Faded Red: Story Of The Young American Soldier

What a journey we바카라�ve had over the past one month! Like a true flaneur, Uttaran Das Gupta juxtaposed memories and observations and interviews in a form which evaded all classification. It was a journey inward as much as it was to the physical spaces outside - from Anhalter Banhof in Berlin to Brigade Parade ground in Calcutta. As we said in the introduction of the first installment, Gupta바카라�s formlessness reminded one of WG Sebald바카라�s 바카라�Rings of Saturn바카라�. In this fifth and final installment we spend some time with the American soldier we met last week, who defected to the Eastern Bloc during the early years of the cold war.

A young American soldier was loitering near the bank of the Danube at Linz, about 180 km west of Vienna, on August 17, 1952. It was a Sunday. The name of the soldier was private Stephen Wechsler, and he was 24 years old. He was looking for a boat to take him to the other side, controlled by Soviet forces. Finding no vessel and fearing that his time was running out, Wechsler waded into the current of the river and began to swim across. 바카라�Many decades later when I visited the same place with my son, I found that there was a signboard forbidding people from swimming in the river,바카라� he told me. 바카라�It was dangerous, but I did not know it when I swam across.바카라� In the water, he thought of Ruth, a Danish girl in a red coat he had fallen in love with during a recent trip to Copenhagen. There were pictures of her in his expensive camera, but he had to abandon it in the river. He also lost his shoes and a box of coins from his travels around Europe.

The current carried him more south than he had hoped. When he finally reached the opposite side, he still had the letter from the US army바카라�s highest legal authority, Judge Advocate General. This letter prompted his flight to the East. Wechsler had received it at Fürth, in south Germany, where he was posted after being drafted into the army at the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. At the time of joining, he was required to sign a form listing banned organizations바카라�mostly Leftist except the Ku Klux Klan and imperial Japanese groups. The form declared that he had never been a member of any. Wechsler had been a member of a number of these, including the Young Communist League, the American Youth for Democracy, the Labour Youth League, and the Southern Negro Youth Congress. He had signed anyway. Two years later, he had received summons to present himself at the army court in Nuremberg. The army intelligence had found out that Wechsler had been a communist.

I found out about him from Stephan Ottenbruch, the manager of the Kino Babylon cinema in Berlin. We were chatting one afternoon about German filmmaker Franz Osten, who directed several Hindi films in the 1930s, when I happened to tell him about my interest in ostalgie. 바카라�Then you must meet Stephen Wechsler,바카라� he said. Ottenbruch knew Wechsler바카라�s son and set up the meeting a couple of days later. It was a sunny morning in mid-June when I rang the bell at the Karl-Marx-Allee address I had been given. But the occupant of the three-bedroom flat on the eighth floor was not Wechsler but Victor Grossman. 바카라�I never really liked this name,바카라� he said, welcoming me into his book-lined living room. 바카라�But I had to protect my family back in America from the fallout because of my desertion. The Soviet officer in charge of me asked me to choose a name but when I could not come up with one, he suggested this. I did not know I would be stuck with it for the rest of my life.바카라�

My interlocutor was a tall man with thin, white hair and a thick moustache. He was 90 years old and needed hearing aids to hear me. But his memory needed no aid. 바카라�We moved into this building in 1961,바카라� he recollected, 바카라�a few months before the Wall came up.바카라� By then, he had already completed his journalism degree at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. 바카라�I was perhaps the only person then to have studied at both Leipzig University and Harvard University (where he had majored in economics),바카라� he said. By the time Grossman reached Berlin, he was already married to Renata, whom he met while working at an automobile factory in Bautzen. Most of his other colleagues were western deserters. He would continue with his le Carré life, working as a journalist and a translator but always remained fearful that he would be captured by American spies. Even when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he did not return to the US. He would eventually do so in 1994 for a reunion of his class at Harvard. He was told by the US army that the case against him had been closed though no reason was provided for it.

His flat was perfect for our interview. From his window, we had a good view of Karl-Marx-Allee. 바카라�All the GDR rallies used to happen here,바카라� said Grossman, 바카라�also cycle races. Those still take place.바카라� The GDR was never a utopia for him: 바카라�I don바카라�t miss the bad things 바카라� I was critical of them even then. But our lives were not full of deprivation as many in the West thought, thanks to the anti-GDR propaganda. There were some shortages, but we always had what we wanted.바카라� I asked him about the Stasi. (I had heard rumours that Grossman, too, had been recruited as an informant.) 바카라�We all knew who they were, there was one who lived right in this building,바카라� he said. 바카라�But the surveillance was nothing like what that clever film, The Lives of Others, made it out to be.바카라�

Despite the humourless Iron Curtain, funny incidents were not uncommon. In 1970, during unveiling the famous Lenin monument at Leninplatz (now United Nations Square), only half the draping fell from Russian sculptor Nikolai Tomski바카라�s red granite installation. 바카라�It was like the unveiling scene in Charlie Chaplin바카라�s City Lights. The mishap was telecast live, with the bigshots orating and the band playing. Finally, someone found a ladder and ended the comedy of errors,바카라� recalled Grossman. The statue was demolished in 1992; the names of many roads have been changed since Reunification.

As I left Grossman바카라�s flat, armed with a copy of his book Crossing the River (2003) and a promise to return it the next day, I stopped at a zebra crossing. It had started drizzling. I looked at the traffic signal 바카라� it was red for pedestrians. But the red was a little faded; there were droplets of water on my glasses.

Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He has published a book of poems (Visceral Metropolis, 2017) and a novel (Ritual, 2020). He teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat. The travel and research for this essay were made possible by the Robert Bosch India-Germany Media Fellowship.