In His Case, It Was True: On the Death of Victor Grossman (1928–2025)

Victor Grossman showing off some of the books published during his time as a journalist in the GDR. -- image via the People’s World Archives

By Nico Popp

Victor Grossman, born Stephen Wechsler in New York City in 1928, died in Berlin on Wednesday, December 17. His Berlin Bulletin appeared regularly on MR Online, and in 2019 Monthly Review Press published his memoir A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee. Victor was a good friend of Monthly Review for over thirty years, who visited us when at last he was able to return to New York and whom we saw when we went to Berlin. We mourn his death. The following is a translation of the obituary that appeared on December 19 in the left German daily newspaper junge Welt.

When you joined the US Army, you had to sign a list. It contained about twenty-five organizations, and by signing, you confirmed that you weren’t a member of any of them, Victor Grossman told us when we spent three hours talking about his life in his apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin—which he had moved into in 1961—in 2023, just before his 95th birthday. “I was definitely in a dozen,” he said, smiling, with the strong American accent he still used to speak the language of the country he had come to in 1952, even after more than seven decades.

Why hadn’t he simply disclosed his membership when he was drafted? “Because I was afraid,” he said without hesitation. In the United States, since 1950, every member of the Communist Party or an affiliated organization had to register individually as a “foreign agent.” Failure to do so could result in severe prison sentences. Victor hadn’t done it. Much later, he met a comrade who had refused to sign the list back then. After some time, he had been “dishonorably” discharged, but without punishment. The price: He ended up on a blacklist that was kept everywhere he applied for jobs.

Stephen Wechsler, as Victor was then known, had signed the contract and came to Bavaria as a soldier in the US Army. The soldiers who had reported physical injuries during basic training to avoid overseas service were sent to Korea. When Victor recounted this, his horror at such cynicism was still evident.

It only took a few months before Private Wechsler was found out in some kind of inspection. When he returned from leave and received a summons from the military court in Nuremberg, he immediately decided to defect. He was so determined, in fact, that he walked into the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) headquarters in Nuremberg in his uniform and asked the astonished comrades there—unsuccessfully, of course—to smuggle him into East Germany. Determination and resolve were Victor’s most striking qualities.

When I gave him the edited interview to review, he wasn’t satisfied with one aspect: the day he swam across the Danube in Linz had been the most important day of his life—and now it was only mentioned in one sentence. Given the sheer volume of material, this was unavoidable, but the criticism was certainly justified. As he swam across the river, Stephen Wechsler became Victor Grossman. The twenty-four-year-old deserter had been advised to change his name for security reasons by a Soviet officer.

That’s how he came to the young GDR. He studied journalism in Leipzig and met “my Renate,” to whom he was married until her death in 2009. He worked as an editor and proofreader for the Democratic German Report and the foreign broadcasting service, and he established the Paul Robeson Archive at the Academy of Arts. However, this self-assured and direct man never got along with his superiors. He called his work as a freelance writer since 1968 “life-extending.” It was clear that, without ever accepting citizenship or joining the SED (Socialist Unity Party), he had made the GDR more “his” country than many who held office or positions there. When we talked about its decline and demise, he used words like “despair” and “bitterness.” “The party was practically gone,” he said of the second half of the 1980s.

He joined the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) and became involved in anti-fascist organizations. Even in his later years, he was a familiar face at events large and small in Berlin. As the Left Party slid deeper into crisis, Victor couldn’t rest easy. The leadership, he said, only wanted to conduct politics in parliaments and governments, no longer on the streets. But it was on the streets, in concrete struggles, as the young communist had learned in the 1940s and never forgotten, that a party’s true “living” nature became apparent. The word was important to him in this context: he longed for a “living,” militant left-wing party that spoke to people in their everyday lives—not one that merely greeted them from posters every four years just before an election. When we spoke in 2023, he said he didn’t even know if he was still listed as a member. The comrade who had always collected the dues had died.

Victor Grossman died in Berlin on Wednesday (December 17) at the age of 97. Another person has passed away who will be missed. “We did what we could,” he told me. In his case, it was true.

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