Ştefan Heym, ereticul prin vocaţie
Stefan Heym, the Heretic by Vocation

Summary/Abstract: Stefan Heym died in December 2001, at the age of 88. The article presents the biography and the work af this eternal dissident, a writer who never betrayed his art in favor of an ideology. An emigrate from Nazy Germany to the U.S.A, the socialist and antifascist Heym settled in 1952 in GDR, where he got in a permanent conflict with the East German communist power. Partisan of a sui generis socialism with a touch of liberalism (some talked even about an “individualist socialism”), Heym wrote with the same energy against capitalism and U.S. imperialism, McCarthysm, Stalinism and against the “real” socialism from GDR. He considered that the writer had the obligation to observe the truth that the autorities didn’t want to see and in the meantime he had to experiment through literature alternative models and political solutions. When his books were banned in GDR, Heym found his readers on the other side of the German border. After the unification, Heym remaind the same non-conformist, declaring that he could not part with the idea of socialism as long as capitalism will exist. A member of the Bundestag for a short period (in 1994), Heym was considered the spokesman of East Germans. But also West Germans had the opportunity to discover and appreciate some of the “ virtues of the heretic behaviour” of the fighter Stefan Heym.

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