A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
Renate’s parents, no opera-goers, with its jolly barnyard full of chickens, its forest with wonderful birds and animals played by children, and the melancholy arias of love and aging in a Slovak tavern. They were all unforgettable.
For those who liked operettas or an occasional musical there was the Metropol Theater, and for revues, chorus lines, and big circus shows the Friedrichstadt Palast. I come later to political cabaret.
Indeed, East Berlin had oodles to offer in the cultural field. In 1959 West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat, speaking to an American TV interviewer about the GDR, said that “to live under communism would be worse than an atomic war.” And yet, as one living “under communism” in this so horrible land, I found that its theater and opera, which matched any in Europe, offered at least a few compensations of which Willy Brandt was perhaps unaware.
7—Filmmakers and Other Anti-Fascists
Renate and I saw more movies than plays and operas, of course, and both Eastern and Western films were always a frequent subject of discussion, critical or admiring. The GDR’s one film company, DEFA, was often the center of debate.
East Germany was well ahead in reviving postwar movie-making, aided by Soviet advisers like Lt. Col. Alexander Dymschitz, an expert on German culture who supported many first steps in a new cultural life. In November 1945, a group of writers and filmmakers, former emigrants and some who had remained but had never been Nazis, discussed possible plans. As Paul Wandel, the head of the group, recalled: “When we first met in the wrecked Hotel Adlon to discuss the future of German film, most of those present doubted whether there was any point to it at all.” (Stephen Brockman, A Critical History of German Film, Rochester: Camden House, 2010, 188–89). Conditions were abysmal; the first director once asked his assistant to find a little butter so he could stay on his feet. But, they concluded, “Film today must offer answers to our people’s basic questions.” And so DEFA was founded.
Its first task was tackling questions about fascism. Within a year, the first postwar German film, The Murderers Are Amongst Us, warned that men guilty of war crimes were already regaining wealth and influence. This film, which started the world career of the fine actress Hildegard Knef, was followed in 1947 by Marriage in the Shadows, a poignant yet hard-hitting tragedy about Hitler’s genocide against Jews. Eleven million tickets were sold, mostly in East Germany; nearly every adult must have seen it, a factor of great importance in combating Nazi ideology. A year later The Blum Affair laid bare the roots of anti-Semitism before 1933. Such anti-fascist films, among DEFA’s best, some real masterpieces, were almost completely ignored or boycotted west of the Elbe and abroad.
Instead, West Germany was inundated with two hundred Hollywood films a year plus dubious pre-1945 German revivals. When filming was finally begun, wartime rubble was occasionally shown, but, for years, almost nothing about the reasons for it. Romances on happy Alpine slopes and meadows were frequent, at times with the same directors who once produced rabid Nazi films.
In all cultural fields the prevailing atmosphere in East Berlin was unambiguously anti-fascist. The first head of the artists’ association, Otto Nagel, had been thrown out of a leadership position by the Nazis in 1933, imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, then released with a strict ban on painting even at home. His successor was Leah Grundig, arrested by the Nazis but able to emigrate to Palestine (there was no Israel then). Her husband, Hans, also a noted artist, was first imprisoned, then sent on suicide missions into battle on the Eastern Front, where he deserted. The writers’ association was headed first by a writer who had fought the fascists in Spain, then by Anna Seghers, an exile in France, Cuba, and then Mexico, whose anti-Nazi novel The Seventh Cross was filmed with Spencer Tracy in Hollywood.
The composers elected a president who had not been an anti-fascist but was no Nazi, just a good composer, and the composers’ secretary-general at his side had been active in the Dutch underground resistance. The dean of East Berlin’s musical conservatory, Eberhard Rebling, after an amazing escape from a Nazi police van, had also been active in the underground in Amsterdam.
The leading cultural organization, the Academy of Arts, was similar. Its first chosen chair was Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann’s brother, whose novel, filmed as The Blue Angel, had made Marlene Dietrich a star, died just before leaving his California exile. The equally famous novelist Arnold Zweig came from exile in Palestine to replace him, followed by the exiled poet Johannes R. Becher, author Willi Bredel, a veteran of Nazi prisons and front action in the Spanish Civil War, and Konrad Wolf, who had been a young lieutenant in the Red Army and later a master film director—in my eyes one of the very greatest. His father was a world-famous writer, Friedrich Wolf, his brother was the master spy chief Markus Wolf, the East German–Jewish counterpart to Bonn’s ex-Nazi general, Reinhard Gehlen.
8—Democratic German Report
After four months working at Seven Seas Books, which published books in English by leftists whose views hampered or prevented sales in their home countries, I became an assistant at Democratic German Report, a biweekly bulletin financed by the GDR. Its masterful English editor, John Peet, twice wounded in Spain, had been Reuters correspondent in Vienna, Warsaw, and West Berlin until, at a sensational press conference in 1951, he accused Reuters and the British press of distorting news from the east and moved to the GDR.
The bulletin reported positively on the GDR but not in the simplistic tones so common in Eastern Bloc publications. He loved wit and irony and liked to quote insipid reports by “daring” Western journalists, who, the minute they risked stepping into East Berlin, found that the sun stopped shining and everyone looked glum. Some incidents were far from glum. One of our readers, an English shop steward touring Eastern Europe by bike, had faced a dilemma at the West-East German border. Western citizens could drive the 120 kilometers through GDR territory to West Berlin, but only on the Autobahn, where bicycling was forbidden. Everyone looked worried until a bright driver put the bike on his truck and told the jolly Englishman, with ragged shorts and a big handlebar mustache, to hop in. In West Berlin he set up his pup tent near the Reichstag. When the police chased him away at dawn, he came to us for help. John Peet called the international office of the GDR labor federation: “We have a British union official here. Can you arrange accommodations?” With high political expectations, they reserved their fanciest guest suite. I must give credit where it is due: the official who came to fetch him with a big car hid any surprise at seeing our somewhat scruffy shop steward, and brought him and his bike to the suite without a word of disappointment.
Since Peet hated travel, I drove around and wrote reports on what I found. At the factory complex where the GDR’s legendary little Trabant cars were made, looking for an interview with a worker, not an official, I picked at random a friendly-looking man making car seats (who turned out to be a rare Baptist church member). He agreed to talk to me and was given a twenty-minute (paid) break. Without a trace of tact, I asked him mercilessly about his earnings, his home, how many suits, coats, and shoes he and his wife owned, about summer vacation trips and the like, and reported it exactly in my article. (Allen Mann [pseudonym of Victor Grossman], “Meet Herr Mueller: GDR Car-Worker,” Democratic German Report (hereinafter DGR), March 3, 1961, 37–39.)
Two months later we had another visitor from London, a young bus driver, his little daughter, and pregnant wife. After reading my report, they wanted to move to the GDR. The husband said, “I don’t have three suits or two overcoats, just one each”; and the woman added, “When could we ever afford a vacation trip?” Their immigration attempt, certainly unwise and officially more than difficult (they spoke not a word of German), ended when the wife became ill and they had to return to London. The episode gave me new food for thought about comparisons—in all directions.
So did my trip to the huge Ernst Thälmann Works in Magdeburg, with its 30,000 employees. I was impressed by its kindergartens and bookshop, its clinic with a medical staff of ninety, and all outpatient facilities. Krupp, its pre-1945 owner, had offered a total of two nurses. I learned of the good contact between a work team I visited and the 9th-grade school class that joined them biweekly, in line with school curriculum, to gain simple skills and learn of factory life. Some Sundays they played soccer together. I noted a sign hanging from the ceiling in one work hall: “Our factory library