years later I did something maybe even nuttier. The water barrier I crossed was far narrower, about 400 or 500 yards across the Danube River. But I didnt fly, I fled, and not in a plane but swimming. At that time the river divided the U.S. Zone from the USSR Zone in Austria, so I was piercing the Iron Curtainbut also in the wrong direction. I certainly did not expect any confetti welcome. Nor did I get any.

That cold water immersion obviously didnt kill me. But didnt it at least cure me? And didnt it ruin my life, making me a traitor to everything decent in the world, starting with the United States? What in the name of God or the devil made me commit such an amazing blunder? How soon did I begin to regret it? This book will try to answer those questions, while raising many new ones, for me and possibly some readers as well.

My immediate motivation was clear. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 in the icy days later known as the McCarthy era, and in great fear of the new McCarran Act with its threat of unlimited years in prison as a foreign agent (or in concentration camps authorized by the same law), I signed the paper required of all Korean War draftees that I had never been a member of the 120 listed organizations, many long gone, all taboo and nearly all leftist. I had indeed been in about a dozen, not only the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Appeal (for Spanish Civil War victims) and the Southern Negro Youth Congress (out of sympathy and support) but also, as a student opposed to atom bombs, anti-union laws, and racismand believing in socialismin the most ostracized of them all, the Communist Party. I was not a card-carrying member only because the Party no longer gave out membership cards.

My hope was that if I kept my nose clean and my mouth shut then the two years of army service might come and go without a check on my past delinquency. At first, I was very lucky, I was sent not to Korea but to Germany. Then luck turned sharply against me: they did check upand discovered my perjury. Ordered to report to a military judge, I read the threatened punishment for my crimeup to $10,000 and five years in prison. Five years behind bars, in Leavenworth? With no one to consult or advise me I simply panicked. The threat of prison is what made me wade in and swim across the swift but not at all blue Danube.

What has that got to do with this book? Everything. Upon arrival, the Soviet authorities, without consulting my possible preferences, held me briefly in confinement and then released me into a town of East Germany, the still very young German Democratic Republic, or GDR.

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