I recently finished reading The Architects by Stefan Heym, which I would thoroughly recommend. Stefan Heym was a German Jew and a Communist who escaped the Nazis as a young man, he obtained American citizenship and fought in the US Army before returning to East Germany in the 1950s to escape anti-Communist purges. Up until his death in 2001, Heym published a succession of novels dedicated to questions of revolution, fascism, anti-Semitism and Stalinism. Once settled in East Germany, despite initial difficulties, Heym was generally celebrated as an important anti fascist author who had chosen a Communist lifestyle over the ‘immorality’ of American capitalism. This turned out to be short-lived and his often outspoken remarks were carefully watched by the government. After being denounced by Erich Honecker at a conference of the Socialist Unity Party in December 1965, Heym’s work was effectively banned in the Republic, the study of his work forbidden in universities and his articles prevented from being published. Although written in 1963, The Architects could not be published until 2000, after Heym had played a significant part in the decision to demolish the Berlin Wall and had moved to Israel. This novel was therefore a long time coming, a lifetime work that Heym had fought to the end to get published in both English and German.
The Architects tells the story of two architects, Daniel Wollin and Arnold Sundstrom, who reunite in 1956 after Wollin returns to East Germany after sixteen years of Soviet imprisonment. Torn between the architecture of the past, which in East Germany was mainly implemented by Nazis, and the modernistic teachings of the Bauhaus, the two men work to redesign the city for the Communist future, focussing on a project titled World Peace Road. But with Wollin’s arrival, Arnold’s young wife, Julia, begins to uncover the lies that hold her marriage together and the mystery behind her own parents’ deaths in Moscow many years earlier. German Communists fleeing Hitler in the 1930s found in Russia not Soviet protection but a climate of fear and suspicion. It was only after the death of Stalin in 1953 when this fully became clear, and many accused were declared innocent, a prominent subject in The Architects, along with the architectural content of the novel.
