Victor Grossman died on 17th December, 2025. He was 97, and for a long time it felt like he would go on for ever. Phil Butland remembers a comrade and friend.

I first met Victor in 2013, when we were setting up the Berlin Linke Internationals, the forerunner of The Left Berlin. Victor was excited by the idea of uniting International activists both inside and outside die Linke, and introducing German activists to people who had recently been involved in the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the occupation of the squares in Spain.

He was particularly interested in developing new activists, attending every meeting which he could, and always being available to talk about his outstanding life, either as a public speaker in a large meeting, or in an informal chat. Well into his 90s, I would still see him at demos, where he would march as far as his ageing body would allow him. He was always keen to talk, and we would regularly march together until he felt unable to go any further and reluctantly went home.

One particular obsession of Victor’s was Sahra Wagenknecht. He adored her for fighting against the party bureaucrats who wanted to sacrifice the party’s opposition to NATO because they had eyes on a coalition government with the SPD or Greens. At the same time, he was deeply concerned about her racist populism. Many of the conversations we had on demos started with him asking me why I thought Sahra had made her latest “mistake.”

Between 2019 and 2023, theleftberlin.com published Victor’s Berlin bulletin—a weekly account to international friends about political developments in Germany.  We stopped doing this after someone created a website for the Bulletin, as there was less need for us to provide what was available elsewhere. But there was also a feeling that Victor was losing his sharpness and starting to repeat himself. I still read the bulletin avidly, though, even after they became less regular.

Principled Opposition

I knew of Victor long before I met him. We were both members of die Linke in Berlin Mitte. We were in different branches, so our paths did not cross regularly, but he would occasionally pop up at a regional meeting making a pithy observation warning us not to trust the leadership. He remained particularly suspicious of a new layer of careerist party leaders, who he felt would just as easily have joined the SPD or the Greens.

At the same time, he was faithfully loyal to the party itself. This was, after all, the man who defected from the USA to the DDR at the height of the Cold War. Victor remained convinced that 1989 was a step backwards in German history. He could argue quite persuasively that following the Second World War, only one half of Germany denazified, as West Germany filled its government posts with former Nazis.

At the same time, he was never uncritical of the East German state or of the party leadership; he did believe that the uprisings in East Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 were organised by the CIA. By chance he was on a spa treatment in Czechoslovakia in 1968 when Russian tanks invaded to suppress Czech leader Alexander Dubček’s reform package called “socialism with a human face.”

In his autobiography, Victor wrote: “I was still torn. ‘Socialism with a human face’ was a great idea in itself; many of the improvements, especially regarding the humane climate, were desperately needed in East Germany. But behind this facade, I had seen how the country was noticeably sliding to the right, and how left-wing groups who dared to resist this trend were marginalized, even threatened.”

This was the dilemma which Victor continually faced. His belief in the Eastern Bloc was regularly contradicted by facts on the ground. Victor was honest enough to recognise this, but in the absence of any obvious alternative, he preferred the Eastern Bloc to rampant capitalism. Like his hero Berthold Brecht, he insisted that the DDR was the least bad option.

For this reason, Victor absolutely hated the film The Lives of Others, not because it criticised the Stasi but because, he maintained, the Stasi were a joke. Everyone knew who they were, and they didn’t disrupt ordinary life. You may disagree  with his analysis, but it was understandable from a man who was threatened with one year in a US jail because he’d joined some anti-fascist organisations prematurely.

He retained this critical loyalty for the rest of his life. He joined the PDS, and then Die Linke, because where else could a socialist organise? You get the feeling that he felt the same about Die Linke as he did about Eastern Germany. He was fully aware of the Party’s shortcomings, but what was the alternative?.

One subject on which Victor remained particularly intransigent was on the issue of Palestine. As a Jewish socialist, Victor knew that his liberation was bound closely to that of the Palestinians. At a time when very few people on the German Left, and particularly die Linke, were prepared to stand up for Palestine, you could always bank on Victor to speak out, sign an appeal, or support a demo for Palestinian rights.

An extraordinary Life

Victor Grossman was born Stephen Wechsler in New York one year before the World Economic Crisis of 1929. He often humbly boasted that he was the only person ever to hold degrees from both Harvard and the Karl Marx University. As a teenager, he became very active in many Communist and Socialist organisations.

Then, in 1950, he was drafted for the Korean War and sent to train in West Germany.  Before he was sent, he had to sign a statement that he was not a member of a list of named subversive organisations. Although he had indeed joined several of the groups on the list, Victor signed the statement anyway.

