Stefan Heym (1913–2001)
Author of The Wandering Jew
About the Author
Stefan Heym is representative of many intellectuals in the former East Germany who found themselves torn between loyalty to the ideals of their state and disdain for the reality. He was born into a secular Jewish family in Chemnitz. As a young man, he went to the United States to escape Hitler, show more where he worked for a while as a journalist. In 1943 he joined the American army. His first novel, The Crusaders (1948), became a best-seller. It was loosely based on his wartime experiences and filled with contempt not only for the Nazi government, but for virtually all of German culture. Distressed by the rise of McCarthyism in the United States and by Western tolerance of former Nazi officials, Heym emigrated to East Germany in 1953 and gave his enthusiastic support to the Socialist aspirations of his new homeland. His disillusionment with East Germany was far more gradual and, by his own account, more difficult than that experienced in the United States. In 1976 Heym protested the forced emigration of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann from the German Democratic Republic. Two years later he was fined and expelled from the East German Writers' Union for accepting royalties for work published abroad. Though Heym continued to believe that the GDR was the "better-half" of Germany, disillusion with the reality of socialism moved him to turn to his Jewish heritage for inspiration in novels such as The King David Report (1972) and The Wandering Jew (1984). In 1992 he became a founding member of the "Committee for Justice," a lobby representing the interests of former East Germans in a newly united Germany. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Courtesy of the Dutch National Archives
Works by Stefan Heym
דוח המלך דוד 2 copies
Ahaswer 1 copy
Keresztes vitézek 1 copy
Keresztesvitzek II. 1 copy
Keresztesvitzek 1 copy
Ar saprāta acīm : romāns 1 copy
A Glasenapp-ügy [regény] 1 copy
Korsfarerere 1 copy
Reden über das eigene Land: Deutschland I. Gehalten auf dem 'Münchener Podium in den Kammerspielen 83' (1983) 1 copy
Ristirüütlid 1 copy
Oči razuma 1 copy
Associated Works
The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain (2009) — Contributor — 57 copies, 4 reviews
The New Sufferings of Young W. and Other Stories from the German Democratic Republic (1997) — Contributor — 12 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Heym, Stefan
- Legal name
- Flieg, Helmut
- Other names
- HEYM, Stefan
FLIEG, Helmut - Birthdate
- 1913-04-10
- Date of death
- 2001-12-16
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Chicago
- Occupations
- journalist
- Organizations
- United States Army
Berliner Zeitung
Party of Democratic Socialism - Awards and honors
- Jerusalem Prize (1993)
- Short biography
- Stefan Heym was the pen name of Helmut Flieg, born to a Jewish merchant family in Chemnitz, Germany. He completed secondary school in Berlin, but fled Germany after the Reichstag fire in February 1933, shortly after the Nazi regime came to power. He emigrated to the USA and served in the special German-speaking unit of U.S. Military Intelligence in World War II known as the Ritchie Boys. He earned a degree at the University of Chicago and became a journalist for German-language newspapers, on staff and as a freelancer. In 1952, he moved back to the part of his native country which was then the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or East Germany. He published works in English and German at home and abroad, and despite longstanding criticism of the GDR, remained a committed socialist.
- Nationality
- Germany
USA - Birthplace
- Chemnitz, Germany
- Places of residence
- Chemnitz, Germany
Berlin, Germany
New York, New York, USA
Prague, Czechoslovakia
Berlin, Germany - Place of death
- Israel
- Burial location
- Weißensee Cemetery, Berlin, Germany
- Associated Place (for map)
- Germany
Members
Reviews
5 Tage im Juni is a novel that does exactly what it says on the tin: it describes the events of the five days up to and including the 17th of June 1953 in Berlin, taking Martin Witte, the president of the official communist trade union in the (fictitious) engineering works of the VEB Merkur, as central character.
The background, broadly-speaking, is that the government of the DDR had tried to tackle the economic problems of the early fifties by a combination of austerity measures and severe show more repression of what was seen as subversion or economic sabotage. The effect was disastrous: production fell, illegal emigration to the West rose alarmingly, and the prison population was growing out of control. In the early summer of 1953, the Central Committee was forced to admit that mistakes had been made, and many of the unpopular measures (especially those affecting farmers and small businesses) were rolled back. However, the requirement that the production norms for industrial workers be raised by 10% was kept.
Witte, although a loyal party functionary, is a conscientious man, and feels compelled to tell his superiors in the party that the workers will not stand for the 10% increase. They are already at their limits, and their wages barely cover their living expenses. Enforcing the increase will certainly lead to trouble. This message goes against the strong convention that only good news can be passed up the hierarchy, and gets him into trouble with the local committee. Meanwhile, nefarious agents of western powers (with a strong hint at neo-Nazi connections) are inciting the workers to strike.
