My beer with Victor Grossman: US Army defector turned (East) German Journalist speaks in Milwaukee

On Fathers Day (June 15th) at the co-operative (i.e. drinker-owned) bar Riverwest Public House in a diverse Milwaukee neighborhood, I met Victor Grossman.  Born Stephen Wechsler to fervently Communist parents in New York, Grossman is an 86-year-old Jewish freelance journalist & a longtime resident of Berlin.  As a United States Army soldier stationed in Bavaria in 1952, Wechsler defected to the Soviet side after swimming across the Danube River to Austria. 

His rather grandiose pseudonym (which means "victor big-man"),  he said, was suggested to him by his Communist handlers.  Grossman, a reluctant draftee, said that he defected due to his (well-founded) fear of prosecution by the US military for having lied on his loyalty affidavit, a document asserting that he had never been a Communist.  A unique double alumnus of both Harvard University & Karl-Marx-Universität (Leipzig, Germany), Grossman proved his stamina as a lecturer by speaking for over two hours.  The audience of about three dozen, most of whom were - judging by the questions asked - old-school lefties, ate up the bland goulash of facts & commentary that Grossman was serving with nostalgic relish.  

First, some background information:  the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) was created by the Soviet Union during Stalin’s post-war re-organization of rump eastern Germany, mainly in order to counter the United States of America’s democratic-capitalist creation, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD), aka the Federal Republic of (West) Germany.  With the help of the Marshall Plan (which Grossman described as a “plot” to undermine Soviet influence in post-war Europe), West Germany began a steep rise to relative wealth & comfort for the majority of its citizens - many of whom were fleeing the DDR by the late 1950s.  

By contrast, the DDR’s economy struggled to provide most consumer goods, having received no corresponding financial assistance from its war-depleted Communist “brothers” in Moscow.  Among Grossman’s many interesting state jobs was working as chief archivist at the Paul Robeson Archive in East Berlin.  In 1968 he became a full-time freelancer & author - publishing Rebel Girls, his populist-feminist American history in German, and Crossing the River, a memoir in English, among other books.  After the DDR regime was toppled by a peaceful popular uprising in the fall of 1989, writing assignments became more infrequent for this man with a suddenly unfashionable résumé .  

The nominally socialist DDR was far from the egalitarian workers’ utopia its manipulative leaders constantly claimed to be approaching.  The DDR’s Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, or Socialist Unity Party) leadership had the disadvantage of being adjacent to the bigger, wealthier & more glamorous West Germany.  Nevertheless, they built an economy so successful that East Germany’s standard of living was comparable to Great Britain’s by the mid-1970s.

“I saw a country with everything against it,” Grossman said of the DDR in the 1950s, “but they achieved alot.”  He cited the fact that the East German government provided free medical care, job security & a state-paid university education for qualified students of any background - so long as they didn’t rock the boat by questioning authority too loudly or persistently.  Grossman himself apparently didn’t question much about his adopted homeland’s lousy human-rights record.  

For example, he said that the forced expatriation of East German poet-singer Wolf Biermann in 1976 was a set-up by Biermann & some fellow dissidents, conspiring with their West German sympathizers, who wanted to embarrass the DDR.  No doubt he also accepted the DDR’s official justification of the Berlin Wall as “an anti-fascist protection wall.”   In fact, it was erected in August 1961 in order to deter DDR citizens from fleeing to the West.

Grossman did at least complain about the intellectually inert ideological clichés of Communist media discourse.  No wonder most East Germans tuned in to Western media - including US-sponsored radio & West German television - instead of enduring the DDR's dull & meager media offerings.

Interjecting opinions on current events in Europe& the United States, Grossman discussed his life as a journalist in East Berlin.  He hosted an American folk-music program on Radio Berlin International, an organ of official state propaganda, during the height of the Cold War (the early 1960s).  The glory years of the DDR, better known to Americans as Communist East Germany (1949-89), ended in the late 1970s.   By then the DDR government was “selling” political dissidents to West Germany in exchange for the coveted hard-currency Deutschmark.  

Based on the evidence gleaned from his long-winded talk in Milwaukee, Grossman not only drank the spiritually toxic kool-aid of Communist propaganda as a red-diaper baby of the Great Depression, he helped mix & serve it as a prominent journalist & media personality in the DDR.  He perpetuates much of the DDR’s self-justifying malarkey to this day, now as an active member of Die Linke (aka die Linkspartei, or Left Party), the fourth largest political party in re-unified Germany, combining former members of the mercifully defunct SED with some breakaway social democrats. 

For all his faults, Grossman still seems like a mensch, a decent guy to talk with over a beer.  He said that he injected a surprising sense of humor into his DDR reportage & commentary.  Four decades spent living under the deadly serious East German regime apparently did little to stunt his wit.  He credited his late wife Renate, an East Berliner, as the person who “made the difference in my life.”

From a journalist specializing in topics related to the USA, Grossman has gone on to write & speak with authority on such topics as European migrants & the neo-fascist backlash, NATO military intervention as well as social & economic justice movements.  

Best of all for me, he knows Bettina Wegner, my favorite DDR singer-songwriter, and he met Angela Davis in her glory days.  A radical American professor & activist, Davis became a popular sensation in the ’70s Communist bloc following her acquittal by an all-white California jury on kidnapping & murder conspiracy charges.  She was awarded the prestigious Lenin Prize, among other honors in the USSR & the DDR.

In the May 15th issue of his detailed blog-like Berlin Bulletin, Grossman quotes the trade-union leader & co-president of Die Linke, Berndt Riexinger:  “To be a leftist means to squarely face the people, life and the future.”  If only it were that simple, Herr Grossman.  It certainly wasn’t true of the DDR’s bullying leaders - until it was too late to reform their corrupt, inhumane system.  The DDR died a sudden & ignominious death, precisely the end it deserved.

NOTE:  The English-language Berlin Bulletin is available for free via email by writing Grossman at:  wechsler_grossman@yahoo.de.  [© 2014 by J.C. Mrazek]