On October 1, 2009, PEN American Center sent the following letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and  Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano urging them to review the decision to deny entry to the United States to publisher and PEN member Karl-Dietrich Wolff, and to take action to renew his visa immediately.

October 1, 2009

The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20520
Fax: (202) 261-8577

The Honorable Janet Napolitano
Secretary, Department of Homeland Security
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Washington, DC 20528
Fax: (703) 235-0443

Dear Secretary Clinton and Secretary Napolitano:

We are writing on behalf of the 3,400 professional writers who are members of PEN American Center to express our outrage that German publisher and PEN member Karl-Dietrich Wolff was recently denied entry to the United States.

Mr. Wolff flew to the United States on September 25, 2009 with a multiple-entry U.S. visa issued in 2000 and valid for 10 years, and was pulled out of the passport control line by U.S. officials at John F. Kennedy Airport. At that moment, Mr. Wolff was informed that his visa had been revoked at the end of 2003 by the U.S. State Department. With no explanation, he was reportedly questioned for six hours, photographed and fingerprinted, and then was forced to return to Frankfurt on the last outbound flight.

Karl-Dietrich Wolff is well known in Germany for his work as founder of the  publishing house Stroemfeld and as a former student activist, and he has earned an international reputation for his solidarity with civil rights activists in the United States—a reputation that won him a ban from visiting the United States between 1969 and 1987. That, as you know, was at the height of ideological exclusions under the McCarran-Walter Act, a practice PEN American Center had repeatedly challenged and was working to reverse. As then-PEN president Larry McMurty noted in testimony before Congress in 1989, ideological exclusion “abridges the rights of American writers to engage in face to face discussion and confrontation with foreign colleagues; it violates the right of citizens to hear the speakers of their choice and make their own decisions about the ideas with which they are presented; [and] deters foreign writers and others who hold controversial views from visiting the United States.”

Since the bar was lifted, Mr. Wolff has visited the U.S. more than three times before his visa was apparently revoked in 2003, including once in December 2001 and April 2002. He was on his way to the United States this past week at the invitation of Vassar College to speak about the civil rights movement and 20th century Germany, and was also due to speak at Rutgers University on September 29. No reason for the revocation of his visa has been provided.

PEN is deeply concerned about the resurrection of the practice of ideological exclusion since September 2001, a practice that has resulted in at least two other PEN colleagues finding they were barred from entering the United States. We have protested these and other exclusions and are plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the exclusion of Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan. It was our hope that the change of administrations would lead to a review of this practice and an end to incidents like the one Mr. Wolff experienced this past week in New York.

Mr. Wolff is a respected colleague who has done nothing but express his views both in Germany and abroad, a right protected by international law and enshrined and cherished in our own Constitution. Denying him entry to the United States sends the wrong message about our country’s commitment to this core First Amendment value at a time when this administration is working to repair the damage that a number of post-9/11 policies have done to the United States’ standing as an international leader in protecting and promoting fundamental rights.

We therefore respectfully request that your offices conduct thorough reviews of the decision to deny Mr. Wolff entry to the United States and take action to renew his visa immediately.

Sincerely,

K. Anthony Appiah
President

Larry Siems
Director, Freedom to Write and International Programs