Creating the Base for Socialism (1945–1953)
FOR YEARS STEFAN HEYM led a Kafkaesque existence in the German Democratic Republic, where he lived and wrote his novels about people under socialism, but where most of his books were not published. Instead, all his novels were published in the West, where he became a hero and the most important spokesman for a free socialism in the GDR. In West Germany Heym was known as the ultimate “nonperson,” somebody who existed physically, but was not recognized as a person by East Germany's Socialist Unity Party (SED). In this essay I will attempt to show how Heym was forced into this paradoxical situation. I will explore the political forces behind it, and what biographical conditions led to this conflict.
The literature of the new GDR depended on the political conditions set by the ruling party, the SED, similar to those for Soviet literature during the 1930s. The first political slogan was not a Marxist doctrine but the general invitation “Let us conquer the past,” which invited accomplished exiled writers back to East Germany. Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Arnold Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, Johannes R. Becher, Willy Bredel, and Anna Seghers were all welcomed as pioneers of a proletarian revolutionary literature. According to Wilhelm Pieck, the GDR's first president, the new state wanted to integrate and merge all antifascist and democratic forces, no matter of what party or religious affiliation, no matter whether they were working class or intellectual, farmer or laborer, in order to establish a unity of all creative people (quoted in Keßler and Staufenbiel 1965: 73).