Stefan Heym: The Perpetual Dissident

Stefan Heym was Hitler’s youngest literary exile. This book, the first full-length study of Heym to appear in English, outlines his exciting career, which culminated in his becoming the major dissident of the German Democratic Republic. It focuses primarily on his journalism and his novels, some of which have been translated into over twenty languages, but also discusses his earliest, almost unknown, poetry and drama. Peter Hutchinson pays special attention to the way in which Heym’s defiance of a repressive regime inspired others and paved the way for the new Eastern European literature.