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 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. ( )