A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
Renate! When monthly ration coupons were used up, people could buy all they wanted (and could afford) at the well-stocked but highly priced nationally owned shops called HO (an abbreviation for Retail Organization). Nationally owned restaurants (Gaststätten) added a letter, forming the interesting abbreviation over the entrance: HOG.
When our son was born, we were assigned two rooms and a small kitchen, again within a larger apartment but with a friendlier widow. Everyone had to be housed, no one could be homeless, but since the huge apartment construction projects did not start up for another decade, many, like it or not, had to share their larger apartments.
After our first joy at our unplanned but dearly loved baby we faced the unhappy necessity, first due to Renate’s short illness, then because of our work, of placing him in a weekly nursery for student mothers, fetching him only for weekends. This cost almost nothing but often meant tears on Monday morning. Otherwise we led an untroubled life, always with enough for our Sunday schnitzel, potatoes, mushrooms, and vegetable, plus a self-made plum cake which, lacking an oven, we gave to a bakery on Saturday and fetched fresh and warm on Sunday. We had enough for the movies, the theater, and occasionally the opera. Regular medical and dental care and medicines, a special gymnastics course for expectant mothers, the ambulance and virtually private delivery of little Thomas were all covered by national low-cost insurance, with six weeks paid leave before and eight weeks afterward, which were later greatly increased. Breast-feeding was also rewarded, and homemakers, almost always women, got one free paid “household day” every month. Life was markedly improving, though at uneven rates for different groups and never without a variety of shortages. Disposable diapers and prepared baby food did not arrive until we had our second son, Timothy, six years later, which meant that I did a lot of helping with diaper-washing and squeezing of carrot juice, mashing potatoes, or other baby needs.
Despite all improvements, the conflicting, often hostile, standpoints I had noticed in Bautzen were still quite evident in Leipzig. One flight above us, the widow and daughter of a man executed by the Nazis for his communist underground activity were fully devoted to the GDR. So were a young couple, puppeteers, who lived a flight below us. A young pastor and his wife were clearly if mildly opposed to “this system”; relations between the GDR leadership and the Lutheran Church were at one of their periodic low points. A man on the ground floor, expelled from now Polish Silesia, was violently anti-GDR and often traveled to West Berlin to join in angry rallies, sanctioned by the Western occupation authorities and the West German government, to demand the return of the “lost provinces.” The GDR, in sharp contrast, recognized the new borders and signed friendship treaties with the Communist-led governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia, while its media played down or omitted references to Silesia, East Prussia, Sudetenland, and the other lost areas. Every effort was made to integrate their former inhabitants, never referred to as “refugees” as in the West but as “re-settlers.” Many who rejected such integration moved westward.
The atmosphere at the Journalism School was free of such conflicts. Some students had also been forced to leave “lost homelands,” but I heard no complaints on this issue, certainly not from my roommate, who came, as an orphan, from East Prussia. Nearly all those who chose journalism—and were accepted as students—were pro-GDR; our department wasn’t called the Roter Kloster (Red Cloister) for nothing. It was very different from, say, the Medical School, with its many offspring of doctors, relatively prosperous yet often far from satisfied with socialist medical policies.
From the start, we were apportioned into “seminar groups” of about twenty-five students each, all of whom had the same classes in the first two years and kept together for political meetings, cultural evenings, trips to the movies or a concert, and occasional trips to help clear the last of Leipzig’s rubble, help in the potato or sugar beet harvest, or, in one case, tamp in rail tracks in an open-pit lignite mine (for a week with pay). Of our group, over the four years, two disappeared and moved to the West, a relatively low average in those days.
We in the Red Cloister also noted some variations, beginning with the professors. Two were dyed-in-the-wool dogmatists. The one who taught basic communist theory, “Historical Materialism,” defended every party and government policy up until the very day it was altered—and then defended the new policy just as uncompromisingly. The other, of Romanian-Jewish background, had been a daring left-wing fighter during the First World War and in the Hungarian Revolution of 1919. Forced to flee to the USSR, he had tried to reeducate fascist Romanian, Hungarian, and German prisoners of war during the Second World War. I wondered how successful his efforts had been, for he was no teacher and the students laughed at his weak endeavors. Perhaps he was given the job out of respect for his past.
But our dean, Hermann Budzislavski, who taught German Press History with a stress on progressive journalists, gave dynamic lectures, with constant pacing back and forth and changing of eyeglasses. He was popular with everyone. While a wartime exile in the United States, as a Jewish leftist, he had been an assistant of the famous journalist Dorothy Thompson, the wife of author Sinclair Lewis.
Wieland Herzfelde, who had also found refuge in the United States (and was also Jewish), taught World Literature, with a stress on the classics. He himself was part of German history, having built up and managed the legendary Malik publishing house until 1933. With his famous brother John Heartfield and the great artist Georg Grosz, he had led the German section of the Dada art movement and developed political photomontage, with witty, biting attacks on the Nazis, from whom they escaped in 1933 by the skin of their teeth. The brothers, on arrival in the GDR from Britain and the United States, had been treated with shocking distrust at first; those were the shameful Stalin-motivated years of mistrust of “Western emigrants,” often Jewish. But then Stalin was dead, and so was that evil period, and they soon came to deserved honors. As professor, Herzfelde made high demands, assigning lots and lots of great books to read, but was therefore not so popular with some students.
Most popular was Hedwig Voegt from Hamburg, imprisoned three times for fighting the Nazis, who came to the GDR after the war to study and became an expert on German literature. Her moving lectures inspired admiration and love for many great writers, for me largely unknown till then.
Many professors and administrators had been active anti-fascists. University rector Georg Mayer retained, to my amazement, the ancient title “His Magnificence” and wore the traditional golden chain at ceremonies. But he also joked that as a young fraternity student the titles “Bottle-Mayer,” “Duel Mayer,” and “Bordello-Mayer” had all applied to him. Later I learned that the Nazis had thrown him out of academia for his courageous opposition.
Sadly, two famous anti-fascist professors in other departments proved too independent for GDR leaders. The philosopher Ernst Bloch was dropped from his position in 1957 and left the GDR in 1961; literature scholar Hans Meyer left in 1963. Neither, I believe, ever abandoned his belief in a socialist future.
Those were turbulent times for socialists or communists, with many ups and downs. The uprising of June 17, 1953, caused very unpleasant shake-ups for some near the top but brought not only more consumer goods and an end to rising prices, taxes, and power blackouts but a loosening of many strictures on political discussion. All this thanks in great measure to the new man in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev, whose “secret speech” in February 1956 detailed immense crimes committed during the Stalin years. (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html) Countless prisoners in the Soviet Union were freed, pressures were reduced, and books written that, in translated editions in the GDR, broke many political taboos. Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Thaw gave the era its name. One unexpected result of this thaw was a brief uprising in Poznan in Poland and a new leadership there under the once-imprisoned and far less dogmatic Wladislaw Gomulka. The always hostile BBC, in its broadcast for the GDR, aired an acerbic joke: A young prisoner asks his older cellmate, “What are you in for?”—“I denounced Gomulka. And you?”—“That’s odd. I’m in for praising him.” Just then a third man is locked into the cell. And why? “I’m Gomulka!”
My marriage after my first college year meant living “off campus,” so I was not so closely involved in “private-level” exchanges. But I couldn’t fail to notice the increase