Richard Kostelanetz
Stefan Heym (2002)
[I met him first in Berlin in the course of doing a general article on the literary scene there. Later I got to know his stepson, an American who willingly stayed in East Berlin, and his daughter, who was thus Heym’s step-granddaughter. When he died, I found myself writing a critical appreciation.]
Stefan Heym, who died recently in Israel at 88, was one of the most provocative, indomitable writers I’d ever met. Born in 1913 with the name Helmut Flieg in Chemnitz, Germany (later Karl-Marx-Stadt. DDR), he emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1930s, took an M.A, from the University of Chicago and began publishing fiction in English. He moved in 1937 to New York to edit the fellow-traveling newspaper Deutsches Volksecho. Enlisting in the US Army under his new name, he served in a battalion filled with immigrant literary men because they broadcast through loudspeakers and over radio, in addition to writing leaflets in various languages urging the Axis soldiers to surrender. Among his military colleagues was Hans Habe, a Hungarian who returned to post-WWII Germany to become a conservative polemicist; Eugene Jolas, who had edited the Paris-based, avant-garde literary magazine transition; and the writer and book publisher Peter Wyden, born Wydenreich, whose son is the current senator from Oregon.
Military service secured US citizenship for Heym. Returning to New York, he wrote Popular Front novels that got favorable reviews and were, in sum, significant enough to be mentioned in more than one history of 1940s American fiction. In 1951, hounded by the FBI, so he told me, he immigrated with his American-born wife first to Czechoslovakia, which refused him a residence-permit, and then to East Berlin, where he resided for the rest of his life.
What some regarded as his very best novel, Goldsborough, ostensibly about a 1949 miners’ strike in Pennsylvania, appeared both in the U.S. in 1953 and, in his own translation, in the DDR. (The last time I checked, more than 40 copies of this title alone were available on the Internet.) To protest American use of former Nazi war criminals in the Korean War, he posted his Bronze Star directly to President Eisenhower.
Heym continued writing novels, first in English for deposit at the Library of Congress (to secure international copyright, no fool was he), then translating them himself into his native German. He received support from the East German literary authorities (whose approval was necessary to publish there) and his wife established a publishing imprint (Seven Seas) for Communist classics in English, until he wrote a novel sympathetic to the 1953 workers’ revolt in East Germany. Banned from publishing in his new country for more than two decades, Heym repeatedly smuggled his manuscripts to West Germany where they became best sellers, and deposited his western royalties securely in Switzerland, where he vacationed.
Fined at home for publishing abroad without permission, he told me that he took his bankbook to a court that simply deducted the requisite sum. No sweat. In his obituary for the weekly Forward, Mikhail Krutokov notes that in 1979 the DDR introduced a law, aimed initially at him alone, of a prison term for passing onto westerners information that could be regarded as inimical to the DDR; but it was never implemented. A tough bird, Heym knew his prominence in the West made him immune to further state punishment. Every time he left East Germany, as he often did, usually to publicize his books or give interviews on West German television, he incurred the risk that the authorities would punish him as they punished his friend the poet Wolf Bierman—simply not allow him to return home. Courage Heym had in abundance.
“Why don’t you live in West Berlin,” I asked him two decades ago at his house in East Berlin near the river in Grünau (the site of the rowing races memorialized in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia)? “I don’t want to live in an American colony.” Why do you live here? The experience of living in a country that was socialist in name but not in fact inspired his fiction, he added, as indeed it apparently did. So did his experience of American literature, his German prose exhibiting a conversational ease rare in German literary writing. One repeated theme was the conflict between strong individuals and larger institutional powers—an Ayn Randian theme incidentally reflecting his own life.
“Who can tell me about your last days in New York,” I asked. “The FBI,” he replied in perfect American English. Are you sure? Yes. Did you ever get your FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act? I’m no longer a US citizen. I suspect you still are. Why? Did you ever take East German citizenship? I wouldn’t do that. It’s hard to lose US citizenship, I replied, advising him to write my Greenwich Village swimming pool buddy, the lawyer Leonard Boudin, who had experience helping sometime Reds negotiate with the US government. Heym must have done so, because I remember reading in the New York Times about a large package of paper arriving directly from Washington in his Grunau house. Enjoying the image of some FBI shulbs in hindquarters gathering paper with lots of black-out, I hoped he put those files to the best literary uses. Too bad neither the Nazis nor the Stasi were vulnerable to the FOIA, because they too reportedly had files on him.
His Cornell-educated stepson, Dave Gelbin, came to live in East Berlin in the mid-50s and stayed when he married an East German woman. Their daughter, whom I met in the East Berlin synagogue on Yom Kippur, spoke rough American English even though she had never visited a “nonsocialist country,” as she put it, because her “parents spoke American at home.” She got some of her first jobs from East Germans who had, like her step-grandfather, spent the war years in English-speaking countries and out of nostalgia liked to speak English with her. Eventually, once freed of Communist control, she obtained the U.S. citizenship that her step-grandfather had inadvertently retained. To East Germans, the Heyms would always be ex-Americans. The DDR chief, Walter Ulbrecht, reportedly once called him “an American writer with a DDR passport.”
When the Wall came down, Heym, still no fan of Western Capitalism, became active in the remnant of the East German Communist Party, now devoid of the Soviet-backed functionaries. Running (or standing, as the British would say) for a seat in the first all-German parliament, he won. It turned out that the Bundestag had an established rule permitting the oldest member to give the opening speech each year. Accepting the privilege for the first legislature of a reunited Germany, Heym was as provocative as ever, not only in his words but in his presence as a Communist, a Jew, and an American—a triple threat, as we use to say in American football. I read in an obituary that members of the Christian Democrats all but unanimously withheld applause and that his speech was not published in the Bundestag’s press releases, contrary to custom. Soon afterwards Heym resigned from the Bundestag when his colleagues voted themselves (including himself only incidentally) a 50% pay raise.
The tragedy was that novels popular in Germany didn’t succeed here, for reasons I found mystifying, as they were not difficult, acknowledging stylistically such American models as Sinclair Lewis and Howard Fast, and often had Jewish subjects; but anyone who studies contrary receptions of the same figures in different countries often comes across such inexplicable anomalies. He was after all among the few writers acknowledged in the histories of two literatures for books written in different languages. (The other other example that comes to mind is Vladimir Nabokov.) I admire Heym now as a writer libertarian in temperament who made some wrong political choices, who will be remembered more for his heroic courage than his politics. Congratulate the world for letting him die of natural causes.