Looking Backward, Autobiographically
It’s reached that time again, a time to look forward but also, for an old geezer like me, to look backward. Being 96 for a while yet (until March), I can permit myself some retrospection (while noting that those two digits, if only reversed and embodied, might well have been greatly preferable.
Wot-the-hell, while I can still enjoy each new spring and fall and even a snowy winter (if I ever see one again), why shouldn’t I review the many happenings I observed or was part of – the worst of them, luckily, from a distance. (But if you’ve read my “Crossing the River” or “A Socialist Defector” you can skip all that follows.)
I’m old enough to remember, just barely, the Great Depression: lines of shabby men waiting for free soup, better-dressed men selling apples on streetcorners, miles of evil-smelling, self-made shacks in a Hooverville near Newark.
A few years later, with my cousin at Times Square, I recall collecting money to “Save Madrid!” – and admiring the Soviets for trying to help do just that, alone (with Mexico) for two years against all the other countries. (And, also largely alone, for bypassing the Depression, building the giant Dnepropetrovsk dam and the model Moscow marble subway stations at New York’s World Fair.
In February 1937 I recall the movie newsreel with happy, unshaven sit-down strikers at GM in Flint, waving from the factory windows in a dramatic (Communist-led) victory which changed the USA.
And, in a friendly teacher’s room in September 1938, I recall hearing Hitler boast of seizing much of Czechoslovakia, with British and French compliance – and the tears of my Czech classmate Natalie.
A year later, as the only lefty in my class at posh Dalton School, I did my 11-year-old best to convince classmates that Stalin had to sign the pact with Hitler to avoid being hit from all sides; Japan in the East, Germany in the West, with the acquiescence of Chamberlain and Daladier as in Spain and Munich, hoping they might wreck each other. “The USSR needs time to strengthen its defenses.”
I triumphed later when Pete Seeger, in one of his first concerts, had all the kids singing leftwing, CIO songs.
June 1941, when the Wehrmacht stormed in, I felt sure the great USSR would smash them. It did, but only after years of sacrifice and slaughter, perhaps 27 million dead, untold destruction – while we in safe but darkened, rationed New York felt deep fear – and then enthusiasm as the tide turned.
Saddened and worried by the death of the only president I had ever known, I rejoiced at the photo of the GI-Red Army handshake on a broken Elbe bridge, not dreaming that, 25 years later, I would be commemorating that event at the bridge at Torgau.
Grateful that V-E Day against Germany and V-J Day against Japan saved me, at 17, from the draft and the war – and from a fate like that of my cousin Jerry, taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge and, being Jewish, enslaved till his death in a Buchenwald outlier camp in Thuringia.
Spurred by Hiroshima-Nagasaki, post-war racist lynching and a big CIO strike offensive, I helped build a Communist Party branch at Harvard, covert in name but active against Jim Crow and in “Win the Peace” actions, like our anti-atomic weapons parade through staid Harvard Yard.
In the summer of 1946, in a lone hitchhike to California and back, I got to know more of my country’s many beauties – and many problems.
In 1947 I had a trip through France and wrecked Germany – and six wonderful weeks at the first World Youth Festival in Prague, with anti-fascist partisan veterans from Europe, freedom fighters from Greece, Vietnam, Burma, Africa, and new friends from Tirana, Bucharest, Moscow, Capetown, Prague – and shared with thousands my hopes for a new-born world.
1948 brought the glorious Henry Wallace/Progressive Party campaign, collecting ballot signatures and getting to know leftist Italian, Armenian and Greek communities plus, after our congress in Philadelphia, a bitterly-upsetting trip to North Carolina, meeting folks in neighboring – but divided – Black and White poverty and misery.
Then, at a last Wallace rally in Boston, joining to cheer Paul Robeson’s moving call, voicing our hopes, some day, for socialism in America. And then the disastrous election defeat, breaking all our hearts.
During the campaign, I marched to oppose the draft despite a media-inspired barrage of eggs and tomatoes, a chipped tooth (with police acquiescence) and several hours in jail and in court.
Despite my diploma (and my mother), my decision to join the labor movement – as a laborer, in Buffalo. I achieved little but learned a lot – about fellow Americans and a daily class conflict at every work bench, with a rise in militancy for a better contract broken by a corrupt union leadership.
I found a “home away from home” with the Lumpkin family in the Black ghetto and learned of hardship, joblessness, dope troubles and police violence – as a witness when one of the family was beaten and almost shot while protesting Jim Crow discrimination at the Canada beach trip pier.
