A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
were certainly differences from the two factories I had worked in in Buffalo. There we had to bring our own lunch or run to a diner we called the “Greasy Spoon.” In the factory in Bautzen there was both a breakfast room for the mid-morning break, called “second breakfast,” with as much free ersatz coffee as you wanted; the canteen, run by the union, served the not fancy but quite adequate hot lunch, which always included potatoes with meat or fish and vegetables.
Unlike at the Buffalo factory, in the Bautzen factory there was visible propagandizing, with slogans urging socialism and improved labor effectivity, always in white letters on red cloth, but few paid any attention to them (except me, at first). In general, there and in many factories I visited in later years, I found a rather relaxed atmosphere, perhaps in part because, with every hand needed, no one feared losing their job. In fact, whenever the workload permitted, it was possible to visit a doctor, a dentist, a hairdresser, and even a little cooperative grocery, where now and again some goods were on sale that were not easy to find, if at all, in shops outside the factory. That meant that if the factory grocery offered imported lemons or raisins or fresh, early tomatoes, strawberries, or cherries, a considerable line quickly formed. Work could wait! And that explained what had at first puzzled me: why people came to work not with a lunchbox but with a worn but capacious briefcase.
I think everyone was automatically in the union, but I can hardly recall the union meetings—perhaps my language handicap induced me to skip them. I think everyone, or almost everyone, also felt obliged to pay a few pfennigs in dues as a member of the German-Soviet Friendship Society—even me. I had been moved when the victory of Stalingrad over the Nazi Wehrmacht ten years earlier was marked by a special ceremony in the center of town—in Germany!—but now I think that many of my fellow workers saw the occasion largely as a chance to get home a little earlier than usual with no loss of pay.
A memory note: A workmate, pointing to a big furnace, said, “When Friedrich Flick owned this plant during the war that’s where they threw corpses of foreign workers or prisoners of war. Too many hours, too heavy work and too little to eat.”
A very different but also moving note for me: Seeing a train pull into the station, still using an old steam locomotive, and reading, painted on it in big white letters, “Free the Rosenbergs!”—the Jewish couple facing death in Sing-Sing prison.
My factory job lasted only five months. At that time, before my second winter, I had the greatest luck. I found and fell for my Renate. Coming from a village too far to commute daily, she also had a rented room, nicer than mine. And it was, like her, warm and cozy in the evening.
I SOON DISCOVERED customs that were neither good nor bad, just unusual, even comical. Like the constant handshaking at any and every occasion, such as with every single member of my work team each morning, then all over again at quitting time. Or little girls’ curtseys and boys’ forelock-tossing bows of the head when introduced. Also, the “Guten Tag” and “Auf Wiedersehen” greetings on entering and leaving every grocery or bakery, whether or not anyone was listening. Or the reluctance of young fathers to push a baby carriage and, if there were no escaping it, to do so with one sidewise outstretched hand while looking away, as if the child belonged to someone else. Completely taboo for males in those days was carrying a bouquet of flowers, even if concealed under paper. Later, these taboos disappeared.
Then there were the language problems: the (impossible) need to know whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter and treat it accordingly, which Mark Twain happily satirized by noting that a red beet is a “she” but a pretty girl an “it.” One witty Turkish woman I know of, having the usual trouble with such rulings, asked her teacher why the word for “table” was masculine—“der Tisch.” Looking under one she said, “I don’t see anything masculine about it!” I found that Gift means poison, Mist means manure, a glove is a Handschuh or, almost a desecration, a nipple is a Brustwarze—a “breast wart.” Some words caused visiting Americans fewer blushes than laughs: “Schmuck” meaning jewelry, and the polite wish to patrons driving away after a restaurant meal to have a good trip: “gute Fahrt.”
While improving my German and adjusting to customs, I soon noticed the political tensions in the air, reflecting different directions and varying types of people. Some, most to my liking, were warm-hearted people who rejected everything from the Nazi past and were dedicated to creating a fair socialist society. I also found narrow-minded dogmatists, who spouted clichés, surely believing them, but could hardly grasp basic humane concepts and were all too quick to browbeat those with doubts or “wrong ideas.” I had already met some such people in various political parties in the United States, including my own. Often disarmingly similar were the careerists who could parrot the correct vocabulary but were primarily devoted to advancing personal interests. As everywhere, I guess, there were also slow thinkers and downright idiots. And then there were those who, rarely uttering their views out loud, hated the GDR and any idea of socialism, pined for the rule of West German Chancellor Adenauer, dreamed of retaking provinces they had been forced to leave or had learned little or nothing from the defeat of fascism. But humans are complicated creatures who waver, learn, even alter their views. There was a wide range of mixtures and borderline cases; it was neither simple nor really wise to paste people into one or another pigeon hole.
A key factor in my positive outlook was, of course, finding Renate, then a stenographer-typist in a construction company. Not only did I no longer freeze evenings in my lonely room, hunting and pecking at my newly bought typewriter until my fingers were too cold to function, but now, as spring came upon us, we could enjoy wonderful strolls through shabby but oh-so-romantic cobblestone alleyways in the Old Town, baroque squares, and pathways around the sturdy city walls of this beautiful, thousand-year-old town, perched on cliffs above a swift little river. Together we enjoyed good plays and concerts (a new experience for my village-bred girlfriend) in the fine theater and a memorable candle-lit performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in the magnificent cathedral, one of only three church buildings in all Germany which was half Lutheran, half Roman Catholic, and quite amicably divided by a little fence right down the middle.
3—Hot Times in Germany
Germany, too, was divided, though by no means amicably and not nearly down the middle. In this larger edifice the Federal Republic (FRG) occupied far, far more pews and almost exclusively the better ones. The main sermon preached in its pulpit, aside from demanding the return of lost territories, was about German unity: brothers and sisters in the two states must no longer be separated. But the commandment often evoked, unlike the ten from Mount Sinai, was not carved in stone from the start. The unity problem trod dramatically onto the world stage in June 1948 when Britain, France, and the United States suddenly introduced a new monetary currency in their West German occupation zones and, even more divisively, into the populous political island of West Berlin in the middle of the Soviet Zone. There was no Wall or other barrier then. Anyone could shop in the East or West, so the switch to a new currency immediately threatened to flood the East with old currency, suddenly useless in the West, and thus swiftly wreck the entire Eastern economy. Inevitable countermeasures triggered the Airlift to supply West Berlin with food and fuel.
The belligerent politician and later secretary of state John Foster Dulles revealed, but not very publicly, that it was always possible to cool the situation by agreeing on the currency question, but then explained that, firstly, “The deadlock is of great advantage to the United States for propaganda purposes, secondly, the danger of settling the Berlin dispute resides in the fact that it would then be impossible to avoid facing the problem of a German peace treaty. The United States would then be faced with a Soviet proposal for the withdrawal of all occupation troops and the establishment of a central German government. Frankly I do not know what we would say to that.” (Overseas Writers Association, January 10, 1949, quoted in Democratic German Report, DGR, February 2, 1962, 32.)
He was right. The Berlin Airlift proved immensely advantageous for Cold War political acoustics and a dissonant propaganda disaster for the USSR. It also split Berlin and Germany for over forty years.
This had occurred while I was a student at Harvard and resulted in harsh repercussions for the Progressive Party candidate, Henry Wallace, a campaign in which I was actively engaged.