Stefan Heym's Schwarzenberg

Meg Tait Stefan Heym’s Schwarzenberg : Actually Existing Utopia? Schwarzenberg was published in the Federal Republic in 1984 and widely inter- preted as a manifesto for a political ‘third way’ between state socialism and capi- talism; the novel was also said to contain its author’s verdict on four decades of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the German Democratic Republic. Commentators have tended to discuss what they believe to be the ‘political content’ of Heym’s fiction, and many regard him as a populist author lacking an interest in narrative form. Schwarzenberg is, as this investigation will show, characterised by an ironic application of socialist realist language and narrative techniques. A study of nar- ratorial modes indicates a sustained examination of German socialist traditions and history, one which goes beyond the readings of the novel’s West German crit- ics and contains implications which the author did not himself address in his own analyses. Schwarzenberg is set in the ‘Stunde Null’ of May 1945. 1 A small area in the Harz mountains has been occupied by neither the US Army ap- proaching from the West nor the Soviet Army coming from the East, and the reader witnesses the decidedly unmilitary means by which two US of- ficers decide how far east their superiors wish them to advance: they toss a coin. In the small town of Schwarzenberg and the surrounding area, a group of politically inexperienced local antifascists attempts to establish a form of social organisation in the vacuum left by the Nazi surrender, while the Americans and the Soviets consolidate their power on either side of the unoccupied territory and a band of renegade Wehrmacht soldiers at large in the mountains poses a continued threat to the stability of the region. The events which form the subject of Heym’s novel are historically documented. They did not sit well with the analysis of the post-war period dominant in the GDR, where Party figures and historians preferred to discuss events within a framework of broad movements and in terms of the ‘creative application’ of ‘scientific’ Marxist-Leninist insights by the Mos- cow-educated elite. The actual developments in the town of Schwarzen- berg are not mentioned in the definitive historical study of the mid-Sixties commissioned by Premier Walter Ulbricht, Die Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung , although they had formed the subject of an account 1 Stefan Heym: Werkausgabe (18 volumes). Munich 1998. Schwarzenberg . Hence- forth: S. 332 published in 1961 under the auspices of the Deutsches Institut für Zeitge- schichte.2 An East German history of the post-war years published shortly before Heym’s novel appeared referred briefly to “sektierende Ten- denzen”3 which had manifested themselves during the unoccupied period of 1945, ascribing these to “einer unter Kommunisten noch verbreiteten Auffassung, nach der Zerschlagung des Hitlerfaschismus und unter den Bedingungen einer sozialistischen Besatzungsmacht könne sofort eine sozialistische Räteherrschaft errichtet werden”. (E 44) The authors of the account alleged that “Karrieristen und manchmal auch kriminelle Ele- mente, die sich als Antifaschisten tarnten, schlichen sich vorübergehend in Verwaltungsorgane und Betriebsleitungen ein und bekleideten dort wich- tige Funktionen” ( loc. cit.) and contrasted these developments with the ‘norm’ in the Soviet Occupied Zone. Those antifascist groups which had formed temporary administrations surrendered “kampflos” (E 45) to the Soviets as they moved in. It was only with the intervention and support of the USSR, the authors maintained, that the development of a socialist state on German soil had been possible. After Heym fled Nationalist Socialist Germany, he eventually emigrated to the USA, where he became known as a best-selling author of popular fiction set in the politicised present. Yet Schwarzenberg , set in the Spring of 1945 and published in 1984, is one of only three novels which he wrote and published after settling in the GDR which does not fulfil the con- ventional definition of historical fiction as being set “sixty years hence”. 4 At first, western commentators generally assumed that Heym chose historical settings for most of the novels written after he settled in the GDR in order to avoid confrontation with the East German political authorities; after Erich Honecker publicly accused him of sedition in 1965, however, the author became known in the West as a ‘dissident’ and his historical novels were read as sustained allegorical accounts of life behind the Iron Curtain. Yet the repeated use of historical subjects by a professedly socialist writer living in a nominally socialist state was perhaps not as anomalous as it appeared to many western eyes. Historical fiction was considerably more common in the GDR than in its western sister state. For some authors liv- 2 See Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitte der SED: Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung in 8 volumes. Henceforth: GDA. Volume VI: Von Mai 1945 bis 1949. Berlin/GDR 1966. See also Werner Groß: Die ersten Schritte: Der Kampf der Antifaschisten in Schwarzenberg während der unbesetzten Zeit Mai/Juni 1945. Berlin/GDR 1961. 3 Karl-Heinz Schöneburg et al.: Die Errichtung des Arbeiter- und Bauernstaates der DDR 1945-1949 . Berlin/GDR 1983. P. 44. Henceforth: E. 4 The allusion is, of course, to Walter Scott’s novel, Waverley, or, ‘Tis sixty years hence. Edinburgh 1814. Georg Lukács takes Scott’s novels as the starting point for his analysis: Der historische Roman . Berlin/GDR 1955. Pp. 23-60. Henceforth: HR. .

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