Bought a few weeks ago. Chapters I've read so far are quite good.
Grossman has a piece in the latest PWW of the CPUSA. Via, H-HOAC, the H-Net
list on American Communism from
<URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=272441084898390 >
> ...Reviewed for H-German by David E. Marshall <davidm_92507 at yahoo.com>,
Department of History, University of California-Riverside
Victor Grossman's autobiography is a partly critical, partly apologetic account of life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). An American communist who fled the McCarthy witch-hunts in the 1950s and found a new life in the GDR, he was probably the only person to have ever studied at Harvard and Karl Marx University and labor as a steelworker in Buffalo and in a lumberyard in Bautzen. He married, raised a family, and developed into a relatively prominent writer and intellectual. He experienced the events of 1953 in East Berlin, saw the 1968 Prague Spring and numerous Cold War shenanigans, and worked hard to build a society which he was proud of, in spite of its many shortcomings. Although never a member of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) or a dissident, Grossman offers readers useful insights into everyday life in the GDR. He was one of the overwhelming majority of East Germans who accepted their fates while the Wall existed and conditions were reasonably stable. While he would have preferred to preserve the GDR, he recognizes why it was unable to establish the loyalty necessary for survival once Soviet support was withdrawn and the SED leadership fell...
> ...This section is one of several in which Grossman almost defends
the repressive measures used by the GDR to maintain stability. For
example, Grossman mostly disapproves of the Berlin Wall. Although its
existence affected him much less than other East Germans, he supported the
right to free travel. Still, he acknowledges that the GDR did not possess
the magnetism of the west, and thus legitimately feared a mass exodus.
He describes similar ambivalence to the 1953 workers' strikes in East
Germany and the 1968 Prague Spring. In each case Grossman criticizes the
conditions that led to the respective movements, and condemns governments
that lost touch with citizens. He found "socialism with a human face" a
beautiful idea, one of urgent necessity in the GDR. However, he
reluctantly supported the moves to suppress these movements. The overall
danger to socialism in Eastern Europe was too great; what some called
liberty, he saw as a return to capitalism. For Grossman, the end
justified the means. Preserving socialism necessitated suppressing reform
groups as long as the west sought to undermine the entire system.
The best way to understand Grossman's ambivalence is to examine his conception of freedom, of which he offers many examples. For instance, he saw more freedom in Warsaw than in the GDR, but it did not impress him. While Poles had the right to see more movies, read more western paperbacks, exercise more political independence and disobey traffic signals, he found their freedom as dispiriting as the restrictions in the GDR. While visiting the United States in 1994, he encountered a woman who commented on how he and his wife were able to travel freely, while she found it difficult to get away from New York. Although she lived in the freest country in the world, she was unable to move as freely as two citizens from the former GDR. Grossman defines freedom as more than a set of laws created by a government; he believed in "freedom from want," which he felt the GDR achieved reasonably well for its citizens. This kind of freedom fostered safe streets, low, stable rents, cheap public transportation, free health care, jobs for everyone and subsidized child care. These benefits have disappeared since 1990, in Grossman's view, a costly tradeoff for the right to travel unhindered to the west.
Grossman blames the fall of the GDR on the concerted effort by the west to undermine the Soviet bloc. Other factors contributed, of course, one of which he describes in some detail in a chapter focusing on the country's unraveling during the 1980s. The political, economic and social system was too rigid, the SED leadership ignored all critical opinions, open and engaging debate was limited, and the increasingly alienated youth were drawn towards the glamour of the west. While Grossman allowed his children to watch West German television and discussed it with them, he found other parents as well as the country's leadership unwilling to confront a cultural offensive that eventually overwhelmed the GDR. Grossman tried to combat it via countless lectures to professional groups and unending suggestions on how to enliven history classes, May Day parades and restaurant menus. Grossman suggests that East Germans never developed an identity strong enough to resist the attractions of the west, possibly because they were bored. <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese