The Architects (European Classics)

340 Pages·2006·1.06 MB·English

by  Stefan Heym

The
Architects

» » » » » » » » » » « « « « « « « « « «
Stefan Heym
The
Architects
foreword by
peter hutchinson
northwestern university press
evanston, illinois
» » » » » » » » » » « « « « « « « « « «
Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois 60208-4170
Copyright © 2000, 2006by Stefan Heym.
Published 2006by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
isbn0-8101-2044-5
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heym, Stefan, 1913–
The architects / Stefan Heym.
p. cm.
isbn0-8101-2044-5(trade paper : alk. paper)
1. Germany—Fiction. 2. Politicians—Fiction. I. Title.
pr9110.9.h48a73 2005
823'.914—dc22
2005007762
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansiz39.48-1992.
»»» «««
FOREWORD
Every German Communist fleeing Hitler in the 1930s had a natu-
ral destination: Moscow. But life in the shadow ofthe Kremlin was
just as evil as it would have been in Nazi Germany. In November
1936, for example, the German Communist Ernst Ottwalt was
arrested and quickly found guilty of “anti-Soviet agitation.” He
was sentenced to a Siberian labor camp, where he died in 1943. His
fate was typical of many Germans who found in Moscow not
Soviet protection but a climate of fear and, after the famous show
trials of1936, mutual suspicion. As the purge ofGerman Commu-
nists accelerated, there were soon instances ofdenunciation ofcol-
leagues and even friends in the interest ofpersonal survival. It was
not until after the death ofStalin in 1953that the full nature ofthis
treachery became clear. In 1956, along with many others, Ottwalt
was declared to have been innocent.
This, one ofthe principal sources ofinspiration for The Archi-
tects, would seem prime subject matter for a novel, but hardly an
easy one in a society where censorship was rigid and where those
in power actually had been the survivors of this Moscow tyranny.
Fiction on this subject could be attempted only by someone whose
desire for truth was absolute and who could publish his work in
another country and another language. In the 1950s only one
writer in the German Democratic Republic was in this position.
His place ofexile had been the United States.
Stefan Heym was born Helmut Flieg into a Jewish family in the
southern German city of Chemnitz in 1913. His first published
poem was pacifist, and the poem for which he was hounded out of
school was an attack on German military policy. He left Berlin for
Czechoslovakia in 1933, immediately after the Reichstag fire, his
father having been taken hostage by a Chemnitz police force deter-
mined to make an example of him. He was probably Hitler’s
youngest literary exile. Taking the name Stefan Heym, Flieg made
his way in Prague as a journalist and then, in 1935, won a Phi
Sigma Delta scholarship to the United States (for Jewish students
whose education had been interrupted by the rise of National
Socialism). He studied in Chicago, learned English, became the
editor of a German-language newspaper in New York, and pub-
lished his first bestseller, Hostages, in 1942. He joined the U.S.
Army in 1943 and, after considerable bravery in the Normandy
campaign, where he worked in psychological warfare, returned to
the United States, where he used his wartime experiences to write
his second bestseller, The Crusaders (1948). From this point until
his death in 2001, Heym was to publish a succession of novels
devoted to questions ofrevolution and its aftermath, fascism, anti-
Semitism, the structures and problems of socialist government,
and, most important, Stalinism and its legacy.
From his early youth, Heym had been socialist in his outlook,
and this position was firmly maintained in the United States. His
American wife, Gertrude, whom he married in 1944, was a mem-
ber ofthe Communist Party. Fearful that they would fall victim to
the McCarthy Communist witch hunt that was sweeping the
States, the couple decided to leave for Europe in search of a safer
home. The reviews of Heym’s 1951 novel The Eyes of Reason (a
positive treatment of the Communist “takeover” in Prague in
1948) confirmed that the decision was wise: One critic declared
that anyone who reviewed the book positively should be jailed for
blatant Communist sympathies. The Heyms settled in the German
Democratic Republic around the turn of1951–52, and after initial
difficulties Heym was generally celebrated as an important antifas-
vi
cist author who had chosen a Communist lifestyle over the
“immorality”ofAmerican capitalism.
This favorable position was short-lived, however. Although the
author heartily disapproved of numerous aspects of the United
States, in particular its role in the Korean War, he soon began to
question aspects of life and politics in the GDR. After the half-
hearted East German uprising on June 17, 1953, he took on a
high-profile role as an advocate of socialism and a castigator of
those who were failing it. His regular newspaper column, in which
he boldly exposed inadequacies in local and national government,
may have won him wide acclaim, but it also brought him into dis-
favor.The knowledge that he was writing a novel about the June
