Stefan Heym

Stefan Heym
Stefan Heym (1982)
Born	Helmut Flieg (1913-04-10)10 April 1913 Chemnitz, Kingdom of Saxony, German Empire
Died	16 December 2001(2001-12-16) (aged 88) Ein Bokek, Tamar Regional Council, Southern District, Israel
Pen name	Stefan Heym, Melchior Douglas, Gregor Holm
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	German
Citizenship	German
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Period	1938–2003
Notable awards	Heinrich Mann Prize 1953 National Prize of East Germany 1959 2nd Class Jerusalem Prize 1993

Helmut Flieg or Hellmuth Fliegel (10 April 1913 – 16 December 2001) was a German writer, known by his pseudonym Stefan Heym. He lived in the United States (or served in its army abroad) between 1935 and 1952, before moving back to the part of his native Germany which was, from 1949 to 1990, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, "East Germany"). He published works in English and German at home and abroad, and despite longstanding criticism of the GDR remained a committed socialist.

Flieg, born to a Jewish merchant family in Chemnitz, was an antifascist from an early age. In 1931 he was, at the instigation of local Nazis, expelled from the Gymnasium in his home town because of an anti-military poem. He completed school in Berlin, and began a degree in media studies there. After the 1933 Reichstag fire he fled to Czechoslovakia, where he took the name Stefan Heym.

In Czechoslovakia, the only remaining democracy in Central Europe at that time, he worked for German newspapers published in Prague such as Prager Tagblatt and Bohemia and also managed to have some of his articles published in translation by Czech newspapers. During this time he signed his articles under several pseudonyms, including Melchior Douglas, Gregor Holm and Stefan Heym.

In 1935 he received a grant from a Jewish student association, and went to the United States to continue his degree at the University of Chicago, which he completed in 1936 with a dissertation on Heinrich Heine. Between 1937 and 1939 he was based in New York as Editor-in-Chief of the German-language weekly Deutsches Volksecho, which was close to the Communist Party of the USA. After the newspaper ceased publication in November 1939, Heym worked as a freelance author in English, and achieved a bestseller with his first novel, Hostages (1942).