A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman

      1—Wrong 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 welcome—and 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 didn’t 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 Curtain—but also in the wrong direction. I certainly did not expect any confetti welcome. Nor did I get any.

      That cold water immersion obviously didn’t kill me. But didn’t it at least cure me? And didn’t 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 racism—and believing in socialism—in 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 up—and discovered my perjury. Ordered to report to a military judge, I read the threatened punishment for my crime—up 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.

      Thus, after twenty-four years growing up in New York and New Jersey, after nine schools, public and private (two years each at posh Dalton and Fieldston Schools), a B.A. at Harvard, unskilled factory work in Buffalo, and a long hitchhike trip from one U.S. coast to the other and back, I now became an inside witness to the growth, development, and demise of the GDR and of what has happened since. As a worker again and once more as a student, when I became the one and only person in the world with a diploma from both Harvard and the Karl Marx University of Leipzig (and since the latter has dropped the name, I will undoubtedly retain this distinction) I became finally a freelance journalist and lecturer and got to visit nearly every town and city and many a village. I saw, heard, and took part in almost every phase of GDR life, while my base and main vantage point was my apartment near downtown East Berlin, less than a mile from its famous, or infamous, Wall.

      I think I can hear two reactions: one sympathetic: “My God, you poor guy! How in blazes did you survive such a long ordeal in that hellhole?”

      Or unsympathetic: “Thirty-eight years locked up in there? Serves you damned right for your treacherous act!”

      To the second reaction I would mildly absolve myself by noting that the man who framed the law that frightened me from the start, Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, turned out to be the rottenest, most vicious anti-Semite in Washington, DC. That paper, which my fear made me sign when I was drafted, thus totally altering my life, was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And I can add that in 1994 the U.S. Army mercifully decided to discharge me, with no punishment at all, after forty-two years. But to both reactions I would reply that life in general, politics in particular, and most specifically the GDR story, are just not that simple.

      My first twenty-four years were spent in the world’s leading land of free enterprise. By strange circumstance, in 1952, I landed in a country with a “planned economy,” variously referred to as communist, “real socialist,” “command economy,” or some far saltier appellations. In 1990, after thirty-eight years, this time with no swimming involved, I was again back in a free market system.

      Even at my ripe old age, I make no claim to be wiser or more correct than anyone else. But we live in a time when many good people are hunting for answers to severe problems facing our world, often fearlessly exploring a wide range of possible solutions. My life journey taught me lessons and led to conclusions that might be of interest, even value. I offer no ready-to-bake recipes but only some ideas, if only because, more than most Americans, I had an unusual opportunity to make comparisons.

      “What? Opportunity? Comparisons?” some voices will retort. “Are you stupid? Or simply stubborn? Need anyone even consider contradictions between good and evil, justice and injustice, freedom and totalitarian dictatorship? Don’t you know the words of that great freedom-fighter Winston Churchill: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others’? Can there really be any doubts about that corpse of a misbegotten regime daring to