Radio GDR Podcast: Victor Grossman on why the GDR failed

Victor Grossman and I on Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, April 2023

Here it is, the much delayed, long-anticipated second part of my interview with Victor Grossman for the Radio GDR podcast.

Victor is an American Communist who defected to the East Bloc at the height of the “Red Scare” in 1952. Once on the other side of the Iron Curtain, he found himself in the GDR, a country that would be his home until it ceased to exist in 1990. While a strong supporter of “the socialist project”, Grossman is clear-eyed about the GDR, its achievements and shortcomings.

In our first chat, Victor explored the achievements of the GDR.

This time, he turned his attentions to the failings of ‘real-existing socialism’ and it made for a fascinating conversation. You can listen to this episode, click here.

Victor is a truly interesting man and if you want to learn more about him and his remarkable life, I can heartily recommend both his books: A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee and Crossing The River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War and Life in East Germany.

Radio GDR Podcast: Victor Grossman on the GDR’s Achievements

I recently had the chance to speak with Victor Grossman, an American Communist who defected to the East Bloc at the height of the “Red Scare” in 1952, for the Radio GDR podcast. Once on the other side of the Iron Curtain, he found himself in the GDR, a country that would be his home until it ceased to exist in 1990. While a strong supporter of “the socialist project”, Grossman is clear-eyed about the GDR, its achievements and shortcomings.

Leuna and Buna Pt. III: Environmental Disturbances

The Leuna Works, 1980 (Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Leuna, Leuna-Werke — 1980 — 21” / CC BY-SA 4.0).

While East German planners placed great hopes in Leuna and Buna as drivers for the GDR’s economy, developing these sites came at a considerable cost to the environment. Both facilities caused significant damage to air, soil and water in the immediate vicinity and beyond. In fact, some have argued that the catastrophic state of the East German environment was a key factor in bringing people to the protests in Leipzig, a city badly impacted by the effects of the country’s chemical industry and home to the demonstrations which ultimately helped drive the SED from power..

In this last post on Leuna and Buna, we’ll look at the environmental damage which emanated from these two sites.

Leuna and Buna, Pt. I: Industry and History

Whenever I think of Leuna and Buna, two of the GDR’s largest chemical production facilities, I am reminded of a pivotal scene in Mike Nichol’s iconic 1967 film “The Graduate”. In it, Dustin Hoffman’s character Ben, a recent college graduate struggling to figure out his place in the world, is taken aside at a party by Mr. McGuire, a man of his father’s generation who wishes to impart some wisdom to the young man:

“I just want to say one word to you,” the older man begins earnestly. “Just one word. Are you listening?”
“Yes sir,” responds Ben.
When Mr. McGuire is sure that he has the younger man’s attention, he finally speaks: “Plastics.”

What, you may be asking, does this have to do with two East German industrial facilities? Well, imagine Walter Ulbricht in the role of Mr. McGuire while the the East German populace is Ben. The pitch takes place not at a cocktail party in mod, 60s-era California bungalow, but rather nine years earlier at the “GDR Chemical Conference” taking place at the Leuna Works (GDR, always at the vanguard of progress! –ed.). For it is here that SED leader Ulbricht articulated the Party’s vision for the GDR’s economic future which famously included the promise that “chemistry brings bread, prosperity and beauty”. This dream of better living through chemistry represented a broadening of the GDR’s economic focus to include not just Stalinist-style heavy industry (e.g. steel and machine building) but also the quickly emerging petrochemical chemical industry, a move which represented a big gamble.

Field Trip: Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben

Earlier this year, I was able to travel to the German-Polish border region southeast of Berlin to the town of Guben. In GDR times, Guben was an important centre for textile production and known as “Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben”, an honorific paying tribute to the GDR’s first, and only, president who was born there. These days, the town is perhaps best known, if at all, as one of Germany’s “oldest” municipalities, a result of the collapse of the region’s industry and relocation of many from its younger generations. Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is a still considerable GDR-era imprint on the town and that’s what I went to find on this field trip.

Radio GDR Podcast: Christa Wolf’s “They Divided The Sky”

I was recently able to sit down with Dr. Luise von Flotow, a professor in the University of Ottawa’s School of Translation and Interpretation, to discuss They Divided The Sky her excellent English language translation of GDR author Christa Wolf’s 1963 novel Der geteilte Himmel. Our chat is now online through Radio GDR, the English-language podcast dedicated to all things East German and you can find it here: https://radiogdr.com/they-divided-the-sky-christa-wolf-episode-12/ 

Wolf’s novel is great place for those looking to get a sense of everyday life in the GDR during the “Construction Years” of the late 1950s and early 1960s and Dr. von Flotow was able to share some interesting insight into the work, its translation history and why it remains a vital piece of GDR culture.

