K.D.Wolff refused entry to US
Posted on | September 30, 2009 | No Comments
The Guardian September 29, 2009
Alison Flood
PEN, the international writers’ organisation, has condemned the news that prestigious German publisher and former student activist Karl-Dietrich Wolff has been denied entry to the US. He was due to speak at Vassar College about African American civil rights and 20th century Germany.
The 66-year-old Wolff, former head of the Socialist German Students’ Organisation (SDS), founder of Germany’s Black Panther Solidarity Committee in 1969 and founder of German publisher Stroemfeld, was refused entry at JFK airport in New York this weekend.
“They filtered me out of the line right away,” said Wolff this morning. “They had a print-out which had my picture from my visa [saying] in big spelling ‘revoked, revoked, revoked’. They told me I was trying to enter the country with an invalid visa.”
He had been invited to speak at the academic conference at Vassar College because he took part in the beginning of the civil rights movement as a high school exchange student in the US in the early 1960s and founded the Black Panther Solidarity Committee. “He could thus share his biographical experience with the international academic community assembled at the conference, which features, among others, such prominent speakers as Angela Davis,” said the organisers of the conference, Vassar president Dr Catharine Hill and German Historical Institute director Dr Hartmut Berghoff.
They issued a statement expressing their disappointment at the denial of entry and their hope that its circumstances would “be clarified promptly by the appropriate authorities”.
Wolff said he had understood his visa was valid until November 2010, but was told it had been revoked in 2003. “They questioned me for six hours, and fingerprinted me and photographed me, and put me on the last plane back to Frankfurt,” he said.
He had been barred from visiting the US between 1969 and 1987 after he was subpoenaed to the Senate Committee on Internal Security and told Senator Strom Thurmond that he and “his like” were “just a bunch of criminal bandits”. “No one ever told him that to his face, and after that I had no American visa for 18 years,” said Wolff today.
According to the book Americanisation and Anti-Americanism, the hearing saw Wolff “indict America’s ruling class as a reincarnation of the Nazis: as the Jewish people in Germany, blacks were deprived in the United States of their language and culture”. “‘This is not only a private opinion of mine,’ Wolff lectured. ‘I’m here to represent all mankind.’”
But since the bar was lifted in 1987 he has been back “more than three times” to the US, he said. He was not told why he was denied entry at the weekend, and said he would be talking to lawyers about the issue, as well as to the American ambassador in Germany.
“The university is trying to get some video conferencing going so I can speak at the conference after all,” he said. “But I will not go back to the US before I get a letter of apology … Everyone who knows me knows I am one of the relatively few leftist leaders in West Germany who is really pro-America … It’s really very strange, the whole thing.”
Larry Siems, director of the Freedom to Write programme at PEN America, called the denial of entry “pretty disturbing and embarrassing”. He said PEN America would be talking to its lawyers about the issue. “The timing of the cancellation of the visa in 2003… suggests they went through an old list of the usual suspects and cancelled visas wholesale,” said Siems, adding that other PEN members including Haluk Gerger, had experienced similar things.
“We have been working hard to challenge the resurgence of ideological exclusion in the US since 9/11, which we consider to be a violation of the right to freedom of expression and of the right of Americans to meet with and engage with our foreign colleagues,” he said.
The German branch of PEN – of which Wolff is a member – said the move was “outrageous and must be interpreted as a curtailment of human rights”.
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