Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

In 1963, Faust traveled across West and East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia with six other high school students and two group leaders. Faust was 15 years old and the group’s youngest member. The trip began with a week of orientation in West Germany, where they met local high school students and learned about East-West politics. Shortly after their arrival, President Kennedy delivered his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in West Berlin, arguing that anyone who believed compromise was possible with the Communists should come to Berlin and see the violence and oppression for themselves.

Faust was nervous “about coming face-to-face with communism” (184). In West Germany, many tried to warn them that their mission of building “peaceful ties” in East Germany was “naïve and even dangerous” (184). Faust and the rest of the group were frightened by their warnings, but the stories also seemed implausible, and they had trouble believing they would have problems. They felt their “greater objectivity” would allow them to “penetrate the abstractions of communism” and contribute to “reconciliation and peace” (184-5). Faust admits that this line of thinking was naïve; in reality, East Germany was full of secret spies and informers.

While Faust was nervous about “crossing the frontier of the Free World” (185), she had many other new experiences on the trip. It was her first time living with Black people as peers, and she worried about accidentally revealing ignorance or having “awkward” interactions with the Black students in her group.

The Black members of Faust’s group were highly accomplished individuals comfortable in white spaces. However, they were unprepared for Eastern Europe, where many people had never seen a Black person before, and strangers frequently asked to touch their skin or hair. Racial violence in the United States played an essential role in Soviet propaganda about the USA, and the group often faced questions about freedom in the American South. While they tried to answer these questions honestly, their existence as a united, racially mixed group did much of the work for them. Faust describes her experience with the group as “life-changing;” for the first time, her idealized concept of integration was a reality.

On July 7th, the group crossed into East Berlin. On the other side of the Berlin Wall, they were met by Roland, their “minder” and a student at East Berlin’s Humboldt University. Roland claimed that people in East Germany “enjoyed all freedoms because they were given all possibilities for development” (193). He called West Germany “a fascist state” and suggested the United States was “run by the Rockefellers and Morgenthaus” (193). Over the following days, Faust’s group and Roland enjoyed arguing, and he gradually relaxed their strict schedule to prove “the benevolence and flexibility of the East German state” (193). Fritz, the group’s senior leader, had friends and family in East Germany who met with the group and discussed the realities of food shortages, travel restrictions, and media bans. The stories were related in whispers, and the speakers’ fear helped Faust understand the dangers of East Germany.

However, Faust also began to appreciate Roland’s view of socialism. She had always understood freedom as freedom from things, like censorship and governmental dictates. Roland and other East Germans spoke of freedom to do things, involving rights like education and accessible health care. Some personal freedoms could be “sacrificed” or “postponed” in the interest of achieving “freedom from economic oppression” (194). While Faust still found this “an unacceptable trade-off,” she began to understand the communist perspective and “confront the limits of [her] own thinking” (194). Roland admitted his time with the Americans had also changed his perspective. He still believed in East Germany’s mission, but he no longer felt the United States would try to impose capitalism on them.

The group’s next stop was Prague, which was just two hours away but was quite different. Even though Czechoslovakia was still “a totalitarian regime,” Faust saw “a greater degree of openness” (196). Artists were resisting censorship, and travel restrictions were lifted. In Czechoslovakia, the group spent less time meeting with other students discussing politics and instead went sightseeing throughout the city. They stayed in youth hostels, where they met other travelers from around the world who were less envious of the United States’ political freedom than they were of “rock and roll and, especially […] blue jeans” (198).

Yugoslavia was again different from Czechoslovakia. The country was “assertively nonaligned” and “had determinedly forged its own independent path as a communist nation” (198). The president, Tito, fostered a “more market-oriented version of communism” (198) that increased the standard of living and relaxed restrictions on individual freedom. Instead of having guides, Faust’s group was permitted to wander freely. The country recruited students to build roads during their summer break, and Faust’s group joined these students, where they shoveled stones while Yugoslav teenagers sang about their great country. Faust was surprised by the “level of grassroots support” that she encountered among these young people; it made her commitment to the United States feel “shallow and wanting” (199-200).

Faust’s group spent two long days driving on the newly constructed Yugoslav roads to reach an International Youth Camp in Dubrovnik. Once there, she found that labels of East and West or communist and capitalist fell away as people from around the world became her friends. Experiencing the “complexity” of Yugoslavia undermined Faust’s ideas of “binary East/West, communist/free” (201). She returned to the United States still unable to imagine the end of the Cold War but feeling she had done her own “small part to accelerate that day” (201). Most importantly, however, Faust had spent the summer “learning and examining, suffused with a sense of purpose” (202). It was an environment that she hadn’t experienced before and in which she “hoped to live the rest of [her] life” (202).