Idolized by fans, his politics acceptable to the Party, Dean became a minor but potent player in the East. He claimed to know Erich Honecker and Gustav Husak. He made speeches and was honored by the Czechs with the Julius Fucik Medallion. He played concerts in Sofia and the Bulgarians presented him with the Dimitrov Medallion. Every ghoul in Eastern Europe, I thought, the whole bunch of them had honored and celebrated Dean Reed.
We ate cake and drank coffee in Victor Grossman's flat, and Victor told the story of how Dean, on a visit to America in 1978, was arrested and sent to jail; how the East German propaganda machine clanked into action and the legend of Dean Reed grew.
In a Buffalo, Minnesota, jail, Dean began a hunger strike and he wrote a letter about suffering to the people of East Berlin. In it, he crowed about the solidarity among the prisoners, but mentioned wistfully how he dreamed of eating goose, especially now it was almost Christmas. His letters were larded with the international socialist rhetoric he was so good at.
Obsessively, the media reported the details of Dean's detention: on November 6, Neues Deutschland, the official East German newspaper, gave front-page coverage to Dean's telegram of greetings to "the people of the GDR and Erich Honecker."
From his jail cell, Dean wrote to Erich Honecker. Joan Baez sent a telegram to President Jimmy Carter to protest Dean's incarceration. So did Pete Seeger and Dimitri Shostakovich.
An international incident was in the making. On November 11, 1978, the New York Times got into the act, reporting that a number of Soviet composers put through an appeal to President Jimmy Carter to help with the release of Dean Reed who was in jail in Buffalo, Minnesota. He was awaiting trial and had been charged with trespassing during a protest over a power-line construction site.
Trespassing? Trespassing? The infraction was so minor that even a German couldn't get exercised over it. It was more than a little embarrassing when the judge was revealed to have offered Dean his choice: a $500 fine or three days in jail. Dean made a speech and went to jail.
Every morning in jail, apparently, he rose early and, from his cell, he sang for the other prisoners.
"Oh what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day," Dean sang. It was one of his favorite songs and he often sang it when he was in jail. I could imagine him in the role of Curly; he would have been perfect in Oklahoma. Not everyone saw it that way.
"Give it a break, Dean," the other prisoners shouted. "Give it a break!"
Like Dean Reed, Victor Grossman was an American in Berlin. Unlike Dean, Victor was perfectly cast for his life. He did not admit to missing much by living in the People's Democratic Republic. Except maybe an avocado. And a Jewish salami. It was impossible to get a Jewish salami in East Berlin, he said.
I thought that Victor was maybe a little fed up with talking about Dean Read. Concealed behind his amiable face and the round spectacles, was a not inconsiderable guy. He, too, was an American in the East; he, too, had an amazing story to tell.
"He's an exotic here, isn't he?" asked Mike Wallace when he interviewed Grossman about Dean Reed for 60 Minutes.
"Perhaps, a little bit. Because, of course, there are not so many of us Americans around here, you know. Basically, I'm an exotic here, too."
"That's true. That's true," said Wallace.
"I'm more exotic than he is, in that sense," said Victor Grossman.
While we waited for the telephone to ring - for Renate Reed to call Victor back - Victor pulled one leg over the other, polished his spectacles, and told his story which, like Dean's, was pretty incredible, another tale from the Cold War, another story of an American who had crossed over.
Victor, who had grown up in New York, went on to Harvard. In 1951, during the Korean War, he was drafted. The army asked if he belonged to certain left-wing organizations.
"Did you?" I asked.
"As many as I possibly could," Victor said.
"The Communist Party?"
"Yes, of course."
Refusing the draft was illegal. Being a Communist was illegal, too, if you were in the military. It was Catch-22 and Victor kept his mouth shut, joined up, went to West Germany, and served nearly his whole year without incident, although as a Jew he felt uneasy: there were still plenty of fascists around.
Then the letter came. The Judge Advocate, noting that Victor Grossman had concealed his illegal affiliations, ordered him to report to the nearest Military Court. Victor panicked.
In his head perhaps, he played out scenes of his Court Martial. Senator Joe McCarthy's voice plagued his sleepless nights: "Are you now, or have you ever been...?" Maybe agents in raincoats chased him through his nightmares. Images of prison haunted him, of hardened criminals and Victor among them, a kid who grew up in New York, whose parents sold books, a commie, a pinko traitor.
Victor ran. Making his way to the Danube, the river that was still divided between East and West, he jumped in. Just stuffed his papers in his pocket and jumped, just like that, swam across, and came up on the Russian side, clutching those papers, looking to defect.
He couldn't find a Russian.
For twenty-four nightmare hours Victor wandered around the Eastern sector, holding tight to his papers, looking for a Russian. By the time he found one it was pretty hard to explain where he had been all that time.
Still, they took him in, debriefed him, and resettled him. He went to university and moved on to East Berlin, where he married Mrs. Grossman, had a couple of sons, and got down to the business of being a journalist and translator. He had an East German passport with the word" American" stamped across it.
As a Jew, he said, he found West Germany scarier than the East. In East Berlin he never made a secret of his Jewishness. He believed the German Democratic Republic made a conscious effort to reject fascist ideology. He believed the GDR made an effort to evolve a just socialist society. Victor didn't have to buy into these views, to accept the socialist package. He had grown up on it. He believed.
He settled down in East Berlin, where he wrote books about folk music and he took his holidays in the Soviet Union, and, after thirty years, Victor Grossman still believed. He knew that it was not paradise on earth, but his basic convictions were intact: in the East there were great gains in education and in medical care and the arts. Neo-Nazis and big business ran West Germany, Victor believed; I. G. Farben was a name that often popped out of Victor Grossman's mouth.
What about the Stasi? What about the prison camps? Perhaps, Victor said, perhaps they existed, a few of them, and they were not unlike the prison farms of Arkansas.
Leslie asked if Victor felt oppressed at all by the system, by the lack of freedom to express his opinions, for instance. Victor said that he often heard a wide range of opinion expressed in East Berlin. Maybe you didn't hear the non-leftist view in political meetings, but you heard it at the supermarket. You heard discussions of West German TV, for instance, and people watched the American soaps obsessively. There were shortages, yes, but there was music, theater, art, opera. There were world-class sports.
"I don't actually care much for sports," Victor added with a self-deprecating smile.
In some ways, I thought that Victor was a man in a time warp. In spirit he was true to his origins. You could put him in a museum with a labeclass="underline" Young American Communist Man, circa 1952. He had grown up when the Soviets were America's brave wartime allies.
His role models must have been those urban coastal Jews in America, the union organizers in San Francisco, and the New York booksellers, like his parents, the believers who hoped for a better way of life for their kids and for the dispossessed, who thought, whatever its drawbacks, and all systems had drawbacks, that the socialist ideal, realized, would feed body and soul.