Heym, Stefan b.April 10, 1913; Chemnitz, Saxony d. December 16, 2001; Jerusalem, Israel
German author who emigrated to the United States in 1936 and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Born Helmut Flieg, the boy who was to become Stefan Heym was forced to leave school in 1931 because of an antimilitarist poem he had written.
Two years later he escaped to Prague and adopted the pseudonym that was to accompany him for the rest of his life, initially only as a pen name to use for his journalistic work for German and Czech newspapers. In 1936 he went to the United States to study toward a university degree at the University of Chicago. His master’s thesis was on Heinrich Heine—a topic and name that would accompany Heym throughout his life.His first novel, the anti-Fascist story Hostages (Der Fall Glasenapp, 1958) appeared to much acclaim in 1942, and for the rest of his life Heym wrote as fluently in English as he wrote in German. He volunteered for service in the armed forces in 1943 and participated in the Normandy landing and saw action as a sergeant in operations in France, Luxembourg, and Germany. In 1945 he was one of the founders of a newspaper, Die Neue Zeit (The New Times), in Munich, but was recalled to the United States and discharged from the army because of his pro-Communist leanings. His second novel, The Crusaders (1948), became an international best-seller. The third novel, Goldsborough (1953), inspired by a miners’ strike in Pennsylvania, showed his increasing lack of faith in the democratic institutions in the United States and his lack of confidence in the role of the intellectual confronting the ubiquitous conspiracies of power. During the McCarthy years and against the background of the Korean conflict, Heym in 1951 returned his reserve officer’s commission and his bronze star to his former commander (now president) Dwight D. Eisenhower. With his American wife he migrated to Warsaw, then Prague, ultimately settling in East Berlin.
Heym never joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED), nor had he ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States. His critical and often controversial statements made him a difficult person for the East German political and cultural system. A prominent member of the National Associations of Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN) in East and West Germany, and a recipient of the Heinrich Mann Award and the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic 2nd Class, Heym did not accommodate his writings to the demands of the Communist system. Consequently, most of his novels were first published in West Germany, and after he was excluded from the East German PEN in 1979 (following the publication of Collin) his life was made increasingly difficult.
His most important books, Der Konig David Bericht (The King David Report), Ahasver (1968), 5 Tage im Juni ( Five Days in June), Schwarzenberg, and Radek (1995), are all historical novels that show both German and American literary influences, or even bridge the Atlantic—like The Lenz Papers, 1948 (East Germany: Die Papiere des Andreas Lenz, 1963; West Germany: Lenz oder die Freiheit, 1965), about a refugee Forty-Eighter who is killed at Gettysburg, and whose grandson returns with the American forces in 1944.
Heym, who had envisaged the German reunification already in a public address in
1981, not only lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall, he helped bring it down with his speech at a rally on November 4, 1989, speaking in favor of a new, better socialism before a multitude on Alexanderplatz in Berlin. However, he later denounced the impulse behind the unification as mostly commercially inspired. In 1993 he was made honorary president of the East German PEN, and in 1994 he was elected to the first unified German National Parliament. As the oldest member, he gave the opening address in November, quoting, among others, Abraham Lincoln.
One of the most important moments in his life, he once said in an interview, was the day Technical Sergeant Heym, Nr. 32 860 259, received a Springfield rifle. He knew then that he could—and would— fight back. Heym passed away in December 2001 while attending a conference on Heinrich Heine in Jerusalem.
Wolfgang Hochbruck
See also Intellectual Exile; World War II, German American Soldiers in
References and Further Reading
Hahn, Regina U. The Democratic Dream:
Stefan Heym in America. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.