uprising gave the authorities even greater cause for concern. Heym
completed the novel in English in 1958and then set about translat-
ing it into German so that he could have a response from the so-
called cultural functionaries—those in charge of cultural affairs
and responsible for overseeing all aspects of book production.
Their response was negative and angry. Heym decided to leave the
novel and wait for better political times. His view ofthe events was
shifting anyway, so he turned instead to newspaper articles, short
stories, and a novel on an earlier German revolution, that of1848.
Novels on historical events have been a standard form ofescape
for writers living under censorship, but in this case the author put
surprisingly little between the lines. Possibly because it was his
first historical novel, Heym held closely to his sources and,
through extensive and detailed research, brought alive an earlier
epoch in which widespread hopes ofliberal reform had temporar-
ily flourished and then had been crushed. In the course ofcompo-
sition, however, momentous events were taking place in Germany.
On August 13, 1961, the East German authorities built a wall
across Berlin, ostensibly to prevent infiltration of “capitalist
agents” but in reality to block the ever-increasing number of East
vii
Germans seeking a better life in the West. Heym held ambivalent
feelings about the Wall in its earliest years, although he later called
for its removal. It did, however, raise further unease in his mind
about government policy and the future of socialism. Before the
publication of Lenz in 1963 he had embarked on the study of a
subject that was to retain his interest for the following four
decades: Stalinism.
Stalin may now be recognized as one of the most brutal dicta-
tors of the twentieth century, but for many years after the Second
World War he was celebrated in East Germany as the heroic figure
who had liberated the country from Hitler’s tyranny. All the mem-
bers ofthe Politburo, the center ofpower in the GDR, had been in
exile in Moscow and were indebted to the USSR for their sur-
vival—and, moreover, their continuing survival, since it had been
the Soviet army that had quelled the uprising in 1953 and that
maintained a substantial presence in the country. The most famous
street under reconstruction in East Berlin carried Stalin’s name.
His death in March 1953was thus greeted with widespread official
mourning.
By 1956, however, the situation had changed dramatically.
Nikita Khrushchev, in a supposedly secret speech to the Twentieth
Congress ofthe Communist Party ofthe Soviet Union, denounced
Stalin for incompetence and a succession of crimes against the
Party. His brutal purges, previously regarded as necessary, were
branded as monstrous and completely unjustifiable, and so began
the rehabilitation of numerous prominent individuals, many of
whom had actually “confessed” to their supposed crimes. Most of
them had already been executed or had died in labor camps, but
some did return—including to East Germany.
The government of the GDR clearly knew the nature and
something of the scale of Stalin’s brutality, but admitting that
knowledge was not in their interests. All ofthem had been shaped
viii
bythe Stalinist approach to dissent, and their own domestic poli-
cies were repressive and inflexible. Now forced into following the
lead of their Soviet masters, they allowed a modest liberalization,
especially in the arts, but this “thaw”proved short-lived. The rela-
tive freedom permitted in Soviet society, which culminated in
Solzhenitsyn’s shocking portrayal oflife in a camp, One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), did not take place in the GDR.
Even when Gorbachev began his reforms many years later (and
full-scale rehabilitation of those falsely accused under Stalin took
place in the Soviet Union), the GDR maintained an unapologetic
stance.
Heym heard of Khrushchev’s revelations before most others.
Details of the speech were suppressed in the GDR (it was never
officially published), but Heym had access to the New York Times,
which provided the key details. Not until Heym’s private diary
becomes available—thirty years after his death—will we know the
point at which he became determined to write against the perver-
sions ofStalin’s megalomania. In view ofthe space he was later to
accord aspects of Stalinism in his work, it is surprising that he
wrote nothing substantial in the late 1950s.It may well have been
Solzhenitsyn’s novel that proved the spark, for Heym’s first ques-
tioning of Stalin’s legacy comes in an unpublished essay of late
1962, followed by an outline of a novel, The Architects, early in
1963.
Heym presented his massive personal archive to the University
of Cambridge, England, in 1992, and we therefore can follow the
precise stages ofcomposition. First, there is a rough, handwritten
sketch ofthe plot, probably written around May or June 1963. The
essence ofthe story is all here, and the author clearly had heard the
fate of the writer Ernst Ottwalt by this point; there is then a
longer, typed version that carries a date of July 30, 1963, and
finally a substantial outline dated November 1. The archive carries
ix