Stefan Heym, 88; German Novelist and Political Activist

Leading German novelist and political activist Stefan Heym died here Sunday of heart failure while on a lecture tour in Israel. He was 88.

Heym, the dissident from the former East Germany, who was a naturalized U.S. citizen during one period, spent most of his life causing trouble with governments on the right and left of the political spectrum.

Heym’s unbending belief in human dignity and socialist values landed him in trouble in the liberal Weimar Republic, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany and finally in a united Germany.

“I am looking for a kind of society where the human mind and the human heart are the most important elements--not the elbow,” he once said in an interview.

Heym had his breakthrough in the United States with the 1942 English-language novel “Hostages,” a bestseller on life under Hitler. He also was well known outside Germany for his best-selling 1948 war novel “The Crusaders.”

In recent years, the novelist, who fought as a U.S. soldier in World War II against the Nazis, was associated with the small Party of Democratic Socialism in eastern Berlin. One of his last major public actions was to take part in a demonstration against the Afghanistan war in October.

Heym was lecturing in Israel on 19th century German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and his career in some ways mirrored that of Heine, who was often ostracized for his religion. Heym had written a thesis on Heine at the University of Chicago in 1936.

The writer fell in and out of favor with the communist regime in East Germany, as its leaders alternately hailed him as a national hero and banned his books.

A fierce critic of postwar Germany on both sides of the Berlin Wall, Heym was critical of German unification in his 1990 book “Auf Sand Gebaut” (Built on Sand)--which led to him being attacked by an irate West German in a Cologne restaurant in 1992.

He was elected to unified Germany’s Parliament in 1994, but gave up the seat a year later in protest of an increase in lawmakers’ pay.

Born Helmut Flieg on April 10, 1913, in Chemnitz, Heym was the son of a Jewish businessman who committed suicide in 1935. Other relatives died in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

As an 18-year-old student he left for Berlin, where he studied philosophy, German literature and journalism.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Heym fled first to Czechoslovakia and then settled in the United States. There he changed his name to Stefan Heym to protect his mother who was still in Germany.

He edited a left-wing German-language weekly in New York and became a U.S. citizen in 1943 when he became a recruit in the war against the Nazis. Heym landed on Omaha Beach in France just after D-day in June 1944 and went to the front lines as a psychological warfare officer.

But once the Nazis were defeated, he was thrown out of the Army for his communist leanings.

He protested the Korean War and renounced his U.S. citizenship during the McCarthy era of purges against left-wingers, moving to East Germany in 1952.

The GDR welcomed him and his American wife, Gertrude, with open arms, but he soon became disillusioned. For years East Berlin leaders refused to publish his books and he became the best-known nonperson in East Germany.

Among his works published in West Germany were the novel “Collin” (1979), a bitter attack on Stalinism, and “Five Days in June” (1974), an account of the unsuccessful 1953 workers’ uprising in East Berlin.

Another novel, “The King David Report” (1972), deals with the problems of truth and censorship under socialism. Heym’s memoirs, titled “Obituary,” were published in 1988.

Heym married Inge, an East German, after his American wife died in 1969.