Profile : A Life of Controversy : Opponent of Nazis, McCarthy and East German regime gets ready to shake up the German Parliament.

At 81, Stefan Heym has led a life of confrontation, with enough intellectual hairpin turns, moral standoffs and brushes with the law to be the stuff of an old-time picaresque novel--and not a very believable one at that.

In October, the onetime best-selling American novelist was elected to the German Bundestag, and as the oldest member will be the “president by seniority,” formally the most honored member of the lower house of Parliament and the one whose opening speech on Thursday will set the moral tone for the next four years of government.

Yet Heym, a German-born Jew who fled the Nazis in 1933, is a reluctant politician--”writers are always called upon to support causes and to be the key figures that we do not want to be,” he lamented in 1990--and indeed, a reluctant German, who confessed in his 1988 memoirs that after tasting the Nazi horror of the 1930s he never wanted to live in his mother country again.

American book lovers will remember Heym as the author of such erstwhile favorites as “ The Crusaders,” a World War II novel that drew on his experiences as a U.S. Army propagandist--he waded onto the Normandy beaches with his typewriter in 1944, a few days after D-Day--and that in its own time was likened to Norman Mailer’s more enduring “The Naked and the Dead.”

But by the early 1950s, Heym had renounced his place in the American book world, giving up not only his U.S. audience but also his U.S. citizenship, and making a new home for himself in the intellectually stifling climate of the German Democratic Republic.

His defection ought to have been a major propaganda coup for East Germany, but instead of cultivating him, the Communist regime banned all but two of his books, recruited his own cleaning woman to spy on him, froze his bank account, kicked him out of the perk-dispensing East German Writers’ Union and eventually, in response to his attempts to publish in West Germany, wrote a special paragraph that placed his activities into its penal code. The laughably open-ended “Lex Heym” made it a crime to communicate abroad any information damaging to East Germany, punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment.

And yet the more the state harassed Heym, the more committed a socialist he declared himself to be. He remained convinced that East Germany could somehow be reformed, and he chose to stay there even when opportunities to flee West presented themselves.

This fall, in his latest caper, Heym ran for Parliament on the ticket of the reconstituted East German Communist Party--the successor to the very outfit that once banned his books and spied on him and is now reorganized and renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).

All of which could make for fireworks Thursday when he opens the new parliamentary session.

Many Germans believe that the hard-line left died a richly deserved death in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and are appalled that a socialist fossil like Heym should turn up in the Bundestag at all--let alone have the top opening-day honors and national platform that he will enjoy.

There have been rumors here that some parliamentarians, mainstreamers who have heckled the PDS mercilessly since its founding in 1990, will either walk out when Heym opens his mouth, ignore him or shout him down.

“I will speak to my colleagues in Parliament in a way that makes them feel that I am someone who wants to cooperate with them,” Heym said reassuringly, adding mischievously that he intends to invoke the spirit of Clara Zetkin, a leading Weimar-era Communist, in his remarks.

Zetkin, who at 85 was the Parliament’s “president by seniority” in 1932, gave a firebrand Opening Day speech that called for the creation of a Soviet Germany and rattled her fellow deputies so badly that they turned around and elected the rising Nazi Hermann Goering their parliamentary president in the very same session.

Such sheer cussedness turns off many Germans. “Never has so much been said and written about a political aspirant who has so little to contribute,” complained the German writer and essayist Henryk Broder, who liked Heym better when he was picking fights with the East German dictatorship.

Yet Heym’s uncompromising spirit has impressed many in his East Berlin constituency--the economically poor but culturally rich Prenzlauerberg and Mitte districts.

People there, mindful of the high unemployment and relatively low wages in their side of the country, have been deeply disappointed until now with the way German unification has turned out. They believe that, second-class citizens in their own country, they need a tough representative in the Bundestag to fight for the interests of the former East.

And over his 81 years, Heym has shown that he is nothing if not a fighter.

