A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee by Victor Grossman

Author:Victor Grossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2019-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

61—Me and Censorship

What about me? In 1968, I had just turned forty. I had left my job as director of the Robeson Archive; I was really no archivist. The switch was a fortunate one. I quickly found work translating into English; many could translate well into German, but very few in the other direction. Then I began writing articles, always about events in the United States or historical articles inspired by anniversaries, like that of the execution of Joe Hill in 1915 or of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. Their stories and many of the current conflicts were close to my heart, and there were hardly a handful who understood and could write about them. No GDR correspondents were yet permitted in the United States, but I could keep up with developments thanks to hourly news reports and other programs on AFN, the soldiers’ radio channel in West Berlin, plus my left-wing newspaper subscriptions, U.S. films on TV or in the movie houses, and my correspondence. In the ten years since I graduated at Leipzig, my classmates had spread into every section of the media, from local newspapers to TV. I needed only to call a friend and ask, “Could you use an article about the Chicago Eight trial or the Native American fight at Wounded Knee?” And there was so much to write about: the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Black Panthers, Kent State, Watergate, Angela Davis, miners’ strikes, the Bicentennial, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Muhammed Ali.

My views about the United States, if not exactly the same as official views, almost never collided with them. Therefore, by and large, I was not troubled by censorship. Once, with a book I wrote about U.S. history (something like Howard Zinn’s), I ran into a few disagreements with the publishing authorities (the equivalent of censors) on some angles on world events. I made a few painless changes in wording, or I ignored the requests for alterations, and never heard any more about the matter. I doubt they looked at the pages again.

Official SED newspapers, local or national, were cautious about slipping off official lines or even vocabulary, but I hardly encountered problems with them when opposing Ronald Reagan or the Pentagon, supporting Martin Luther King Jr., or fighting to free Angela Davis. Nor was I inclined to paint any unsullied halo over Richard Nixon. Some editors couldn’t quite grasp my attempts to add human interest, suspense, and even humor to reports. But others could. And there were those good weekly or monthly publications, edited by sensible journalists, with strong leftist principles but without blinders, often with experience as exiles in Western countries, who tended to pay attention not only to the authorities above them in the political ladder but to the wishes and intelligence of grateful readers. I got along best writing for them.

My greatest success was with my two years of radio broadcasts on American folk music in 1966–67. The first series introduced GDR listeners to singers I loved, like Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie.

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