One day in 1952, he was called to appear before a military court in Nuremberg. Sensing it was to do with his false statement—which could lead to 1 year in prison—Victor decided to defect. He swam across the Danube and turned himself in to the bemused Soviet army which was occupying that part of Austria. 

After 2 months detention, he moved to East Berlin where he started a new life, first as a factory and railway worker, later as a journalist and a loyal oppositionist. He befriended the actor Dean Reed—another defector from the US—who made a series of East German cowboy films told from the point of view of Native Americans.

Victor published his autobiography Crossing the River in 2014. Despite its English title, the book is in German, although in 2019 he did publish a shorter, English, version—A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee.

Despite his many talents, Victor was a modest man. I will miss his perception, his energy, but above all his sense of humour. Victor was a witty man and a born raconteur. We did not agree on everything politically but he was a passionate internationalist who was prepared to argue his case and usually ended up on the right side.

Ingar Solty from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung adds

I am not the only person to miss Victor’s presence. I asked Ingar Solty from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung about his memories of Victor. Ingar sent the following text:

“During the late 1940s, early 1950s, with the victory of the Chinese Revolution and the beginning of the Cold War, the example of Victor Grossman shows that not only German socialist and communist survivors of fascism and world war could consider East Germany as the better German state insofar as all the demands of the social democrats and in fact the majority in the West were realized only here: de-nazification, land reform, and the socialization of industry. 

This is why communist artists like Peter Hacks as well as Wolf Biermann moved from West to East. The example of Victor, however, shows that international communists could also be convinced that the GDR was a safe haven for them against the anti-communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s, stretching from the House of Un-American activities in the US to the Adenauer-Erlass in West Germany. 

Victor Grossman then was a key actor with regards to the proletarian internationalism of real socialism. It was Grossman and the Canadian, Perry Friedman, who played a key role with regards to the interculturality connecting the American Folk Revival in the US with the Burg Waldeck festivals in West Germany and the Oktoberklub and hugely influential Singebewegung in the GDR. 

Across the Cold War divide, at the height of bloc confrontation right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were socialists in East and West returning to the folk tradition in order to sing against the threat of nuclear warfare, for peace and social justice. Grossman’s radio program in the GDR brought Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, and Phil Ochs to an East German audience and even to East Berlin itself. It also facilitated the particular internationalism which led to the massive show of solidarity coming from GDR civil society when Angela Davis was imprisoned. 

In this regard, the other America always had a place in a country whose solidarity generally stood with the victims of US and Western imperialism who sought to liberate themselves from it, stretching from the revolutionaries in Cuba to the defenders of socialism in Chile and the ANC in South Africa.”

Salud Victor. The world will be a worse place without you.

The German Democratic Republic, swallowed up by its capitalist counterpart 35 years ago, left behind a fascinating legacy. The GDR produced Superfest Glas, virtually unbreakable beer glasses; it used hyperefficient prefab concrete construction to build Marzahn, a district of 160,000 people, in just a decade; it created some spectacular architecture. And almost unimaginable for a German state, the GDR showed solidarity with Palestine and gave material support to anti-colonial movements in Africa

This was all possible because East Germany had a planned economy. Production was not organized around satisfying capital’s endless demand for profits. The GDR thus accomplished things that seem impossible today. As one small example: Cheap unbreakable glasses are incredibly useful — but they are not made today as they are not profitable.

As socialists, we defend degenerated and deformed workers states like the GDR where they still exist, such as in Cuba. We point to how a poor country like the GDR was able to solve the housing crisis with economic planning — where the much wealthier Federal Republic of Germany claims to be completely helpless.

As I argued back in September, however, while a planned economy is a necessary condition of socialism, it is not enough to define a system as socialist. Socialism refers to the transitional stage between capitalism and communism — the term only applies if the working class is taking over the management of society and the state is withering away.

A response to my piece by the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR, mirrored at Monthly Review, insists that the GDR was socialist — yet it does not offer any definition of socialism. Surely, the comrades do not believe that it’s enough for a government to use this term — otherwise they would have to refer to the bloody neoliberal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad as socialist too.

Democracy like oxygen

Looking to define socialism, the IFDDR implicitly concedes that democracy is necessary. As the quote, often falsely attributed to Leon Trotsky, goes: “a planned economy requires democracy just as the human body requires oxygen.” So the authors claim that the “D” in GDR was real, and East Germany was in fact democratic. 

They explain that workers in the GDR had a “right to participate in factory management” and that laws were discussed by millions before passage. They even point to the notorious Eingaben system: citizens could write a letter to their representatives, and would get an answer within four weeks.

