K.D. Wolff in 1968

Last week at Kennedy Airport US authorities refused entry to radical — and fairly prestigious — German publisher Karl-Dietrich Wolff, better known as K.D. Wolff, who had been invited here to speak at a conference at Rutgers University, and another at Vassar College.

“They filtered me out of the line right away,” Wolff recounts in a Guardian report by Alison Flood. “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. … They questioned me for six hours, and fingerprinted me and photographed me, and put me on the last plane back to Frankfurt.”

Wolff was a student radical, both in Germany and as an exchange student in the US when he was in high school, when he founded a Black Panther Solidarity Committee. What’s more, he had been barred from entering the US between 1969 and 1987, the Guardian explains, “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’.”

However, Wolff has been back to the US several times since that ban was lifted and never got any notice of problems with his visa.

So it’s unclear why, exactly, Wolff was turned away, but the two schools where he was to speak have protested, and so has PEN America, where the director of the Freedom to Write program, Larry Siems, says the denial of entry is “pretty disturbing and embarrassing,” and that PEN is conferring with its lawyers about how to rectify the situation. He says, “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. 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.”