Grad Reflects on Glory Days Behind Iron Curtain

Five decades ago, Stephen Wechsler ’49, an American soldier stationed in West Germany, jumped into the Danube River to begin a new life on its opposite bank—communist East Germany.

Wechsler records this experience and four subsequent decades of life as an American expatriate in East Germany in his new book, Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany, due for publication in the fall.

The book describes a life filled with adventure and decisions that seem simultaneously shocking and perfectly rational, given the writer’s somewhat rebellious personality.

Wechsler grew up in a liberal Jewish family in New York in the 1930’s, his father an art dealer and his mother an Estonian immigrant. Despite financial troubles, his parents provided him with an elite education that culminated at Harvard, where he majored in economics, focusing on workers’ unions.

Crossing the River is divided into two sections. The first is a chronological sketch of Wechsler’s youth and time at Harvard; the second, his years in East Germany.

Wechsler recalls those Harvard years as vibrant but somewhat unfocused.

“At Harvard…there was really little specialization. I was unprepared for the world,” Wechsler recalled in an interview.

Outside of classes, Wechsler found his niche among “the radical left-wing bunch.” He threw himself into the Harvard Liberal Union and the campus branch of the communist party, serving for a while as campus chair of the American Youth for Democracy. Wechsler also sang with the Glee Club and attended performances by the drama club.

Harvard was still an all-male school in the ’40s. In Wechsler’s Dunster House, male residents were allowed to entertain female guests only between 1 and 7 p.m. on normal days—with an hour extension over the weekend if there was a dance.

But despite the strict atmosphere, Wechsler’s undergraduate life was filled with adventure. He traveled to Washington for peace protests and hitchhiked across the country and to Canada over holidays and weekends.

Tuition was $200 per semester when Wechsler attended. He says he paid for his first three terms with a $1000 prize that he had won in a New York-area radio contest for high school seniors.

Looking for a more “proletarian” lifestyle after graduating from Harvard, Wechsler entered the workforce at a factory in Buffalo, N.Y. However, he soon grew disillusioned by the material concerns of his fellow workers.

Directionless but patriotic, Wechsler joined the U.S. Army, serving in Bavaria, Germany. At the same time, Wechsler kept quiet about his radical political views, which led him so far as to take part in communist May Day parade while on a break in Spain. But with McCarthyism raging at home, Wechsler’s political activities would soon become a problem.

One sunny afternoon in 1952, Wechsler received a package from the Judge Advocate General ordering him to present himself to the U.S. military court in Nuremberg.

Wechsler’s knee-jerk reaction was panic—he had lied about his past participation in “subversive organizations” when joining the army and was now threatened with a $10,000 fine and/or a five-year prison sentence.

Wechsler secretly decided to leave the army. On the same weekend that he received the packet, Wechsler left his army station and jumped into the Danube, swimming across to the Soviet zone on the other side.

“[Wechsler] was the anti-Holden Caulfield, a red antithesis of J.D. Salinger’s lonely, alienated teen traveler in Manhattan,” historian Mark Solomon writes in the afterword to Wechsler’s book.

As Solomon points out, Wechsler’s experiences are both idiosyncratic and generational. Like many radical youths of the post-Depression era, Wechsler was drawn to the egalitarian ideals of socialism and communism. His book provides a glimpse into the little-known generation “nestled between the highly visible Depression and World War II radical generations and the new left boomers of the sixties.”

Once in Germany, Wechsler was picked up by Russians who sent him deeper into East Germany. The cultural atmosphere in East Germany was vibrant thanks in part to the presence of other ex-pats and self-exiled intellectuals from the West.

Wechsler enrolled in the journalism program at the prestigious Karl Marx University. Comparing the experience to his years at Harvard, Wechsler says that “in both cases, we had good and bad lecturers, and we had hard-line dogmatists.”

After graduating from Karl Marx, Wechsler worked as an organizer at a clubhouse before becoming a professional journalist in the ’60s. He supported himself with writings about the United States, a topic of great interest to the East German public. And he assumed the name Victor Grossman, the pseudonym under which Crossing the River will be published next September.

Wechsler told The Crimson that even in these years there was western television everywhere in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), although the authorities discouraged children from watching it. The East German public struggled to reconcile competing images of cold capitalism with the glamorous America of Hollywood films. Wechsler’s background provided him unique insights into the mysterious United States in politically isolated East Germany.

While Crossing the River is Wechsler’s first major American work, he authored five books while in East Germany. The subjects of these books ranged from general American history to the history of American music up to Bruce Springsteen.

Wechsler also penned a best-selling autobiography based on his hitchhiking experiences during his college years and a children’s book about “a hippopotamus who landed in the GDR.”

The first section of Crossing the River, about Wechsler’s American youth, was originally published in German in the 1980s under the title Route Across the Border.

“Some people thought it was about how to go cross to West Germany,” Wechsler says.

With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and an inflow of American and West German commercial products, demand for Wechsler’s insights diminished. Wechsler sustained himself during this gap by translating and providing voices for 200 episodes of the television western series Rawhide.

It wasn’t until 1994, forty-three years after his departure, that Wechsler was able to return to the United States after being formally discharged from the American army.

“One of the things which made me happiest [upon returning] was the robins and blue jays,” Wechsler says. “When I saw the first blue jay, it really made my heart leap.”

His years in East Germany made Wechsler appreciate other facets of life in America as well, Wechsler says. He describes his early reaction to the presence of “whole lines of spaghetti sauce” in an American supermarket, which he found “overwhelming.”

At the same time, Wechsler was shocked by the gap between rich and poor, in particular the homeless people filling the benches of New York City’s Central Park when Wechsler visited in his first summer back in America.

“In the old days [in New York], there was much less [homelessness], and in the GDR, there was none,” Wechsler says.

Wechsler has mixed emotions about his years in East Germany, which were dominated by the repressive Stasi, the East German secret police, as well as the miseries of life behind the Iron Curtain.

If given a second chance, would Wechsler still have crossed the river?

“It’s hard to say,” he says. “What I can say is that...[the decision] made possible for me a very interesting life.”