On the front line of the Cold War: Victor Grossman, 1928-2025

Victor Grossman — known in the U.S. working-class movement from his reports as author and publisher of nearly 240 issues of the Berlin Bulletin — died in Berlin, Germany, on Dec. 17, at the age of 97. Grossman was born Stephen Wechsler in New York City in 1928. The change in name and place told much about his story, which coincided with the history of the Cold War and included eight decades of political activity.

A Harvard graduate, who, like many young U.S. residents in 1950 had to join the U.S. military or face punishment, Wechsler wound up in the U.S. Army. He was stationed in the U.S-occupied sector of Austria, when he believed he might face as much as five years jail time for “perjury” during that McCarthyite period of anti-communist repression. 

Instead, he left his post and swam across a river to the USSR-occupied sector of Austria in the summer of 1952. The Soviet forces sent him to eastern Germany, which had in 1949 begun its existence as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This was the socialist part of Germany, and until 1990 was the front line of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and its allies on one side and the imperialist West on the other. That was before West Germany annexed the GDR in 1990.

In the GDR he learned journalism and began a new life as Victor Grossman. Though I had heard of his contributions earlier, we met for the first time when we both held the lead banner at an antiwar demonstration in the fall of 2002 in Berlin, protesting U.S. plans to invade Iraq.

His Berlin Bulletin explained, for a U.S. progressive audience, the political developments in Germany over recent decades. Because he was aware of how distorted the news is that people in the U.S. got about Germany — not to mention the Niagara of lies poured out about the GDR — and because he knew German politics so well, his Berlin Bulletin served to educate U.S. readers with a dose of reality. 

He told his own biography in “Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War and Life in East Germany” (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Boston, 2003) and in “A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee”( Monthly Review Press, 2019). A review in Workers World of the latter book can be found here: “A Socialist Defector.” 

Stephen Wechsler / Victor Grossman spent his life living under opposing social systems, but during his 97 years he was always on the workers’ side of the global class struggle.