We follow Witte and some of the people connected with him more or less hour-by-hour through the five days — Heym is obviously drawing on the American documentary/journalistic style of the time, with short chapters all headed with a date and time, interspersed with excerpts from actual documents (news reports, speeches, radio broadcasts, etc.). The writing itself looks relatively unadventurous — nothing like Bräunig's hardcore realism — Heym wants us to focus on the content, not the style. There are a few short passages of Alexanderplatz-style modernism given to one of the characters, the stripper Gudrun-alias-Goodie, but they seem to be there more to create variety of texture than anything else. This is a book that you read for its insights into how ordinary people get involved in political action, and how the political process can break down under the influence of inertia, cowardice and authoritarianism, not for its literary flourishes. show less
The background, broadly-speaking, is that the government of the DDR had tried to tackle the economic problems of the early fifties by a combination of austerity measures and severe show more repression of what was seen as subversion or economic sabotage. The effect was disastrous: production fell, illegal emigration to the West rose alarmingly, and the prison population was growing out of control. In the early summer of 1953, the Central Committee was forced to admit that mistakes had been made, and many of the unpopular measures (especially those affecting farmers and small businesses) were rolled back. However, the requirement that the production norms for industrial workers be raised by 10% was kept.
Witte, although a loyal party functionary, is a conscientious man, and feels compelled to tell his superiors in the party that the workers will not stand for the 10% increase. They are already at their limits, and their wages barely cover their living expenses. Enforcing the increase will certainly lead to trouble. This message goes against the strong convention that only good news can be passed up the hierarchy, and gets him into trouble with the local committee. Meanwhile, nefarious agents of western powers (with a strong hint at neo-Nazi connections) are inciting the workers to strike.
We follow Witte and some of the people connected with him more or less hour-by-hour through the five days — Heym is obviously drawing on the American documentary/journalistic style of the time, with short chapters all headed with a date and time, interspersed with excerpts from actual documents (news reports, speeches, radio broadcasts, etc.). The writing itself looks relatively unadventurous — nothing like Bräunig's hardcore realism — Heym wants us to focus on the content, not the style. There are a few short passages of Alexanderplatz-style modernism given to one of the characters, the stripper Gudrun-alias-Goodie, but they seem to be there more to create variety of texture than anything else. This is a book that you read for its insights into how ordinary people get involved in political action, and how the political process can break down under the influence of inertia, cowardice and authoritarianism, not for its literary flourishes. show less
A kind of irreverent religious fiction about the Wandering Jew, Ahasverus, who has been condemned to wander the earth until the return of Jesus Christ. The main characters are Paul von Eitzen, a hapless clergyman and follower of Martin Luther, Leuchentrager (aka 'Lightbringer' or Lucifer -- you see where this is going) a hunchback who 'helps' von Eitzen on his way; and Ahasverus himself, who debates with 'Reb Joshua' that is, Jesus about his passivity. All in all it's quite a fun and show more educational romp through Reformation religious history show less
This author led an interesting life. A German communist who fled Hitler, he settled in the United States and fought in the US army in the war, while remaining a communist. After the creation of the German Democratic Republic in 1949 he defected there, where he was for a while feted as a prominent anti-fascist writer, before becoming disillusioned with the Stalinist state. He fell out of favour and his works were effectively banned. After the collapse of East Germany and reunification, he show more briefly sat in the German parliament.
This novel was written in the early 60s and concerns the aftermath of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin, with Julia Goltz finding out that her parents were among those condemned and executed during the purges, and shatteringly, that her husband, their old friend, was the one who had denounced her. It contains some interesting passages about the nature of betrayal and how compromise with dictatorship corrupts human conscience and decency. But I didn't find the characters very interesting and there were too many digressions into architecture that I found a bit dull. So this didn't fulfil its promise for me. 3/5 show less
This novel was written in the early 60s and concerns the aftermath of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin, with Julia Goltz finding out that her parents were among those condemned and executed during the purges, and shatteringly, that her husband, their old friend, was the one who had denounced her. It contains some interesting passages about the nature of betrayal and how compromise with dictatorship corrupts human conscience and decency. But I didn't find the characters very interesting and there were too many digressions into architecture that I found a bit dull. So this didn't fulfil its promise for me. 3/5 show less
Die Welt der DDR lebt mit all ihrer Engstirnigkeit und ihrer Staatskontrolle auf und versprüht Ekel und Angst.
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 63
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 1,212
- Popularity
- #21,185
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 14
- ISBNs
- 215
- Languages
- 13
- Favorited
- 2