I was at the great outdoor concert with Paul Robeson in Peekskill in 1949, part of a crowd of 20,000 which the state police forced to leave through a woodland sideroad , a gauntlet lined with fascist gangs with piles of stones, breaking every window in my bus – and all the busses – then blaming it on Robeson. This was actually a final attempt to save the labor-left-wing force, a remnant from the 1930s, but it was now smashed by the McCarthys at home and the Dulles-monopoly forces in foreign policy – and ten tough years of fear, imprisonment and aggression.
When the Korean War began in 1950 the draft, which I had marched against, was re-started, and this time I was not too young. After arrival at the Army base in January 1951 we had to sign a pledge of our political virginity. But the new McCarran Act required every member of a leftist “front” to register as a “foreign agent” or face five years for every day (!) of not signing. Nobody obeyed this nonsense, but I feared its threat, having been in a dozen such organizations, like the Young Progressives, the American Labor Party, Spanish Relief, Southern Negro Youth Conference and Communist Party!!! So I lied and signed, hoping that if I kept my nose clean and my mouth shut I might outlast the two years with no checkup. At first I had huge luck, getting sent to Bavaria not Korea.
I tried to conform. Only a few times, on weekend passes, I joined leftist youth in Stuttgart for a meeting marking Women’s Day, spent a short weekend with an old comrade from Harvard who had married and moved to Vienna, and had a long talk in a leftist bookshop in Copenhagen with a woman who had dared to bring anti-Nazi leaflets into soldiers’ bars in occupied Copenhagen (and, in Tivoli Park, met and fell in love with a perky, pretty young Danish woman.)
But they caught up with me, possibly because of a denunciation to the FBI by a fellow-student at Harvard, and ordered me to appear before a military judge the following Monday. I knew that perjury such as mine could get me up to $10,000 and five years at Leavenworth. But I had five days left!
After destroying all my mail and two leftwing books I bought in Copenhagen I ate lunch, packed some cigarette cartons for trading, took the train from Nuremberg to Salzburg, crossed into Austria (with a forged three-day pass) and trained to Linz where, after a desperate search and an exhausted nap in the woods I swam across the Danube River from the USA-Zone and, shoeless and disheveled, tried to find the Soviet Army HQ on the other side. I couldn’t, but the Austrian policeman who picked me up could. The officer there, friendly but reserved, sent me the next day to Soviet HQ in Austria near Vienna, where I spent two weeks in a cellar cell, under guard, and read twice through the only books they had in English, “The History of Scotland” and “Sister Carrie”.
After an unusual drive with Red Army guards, with picnic breakfast when we reached Czech territory, I was taken for two months to luxurious but isolated quarters in largely ruined Potsdam, where I got a new name, which I had asked for but then failed to think up for myself. Then I landed in the mid-size town of Bautzen, amidst 30-40 other deserters from six Western countries. I fought to better my German (tie score), learned to work a lathe and had the supreme luck of meeting my life-time wife and love, Renate, and her village family, which now became my own as well. (All genuine anti-Nazis!)
In 1954 I was admitted to the Journalism School of re-named Karl-Marx-University in Leipzig (founded 1409) and four years learning about German history and literature, also some Russian, some shorthand, some journalism, but mainly the GDR lay of the land – and the ropes. Valuable sidelights: the students’ weeks helping new cooperative farms with potato harvests and weeding sugar beets, or fixing tracks in an immense open pit lignite mine.
A sudden shock in 1956; the Khrushchev speech about the crimes under Stalin, causing hours, weeks and years of regrets and new thinking, but retaining gratitude for the efforts and sacrifices of millions in the USSR, above all 1917-1921 and 1941-1945 – with renewed hopes for a world without billionaires, profit-takers or the resulting poverty and war.
My major events: Marriage, honeymoon, first son Thomas and the move to Berlin – in that order.
Four jobs in East Berlin: with Seven Seas English-language book publisher Gertrude Heym (wife of the author Stefan Heym), then assistant to John Peet, the former Reuters ace (and Spanish Civil War vet) whose bi-weekly Democratic German Report offered positive reporting on the GDR while exposing former Nazis on all levels of West German society and government, and my learning journalism from an expert. I missed reportage on the new Berlin Wall, being on a Sunday visit to the zoo – and was luckily unaffected personally by its years of grave problems. After three years with the North America shortwave section of Radio Berlin International , I spent 1965-1968 building up a Paul and Eslanda Robeson Archive at the GDR’s Academy of Arts.
