Behind the Legends: The Cult of Personality and Self-Presentation in the Literary Works of Stefan Heym (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9783039114191)

Stefan Heym's very beginnings as a writer were a direct response to the threat of Fascism and the mass veneration of Hitler, and in his American exile he was to encounter the marketing and image machinery of capitalism and democratic politics. After arriving in the GDR in the wake of McCarthyism he was then confronted with the Stalin cult and the stark contradiction between the personality cult and the purported aims of the Communist vision. This book examines Heym's response to a problem that did not die out with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and which he treated as a universal phenomenon, and probes the extent to which he employed various publicity techniques to shape his own reception as a writer. In this analysis of an often controversial figure, the author draws on much uncovered archive material, and places close readings in a broad context; this is one of few studies that deal with Heym's career as a whole, from his beginnings in the Weimar Republic and Czechoslovakia and his overnight success in America through to his eminence as an intellectual public figure in the GDR and the reunified Germany.

Author: Hans S. Reiss,John Heath
ISBN-10: 3039114190
ISBN-13: 9783039114191
Publisher: Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publis
Language: English
Published: 10/07/2008
Pages: 179
Format: Paperback