Victor Grossman is a journalist from the United States now living in Berlin. He is the author of Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany and A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee.
Three states in former East Germany face elections in September, with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland leading polls. The party is exploiting voter discontent with the fallout of reunification — and the Left’s lack of a convincing alternative.
In 1952 the Harvard grad Victor Grossman defected to East Germany, hoping to help build socialism on the ruins of Nazism. Thirty years after that state collapsed, he insists that we should see it as a land of contradictions, not just a totalitarian monolith.
Famed socialist Victor Grossman on why Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party campaign mattered.