I always got along with colleagues, but never with bosses, so it was a life-prolonging event when, at 40, I became a free-lance journalist, occasional English teacher for scientists, film sub-titler, but above all speaker about USA developments. Due to my using humor and avoiding black-and-white polit-jargon, and my criticism of much GDR media-coverage I made some people angry, but somehow had a “jester’s license” and more than abundant gigs all over the GDR in all kinds of milieu.
But after the flourishing 1960s and 1970s I watched the GDR sliding into the exit ramp, lamed by aged, out-of-touch leaders and pressures from the USSR but, above all, hit unceasingly by two of the wealthiest economies in the world and, every evening, their masterful spin doctors in TV. Like Fox!
I was happy that the Wall barrier separating families and friends opened up, but very bitter about the swift, total colonization of what I still see as a noble experiment which, like perhaps no other country, almost completely abolished poverty, evictions and homelessness, payment for medicine, health care, child care, abortions, all education levels, while keeping prices on rent, carfare, food staples and necessities to a bare minimum. I also saw and despaired the bad sides, but where are they absent?
In 1994 I was finally able to visit my homeland with my wife, after a short painless briefing at Fort Dix. I found it not so very different from 43 years earlier. So much was so very beautiful, I met so many good people (especially the brave ones on “my side“ of still existent barricades), I loved Central Park with its Ramble full of old bird friends, and the green High Line on a dismantled elevated train section. I wondered at endless shelves of toothpaste brands, cereals, cheeses, vegetables, fruits and so many goodies. But then the shocks: the homeless sleepers on park benches around Central Park, the man sleeping in a cardboard box a block from UN HQ , the sad old ladies with all their earthly belongings in a shopping cart. And the cost of dental treatment or a one-night checkup in a hospital – price: $5000.
On later trips: I always had trouble with turnstiles and hideous subway stations and was unhappy about the super-commercialization of Times Square and its painted, living statues and stupidly costumed photo-beggars. All the same, my heart was moved by what was still my old home-town – though not enough to counteract a feeling of relief after my return to my slower, quieter, even sleepier Karl-Marx-Allee boulevard in Berlin. But I thus have two contrasting home towns.
Unhappily, I see great problems for both of them, and also for the countries and continents around them. I see a growing gap between rich and poor, and if theories of cyclical crises again prove correct, a possible economic depression ahead, conceivably worse than ever before. More certainly by far, they all face seeming inevitable ecological disaster. And worse, far worse and closer, though amazingly ignored, downplayed or accelerated by some, l see the menace of annihilating war, even atomic war. And bound up closely with all three menaces I see the rapid growth of the bloodiest elements of repression – modern forms of fascism – and already gaining strength in many countries.
Behind every one of these menaces I see a limited cabal, once of millionaires, now billionaires, sometimes rivals but united in their hopes of controlling not half the world’s fortune but all of it, determining the direction of every government no matter what its changes and overturns. Clusters of three, six, eight conglomerates now dominate almost every field of human endeavor in so much of this world. And they want it all!
Some names have become symbols: Musk, Bezos, Gates, Soros, Murdock, Springer, Zuckerberg, Disney. But the empires also expand with changing personnel: Merck, Pfizer, Purdue, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Mobil, BP, Daimler, Toyota, VW, Cargill, Unilever, Amazon, Meta, Vanguard, Blackstone… Most dangerous are such as Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Rheinmetall, Krupp-Thyssen… New names show up, also in North, South, East and West, but a handful dominates each field – and seeks conquests and expansion. And all are absolutely merciless in their greed, inhumanity and disregard for human health and life!
The world must rid itself of these infections! That is its chance! So I rejoice at every sign of working people’s rebelliousness – against Amazon, Starbucks, VW, outside South Korean and Parisian parliaments, surrounding Trafalgar Square, against French barracks in Niger and Mali… I am heartened to see courageous students at Harvard, UCLA, at Humbold U. and FU here in Berlin, daring to protest genocide and its suppliers. Can the majorities resist oppression? Can they join hands, regain peace, defying media demagogues, tear gas, water cannon and far worse?
What will the future hold? I won’t see all too much of it. But I can be grateful that, aside from losing my Renate far too early, I’ve been lucky to have had a good, always interesting life, spared from want and disaster but witness to amazing slices of the world and its history.
And I still retain sparks of hope that 2025 will not see more gains for the biblical Four Horsemen – War, Pestilence, Famine and Devastation – but rather more struggle, at least some motion forward and upward. I’ll do the very little I can in that direction as long as I can. Inshallah!
Best wishes to all of you – for good food, good drink, good books, good times and good health – and peace to all of you in 2025. Keep kicking!
Shalom! As-salaam alaikum !“ No pasarán! Pasaremos!
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