January 2002 - Nr. 1
Author Stefan Heym Dies at 88
TWIG - German political leaders joined the literary world this week in mourning the death of Stefan Heym, a writer long known for his critical voice and unwavering integrity. The 88-year-old novelist died unexpectedly of heart failure Sunday (December 16) in Israel, where he had recently spoken at a conference on the poet Heinrich Heine.
President Johannes Rau praised Heym as a much-loved writer whose passing would be a great loss to German literature. The author was also remembered with deep respect by his former political opponent, Bundestag president Wolfgang Thierse.
In the 1994 Bundestag election campaign, Heym defeated Thierse in a district of Berlin as the candidate for the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the East German communist party. He resigned from the legislature the following year in protest over plans to raise members’ salaries. Thierse said Heym was one of those people "who put their whole heart into changing society for the better." He helped Germans confront their past and present in ways that were "often uncomfortable, always fearless."
Heym was born in 1913 to a Jewish family in the eastern German city of Chemnitz. He studied philosophy, literature and journalism in Berlin and worked as a reporter in Prague until 1935, when he left for the United States to escape persecution by the Nazis. After graduating from the University of Chicago, he fought in World War II as a sergeant in the U.S. Army. He was dismissed from the military in 1945 as a supporter of communism and later left the U.S. to settle in East Berlin. Although Heym eventually renounced the U.S., its spirit apparently stayed with him. "We saw him as somebody from over there, from America," a Berlin professor says of him. "His novels were more in the American style, Sinclair Lewis or Norman Mailer, than German."
By the 1960s, Heym had become a thorn in the side of the GDR’s communist regime, calling attention to its shortcomings even while clinging to its Marxist ideals. When the Berlin Wall opened in 1989, he was disgusted by the "consumer high" that seized GDR citizens shopping in the west for the first time. He joined the call for a new and better socialist alternative to the Federal Republic, a dream that died with reunification.
Among Heym’s best-known works are the World War II thriller Hostages (originally published in English) and Collin, a novel describing the crimes of East Germany’s Stalinist past that was banned by GDR censors. Heym’s publisher, Random House, has announced it will publish a new collection of stories by the author next year. He had completed the manuscript just two weeks before leaving for Israel.
