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No workers’ paradise, but the GDR wasn’t a prison, either: novelist Eve Ottenberg reviews “A Socialist Defector”

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A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee
352 pp, $23 pbk, ISBN 978-1-58367-738-4
By Victor Grossman (Stephen Wechsler)

Reviewed by Eve Ottenberg

“From the perspective of 2019, it’s often difficult to recall the cold war hysteria over East Germany. It was called a secret police state. Everyone there was said to be oppressively monitored if not actively harassed by the Stasi. For Americans, it epitomized communist tyranny. Then along comes Victor Grossman’s memoir, A Socialist Defector—he fled US anticommunism to East Germany in 1952—and the distortions about East Germany (GDR) go right out the window….”

Read the review at Eve Ottenberg’s blog

A Socialist Defector

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