A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
1st Class. But while the U.S. Army was sifting through my political past, present, and possible future, Germany’s past, present, and future were being surveyed by far more important figures, President Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin. On March 10, 1952, Stalin made an unexpected offer to remove Soviet troops and control from East Germany, to support free all-German elections, and to permit unification and full German sovereignty. The offer came with one condition, a result of the Nazis’ near total destruction and virtual genocide in the Soviet Union a decade earlier: Germany must be “free, neutral, and demilitarized” and, like Finland or Austria, in no pacts, Eastern or Western.
The response was a resounding “No!” U.S. policy had long aimed at pumping up West Germany. Its powerful, rebuilt industrial base, strategic location, and top-drawer generals with “Eastern” experience were major chess pieces in the worsening Cold War, or someday in a hot one (which a few firebrands were demanding). As the German-born banker and former Roosevelt adviser, James Warburg, vainly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 28: the Soviet proposal might be a bluff, but it seemed “that our government is afraid to call the bluff for fear that it may not be a bluff at all” and lead to unity. (Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, March 28, 1952.)
To this “No” a loud “Nein!” was added. Chancellor Adenauer also feared such unity, preferring an expanding Western ambience with his two-thirds of Germany bound up in it. Only a few West Germans had the courage to blame him for rebuffing this chance at unification. Instead, in Paris, he signed onto a “European Defense Community” with a large German military component, a plan ditched by the French people two years later. All East German proposals to heal the split were ignored; thus, by 1952, the chips were down. One result was the GDR leaders’ call to move on and build socialism in their corner of the country. That smaller corner where, a few months later, I was to land.
As a foreign newcomer who still read no newspapers and heard no radio, I could hardly comprehend such fateful events. But as 1953 moved along. I could see that something was not okay. Earlier rapid improvements in life were slowing down with signs of going into reverse. Even a breakfast staple of mine, ersatz honey, defied past trends—its price went up, not down.
With hopes of unification giving way to increasing fears of Western annexation attempts, the decision to “build socialism,” a lifelong goal of most East German leaders, now required the rapid buildup of an industry to produce coke, iron, and steel, basics increasingly hard to get from traditional West German sources. It was also seen necessary to counter Western rearmament with GDR armed forces. Both endeavors consumed billions of marks. To pay for them and “clear the decks” politically, a stringent, tough policy was adopted, rough on private businesses and wealthier farmers but also on workers, whose wages were to be tied to stricter norms, or quotas, aimed at increasing productivity without putting too many more inflationary 10- or 20-mark bills into pay envelopes. During my first winter and spring I could sense the growing unhappiness at all of this.
In March 1953, Stalin died. What would that mean for the world, for the USSR, for us in the GDR? We could not peer through the distant thick Kremlin walls and perceive that the new ruling team in Moscow, noting that the economic strategy in the young GDR was not going well at all, had concluded that urgent changes were needed if menacing dangers were to be prevented. They pushed the GDR rulers into a sudden, quick reversal.
On June 11, the New Course was announced, annulling all unpleasant restrictions, cuts, pressures, and many jail sentences, with one important exception. The tighter production norms would remain unchanged. This exception neglected the main cause of anger for the working people who were always hailed as the foundation of the new republic, and so the entire turnaround proved to be too little and too late. On June 16 and 17, first in East Berlin, then in many towns and cities around the GDR, there were demonstrations, stoppages, as well as violence by workers and those who jumped on board with them, including young toughs from West Berlin. A few local official buildings were seized, a Berlin department store was set ablaze, and prisoners were freed, allegedly including virulent Nazi war criminals.
Workers in a railroad coach factory in nearby Görlitz also went on strike for a day or two. In its sister plant in Bautzen, where I had been working seven weeks earlier, little work was done on June 17, but there was no strike. A tiny riot by young men in Bautzen attracted only a handful of workers and ended quickly when a truckload of Soviet soldiers arrived and fired some shots into the air.
There were some casualties elsewhere, but Soviet military involvement, also involving tanks (with orders not to shoot), soon ended the uprising. Historians still argue about whether it was based solely on the resistance of downtrodden workers, as claimed and celebrated to this day, or was fostered by Western propaganda and provocateurs, as GDR media asserted. In my view it was both. Genuinely angry protests reflecting disappointment and frustration were quickly utilized from without, especially in the twisted divided city of Berlin. A key factor was the CIA-financed radio station RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) in West Berlin. Egon Bahr, then RIAS director and later a leading Social Democrat, admitted—or boasted—that though RIAS had not planned or directed it, its broadcasts had acted “as the catalyst of the uprising … without RIAS the uprising would never have taken place in this form.” (Interview with Nana Brink, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, January 9, 2006). Indeed, RIAS broadcast the call for a general strike. The basic goal, it seems clear, was what is now called “regime change,” an early version of the Maidan Square “uprising” in Kiev in 2014 (and many other countries). Most GDR citizens did not take part, but few had been happy in the preceding months.
As for me, since I had left the factory and taken a job as cultural director of a new clubhouse for the thirty or forty Western army deserters then settled in Bautzen, responsible for chess, billiards, and ping-pong tournaments, for outings, dances, films, and such, these events had little effect on me, although I was happy when the price of my artificial honey and other items was reduced and those power stoppages for homes, requiring candles and matches, were finally eliminated.
After six months I quit as cultural director and joined the other deserters in a special one-year apprenticeship in any one of four handicraft skills. Since few had ever learned a non-military trade I found this a clever, wise, and humane idea, with all receiving a generous monthly stipend, more for those with dependents. And to my amazement, I learned how to work a lathe machine.
Before I could test my new skill, however, and perhaps luckily not just for me but for the economy, I got a very different opportunity—to take a four-year course in journalism at Karl Marx University in Leipzig. Although I was already twenty-six, I was only too happy to move from a small town to the GDR’s second-largest city, with a half-million inhabitants and a famous old culture, Johann Sebastian Bach being its main gem, along with Goethe, Schumann, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and an annual book fair nearly as old as printed books. Plus, there was a monstrous monument from 1913 celebrating the defeat of Napoleon there in 1813. I had no problem getting accustomed to city life, nor did Renate, now my fiancée, who had found herself a job and a room in Leipzig even before I arrived.
4—Leipzig and Karl Marx University
A year later, we got married. We were assigned a room-and-a-quarter in the apartment of an elderly, by no means welcoming couple. An interest-free 2,000-mark credit for all Bautzen ex-soldiers allowed us to set up a household centered around a big bed and a big desk. Though Renate’s job as stenographer-typist was not well paid, students received scholarships, 180 or 240 marks a month, with possible bonuses, and a small but growing number of foreign students, including me, got 300. After buying our main furniture, no other major purchases were possible, yet we were able to get along quite well without financial worries. My hot meal of the day, as in the Bautzen factory and like Renate’s in her publicly owned wholesale firm, cost a pittance. The New Course in June 1953 ended reparation payments to the USSR and meant a steady increase in the amount and assortment of consumer goods. Once again people looked forward to May Day and the “Day of the Republic” on October 7 when the press had page-long lists of price cuts on food, clothing, and other goods. We bought our groceries in consumer cooperatives or private retail shops, where our ration coupons enabled us to buy meat, milk, butter, and sugar at very low prices. Since rations varied according to one’s job and profession (lowest for non-working seniors), jealousy and not a little bitterness