Schwedt: “A Sanssouci of Socialism”

East German city planning is a particular interest of mine because here the frictions between the utopian aspects of the socialist project and the concrete realities of daily life in the GDR are revealed in a most telling way. East German leaders were determined to create the “new socialist personality” (their version of the Homo Sovieticus) and saw in city planning another tool to facilitate this goal. At the centre of these efforts were four so-called “socialist cities”, towns planned from the ground up and, theoretically at least, built in such a way as to enable its citizens to live their lives in conformity with the values and priorities of the state’s socialist ideology. Over the past number of years, I managed to visit three of these several times (Eisenhüttenstadt, Hoyerswerda and Halle-Neustadt), but had never made it to the fourth, Schwedt. That changed this past April when I was able to spend a day in this town in the lovely Uckermark region to the north-east of Berlin.

Public Art from GDR Era, Pt. 1

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My guide in Schwedt was Dr. Johanna Goldberg, a resident of the town since 1969 and someone who will be familiar to regular readers as the subject of several recent posts. My hope was that she would be able to give me a personal take on Schwedt’s history and I was not disappointed. Before heading out for my tour, however, I gave a close read to Dr. Philipp Springer’s Verbaute Träume: Herrschaft, Stadtentwicklung und Lebensrealität in der sozialistischen Industriestadt Schwedt (Blocked Dreams: Power, City Planning and Daily Life in the Socialist Industrial Centre of Schwedt – Ch. Links Verlag, 2006), a detailed look at the development of this “socialist city” and source of many of the facts laid out here.

The Hartha They Fall: After the Wende in the eastern German Provinz

During my year teaching English in Leipzig in 1999, the school I worked for held the contract for retraining groups of the long-term unemployed both in Leipzig itself and in Hartha, a town about 75 kilometres to the southeast. This was not a coveted gig as instruction began at 7:30 am, a starting time that meant one had to leave the city by 6:00 am the latest. As low man on the totem pole, I was assigned the Hartha gig shortly after my arrival in January. Though I grumbled at first, my assignment to “middle Saxony” turned out to be a blessing in disguise for there I was exposed to a completely different reality than the one I was experiencing in Leipzig. In Hartha the news reports about rural eastern Germany and aspects of GDR history came to life. Whether it was the “flight of the youth”, the rise of neo-Nazi youth culture or the rocky road on the way to the new  economic order, Hartha offered perspectives that I couldn’t get in the city.

The video below is a portrait of the town that was shot by the film club at a Hartha elementary school in 1982. For scenes of town life, skip to the 1:30 mark. The film is remarkable for the candour of local residents. When asked what it is they like about their town, one answers, “About Hartha?! At the moment not much! There’s nothing to buy in the grocery store and you have to stand in long lines!.”

Eisenhüttenstadt (2008): “We learned to build cities, not tear them down.”

In 2008 I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Marcus Funck, my friend and colleague from the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies to lead a study tour of Canadian graduate students to the former-East. The central theme of our trip was transformation and one of our aims was to expose the group to what this process had been like not only in the major cities such as Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden, but in smaller centres as well. Given the way in which Eisenhüttenstadt had been connected to the old regime, we were confident that including it in the itinerary would be useful and I’m pleased to say that we were not disappointed.

Children are our future: Stained glass from 1950s by Walter Womacka in former daycare centre (photo: author).

Tom Hanks and I in Eisenhüttenstadt

Until a few years ago, I could tell my stories about Eisenhüttenstadt and 99% of people wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Then Tom Hanks went and ruined it. After the actor’s 2011 visit, and subsequent storytelling of it on the Letterman Show, “Iron Hut City” now occupies a tiny space in the popular consciousness and even the local tourism board has gotten into the action creating an unintentionally amusing video that uses Hanks’ visit as a jumping off point to lure visitors to eastern Brandenburg, an endeavour likely to bear little fruit.

Which is not to denigrate Eisenhüttenstadt. While it may have little to attract the average tourist, those with a passion for architecture, city planning and East German history will find much to explore. Over the years, I have the opportunity to visit “Hütte” four times and In this week’s post I’ll give a bit of background on the city history and share my experiences exploring the German Democratic Republic’s first “socialist city”.

1987 photo of Eisenhüttenstadt’s main street, Leninallee, which leads to the city’s steel mill (photo: Peukert).