Helmut Flieg (April 10, 1913 - December 16, 2001) was a German-Jewish 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 now-partitioned native Germany which was 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 c...
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Helmut Flieg (April 10, 1913 - December 16, 2001) was a German-Jewish 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 now-partitioned native Germany which was 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.
Helmut 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...
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