Notably, they do not mention the most elaborate form of East German democracy: GDR citizens voted for parliamentary bodies every four or five years, at the national, district, and municipal levels. Yet they only had a single list to choose from, and the National Front won between 99.95 and 99.46 percent each time. As election observers noted in 1989, despite only offering one choice, the authorities nonetheless engaged in systematic fraud.

This is not to defend parliamentary democracy, which in capitalist countries is nothing more than a façade for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. But a Marxist criticism of bourgeois parliaments aims for higher forms of democracy, such as workers’ councils, soviets, and Räte, in which workers elect delegates to bodies that are both executive and legislative, based on the model of the Paris Commune. East Germany’s Stalinists, in contrast, created a pathetically unconvincing copy of bourgeois democracy.

The IFDDR claims that in the GDR, “economic power was … devolved to the working masses,” yet they do not cite any examples of what economic decision making looked like. To name one major policy shift: in 1971, Erich Honecker proclaimed the “Unity of Economic and Social Policies,” which included higher subsidies for consumer goods and increased housing construction, at the expense of heavy industry.

What to do with the surplus is about the most important decision that a socialist society can make. So what percentage of East German workers were in favor of this turn? What percentage were opposed? To claim “99.46 percent” is to spit in the face of the working class. That is obviously not how real decision-making works — not in a strike committee of five workers, and not in a socialist society with 16 million citizens. 

East Germany offered pseudo-democratic mechanisms that modern capitalist politicians are learning to love: “participation,” whereby decisions are made at the top, but atomized individuals are allowed to “participate” by voicing an opinion that then lands in the recycling bin.

I would say, for example, that the Federal Republic’s decades of cuts to the railway system have been terribly undemocratic because this austerity goes against the will of the majority of the population. The IFDDR might respond that everything is fine because the Deutsche Bahn provides suggestion boxes where everyone can give feedback.

Repression

While I am deliberately not focussing on the Ministry of State Security (MfS, better known as the Stasi in the West), it was also an economic decision to build up the largest security apparatus of any country that has ever existed, with 91,015 full-time employees and hundreds of thousands of informants. This bureaucracy was supposedly necessary to protect socialism and prosecute Nazi war criminals — yet it spent enormous resources surveilling workers or harassing critical communists (Rudolf Bahro and Robert Havemann are just two famous examples). The GDR’s pervasive repression against youth cultures did a lot to undermine support for socialism. And again, who decided that this was a good use of society’s resources? Why put money into suppressing Western rock bands, rather than creating better rock bands?

The authors quote Lenin, only to toss out his ideas about the withering away of the state under socialism as a “regression to the utopianism Marx and Engels criticized.” So what did Lenin write about the vast resources invested in the Stasi?

“Naturally, the exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple ‘machine’, almost without a ‘machine’, without a special apparatus, by the simple organization of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies…).”

In other words, a society organized on Leninist lines would rely on self-organization to defend socialism. Who, precisely, decided the GDR should do it otherwise?

John Peet

To close, I would like to quote at length from the hard-to-find autobiography of John Peet. The head of the Reuters bureau in West Berlin, Peet sought asylum in the GDR in 1950 in protest against West German rearmament. For 25 years, he published the fortnightly newsletter German Democratic Report from East Berlin. At the end of his life, looking back at 35 years in the GDR, he was proud that everyone got housing, education, and employment. He pointed to the legalization of abortion and many other accomplishments.

Yet he described the system as one of “benevolent paternalism,” in which “all important decisions” are made by the top leadership of the Socialist Unity Party. Peet commented: “I believe that many of these decisions are wise. But they are arrived at without any public discussion of the pros and cons, and without any proper channel for dissent to be registered.” (Had he not heard of Eingaben?) He concluded:

“I fear the results can only be negative. Since the majority of the population have the feeling that they cannot participate in the decision-making, they tend to withdraw and live their private lives. They march on May Day demonstrations and vote in the single-list parliamentary elections because it is the done thing, but without any particular enthusiasm. There are obviously all sorts of creeping dangers in such a conformist society; for instance, it is almost inevitably the mediocre, the conformists, who get ahead. Karl Marx once said that his favourite motto was ‘De omnibus dubitandum’ — doubt everything. Today in the GDR, the ruling motto would appear to be just the opposite: ‘Father knows best.'” 

Peet spent far longer than the IFDDR defending the East German system, yet even he had to acknowledge that bureaucratic rule was preventing socialism from flourishing. We should study the GDR, which shows that a planned economy offers mind-blowing potential to improve our quality of life — but also that without real proletarian democracy, this potential can be wasted.

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.