Born Helmut Flieg in the eastern German town of Chemnitz in 1913, Heym ran afoul of the Nazis at 18, when he published a poem scorning Germany’s decision to send advisers to the Kuomintang army in China. He was kicked out of school and blacklisted, and eventually went into exile when the Nazis--who wanted to arrest him--couldn’t find him and took his father hostage instead.

He fled to Prague, sending home an all’s-well cable signed with what would become his nom de plume, Stefan Heym. Later, he moved to the United States, took a job in a print shop and set to work writing his first novel in English, “Hostages.”

The book, a psychological murder mystery set in Nazi-occupied Prague, brought Heym instant celebrity.

Paramount bought the rights and made “Hostages” into a motion picture. But then the Army drafted Heym and sent him back to Europe, putting him to work writing propaganda leaflets and radio scripts calling on German soldiers to desert.

One of Heym’s leaflets is, in fact, credited with bringing about the fall of a well-equipped German garrison on an island off Normandy.

Heym said that when his homeland was liberated he felt a tremendous surge of hope for the world--but his next novel, the best-seller “The Crusaders,” suggests that his hopes soon turned to bitterness.

Set in wartime Europe, “The Crusaders” depicts not only the evils of National Socialism but also the corruption and pettiness within the U.S. military and even the decay of America’s founding, democratic ideals.

Heym’s disappointment with America grew during the McCarthy years, when he began to fear that the anti-democratic tendencies he had witnessed in Germany in the early 1930s were building in the United States.

His wife was a member of the U.S. Communist Party. He himself had recently written a novel favoring the 1948 ascent of communism in Czechoslovakia. He figured that it was only a matter of time before he was publicly vilified, so he left America in 1951.

He did not choose to go to East Germany, but bounced visa-less and homeless around Europe until finally the German Democratic Republic agreed to let him in.

But he almost immediately wore out his welcome, writing novels--banned in the East but acclaimed in the West--on such themes as freedom, truth and the clash between power and individual integrity.

By November, 1989, when more than half a million East Germans took to the streets of East Berlin to demand reform, Heym had become one of his country’s most respected dissidents.

“Friends! Fellow citizens! Take charge!” he told a cheering East Berlin crowd just days before the Berlin Wall was opened, urging listeners to achieve “socialism, not the Stalinist type, but the authentic type that we want to build at last.”

But by the middle of the following year, most East Germans had made it eminently clear that what they really wanted was not so much as to build authentic socialism as to go shopping with their new hard currency in the well-stocked West German department stores.

For a time, it seemed as if the aging perennial survivor had suffered one disappointment too many.

“With the Great Change, Heym lost not only his privileges, but also the very ground underneath his feet,” Broder said.

“Visitors who strayed to his house in (the eastern Berlin district of) Gruenau told of seeing a tired, old man suffering from a sense of meaninglessness.”

But then came the PDS offer that he run for the Bundestag.

Heym’s critics said he went into parliamentary politics at 81 not because he has anything useful to offer, but mainly to amuse. Indeed, Heym hasn’t joined the party that helped him to his electoral victory, and has had little to say so far about what exactly he hopes to accomplish in the Bundestag.

“Why must a person always have programs?” he asked. “Why can’t I just take things as they come, and make decisions based on my long experience as a writer and a political person?

“Why must I decide beforehand what I think about this and that? I cannot, and I will not do that. It would be so boring. You can expect surprises from me.”

Times researcher Reane Oppl in Bonn contributed to this article.

Biography

Name: Stefan Heym

Titles: Writer; member of German Parliament

Age: 81

Personal: Forced out of Chemnitz State High School after publishing a poem critical of German military activities. Completed high school in Berlin and studied briefly at Humboldt University before a warrant was issued for his arrest and he went into exile. Has lived in Czechoslovakia, United States, East Germany. Books include “The Crusaders” and “Hostages.” Married to Inge.

Quote: “You know, old age is nothing nice in general, I can tell you that. Its only advantage is, you know exactly where it leads, and also, you have experience, which keeps you in the end from doing as many stupid things as you did before.”