A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
for a far more elastic, realistic approach to our “unbending principles.” This was reflected in our first printed student newspaper. One article reviewed the East Berlin political cabaret Der Distel (The Thistle), which satirized attempts to ignore events in nearby Poland. Another urged that the Leipzig press should also print the critical letters to the editor. My article called for more balanced, less simplistic media reports about the United States. Other articles were also mildly critical; none were “oppositional.”
But the Polish upsets were followed by an uprising in Hungary, with angry workers waging a brief civil war, enthusiastically encouraged by the Catholic Church and Voice of America. Party employees and government employees, including security service agents, were hanged or otherwise killed, and when Soviet tanks moved in there were deaths on all sides. These tragic events caused a crisis in the world’s left-wing movements and also frightened GDR leaders politically and perhaps personally, although, as I heard it, moving their homes out of Berlin to an inaccessible enclave to the north was due less to their fears than to the worries of their security officers. But it was certainly their fears that led to another tightening of screws generally. A second issue of our student newspaper was long in coming—and then tame as a lapdog. Political “deviations” by students, or in one case by a teacher, were harshly castigated. The teacher lost his job, but rather than “proving himself” at some temporary industrial job, as demanded, he too took the option, still open before the Wall, and went west.
And me? I received the U.S.-Communist newspaper Daily Worker, which, after Khrushchev’s speech, had opened its “Letters” pages to an amazingly critical debate. The hot arguments and hot words and my American background made finding my way especially complicated. I wondered whether the constraints on free discussion and one-sidedness in the GDR press were too similar to what I had experienced in the United States. Was this a mirror image of McCarthyism? Could I approve of it?
There was a semi-official rebuttal to such doubts. The pressures in the GDR were actually the opposite of those used by McCarthyites, who aimed at suffocating all efforts at progress for workers and unions, for blacks and women in their fights for equality, and squelching all opposition to the Cold War, or a hot one with atomic weapons. GDR pressures, it was averred, were the opposite—to strengthen a society where working-class youngsters got a free college education, no one was jobless, and everyone was medically insured.
I could not dismiss such a justification out of hand. In the United States, I had experienced the merciless offensive of the powers-that-be against all opposition, most dramatically at Peekskill in 1949, when state troopers supported the goon mobs that threw rocks at us at a concert with Pete Seeger and the great singer and actor Paul Robeson. All the windows in my bus had been shattered, along with any possible illusions. Every dirty, even bloody method was used to silence us. Could I get distressed at countermeasures aimed at stymieing such elements here in this most sensitive spot in the world, where nose cones of opposing atomic missiles faced each other? But were such counter-measures really the most effective method? And what about morality? I had plenty to chew on.
Again, ups followed downs. The atmosphere improved with the flight of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, and recurrent Soviet space successes that followed. Today many are unaware of the alarm in the United States over the triumph in the Eastern bloc. The GDR press was delirious with each new achievement: the Sputnik starting things off; the first animal in space—the dog Laika, who unfortunately could not return; the first human, Yuri Gagarin, who could. Then the first two men together, then three men, the circling, filming, and hitting the moon (but not landing), the first woman in space in June 1963. For the GDR media each new feat was proof of the superiority of socialism. An American sour-grapes comment on this one-upmanship was that “before we send a woman into space the Russians will have sent up the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra.” (Meg Waite Clayton, “Female Astronauts: Breaking the Glass Atmosphere,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2013.) Some years later the tables were turned—but very quietly in the GDR.
There was good news closer to home for the GDR. In May 1958 rationing was finally dropped. Instead of a dual price system with cheap ration card staples and all you wanted at higher prices there was now a single-price system, uniform in the whole country, for goods like bakery, butcher, and dairy products. Amazingly—some said unwisely—these new prices stayed firmly frozen for over thirty years, until the end of the GDR.
In September 1958 my four college years came to an end. Some dogmatic aspects had been troubling, but on the whole I had found a friendly, often quite jolly atmosphere among most students, now full of curiosity and expectation as to their future careers. I celebrated with a spaghetti Bolognese feast for the twenty-odd members of my group and directed that the males do the main work, shaping little meatballs, slicing onions and mushrooms. That was totally new for most of them, but a big success. And now I had a second diploma. It was not an M.A., but that never bothered me.
After a happy two-week vacation with Renate and our two-year-old Thomas on the cliffs of “Saxon Switzerland” along the Elbe River, where I had first seen the GDR six years earlier, I landed in Berlin, at first in a rented room on the city outskirts and commuting every weekend to Leipzig.
5—Life in Doubled Berlin
What a different world I found! Though not like the picture of East Berlin so often conjured up with nothing but military parades, cloak-and-dagger Stasi men snooping everywhere and long lines of angry customers, it was nevertheless a highly unusual town, with countless complexities.
This was before the Berlin Wall; people moved back and forth between East and West through that strange open door in the Iron Curtain. And did they ever move back and forth! Bonn and Washington, with sights set on impressing and winning people in East Berlin and the GDR, used West Berlin as a magic magnet, pouring in billions to repair war damage, renovate older buildings, build new ones and, by slashing taxes, attract lots of industry and fine shops with quantities of fancy goods. One symbol was the KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens) department store with a legendary assortment of delicacies. Closing times for nightclubs, bars, and dance-halls were eliminated, and well-subsidized cultural events were offered for every taste, with the desired effect on large numbers of Easterners. U.S. culture, from bebop and theater of the absurd to Disney and dungarees, all of it attractive, swamped West Germany and, just as intended, spilled over eastward in great quantity, if not always quality.
The existence of two currencies had strange effects unknown to the Western world. Many East Berliners commuted to West Berlin, happily undercutting wage levels there. Measly 200 West-marks were magically transformed by the many Western money-changing offices into 800 or more GDR marks—the rate changed daily. An untrained East Berliner, perhaps a cleaning woman, could return eastward on payday with more in her purse than a highly trained GDR engineer. Many such commuters bought butter, a large sausage, or a dozen eggs at low East Berlin prices, sneaked them across in the subway or el under their coats and sold them to West Berliners at well under the going price. Translating this into GDR marks meant a nice additional source of income. A woeful story about hard times in the East might also get a sympathetic gift from an employer, maybe a pack or two of Luckies or Camels that could be sold for a stiff price back in East Berlin. With 50,000 to 80,000 commuters it certainly worsened a perpetual East Berlin lack of labor power.
For many, smuggling was part of everyday life. At the last station before crossing into West Berlin, two GDR customs men walked through the el or subway cars and collared some who were all too conspicuous, perhaps a middle-aged or elderly woman looking strangely pregnant. They could hardly control such butter-eggs-sausage smuggling; their trained eyes were keener to catch professional smugglers of valuable GDR products like cameras, children’s goods, or Meissen (that is, Dresden) chinaware.
The two currencies caused endless problems. The largely artificial 4:1 or 5:1 exchange rate led many West Berliners to cross over for themselves and buy groceries in East Berlin at dirt-cheap prices, thus helping to empty the not so heavily laden East Berlin shelves. This was then prevented; a show of ID was demanded (which all Germans possessed) to prove GDR identity for every purchase, even an ice-cream cone or a bockwurst (a hot dog equivalent). Though an awful bother, most East Berliners agreed with this and wished that ID also be required for services like beauty parlors and physical therapists. It wasn’t, and those businesses