Speech OB 10.04.2013

Honoured guests,

Literary prizes are dedicated to the positive power of the free word.

They are a tribute to writers whose works transcend themselves, whose poems, dramas, novels and stories are untouched by time.

This applies in particular to authors who have fought injustice with both their work and their person.

Think of Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann or Kurt Tucholsky.

The man whose work we are honouring with this award ceremony and whose 100th birthday we are celebrating today is one of these important authors and personalities: Stefan Heym.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am delighted to welcome you all this evening and to celebrate the highlight of this Stefan Heym Week with you.

Dear Mr Hein,

Thank you very much for being here in Chemnitz this evening. It is a pleasure and an honour to present you with this award.

I would like to thank the Board of Trustees for awarding the International Stefan Heym Prize of the City of Chemnitz. You bear responsibility. Your decision is an interpretation of how we encounter Stefan Heym today. And how we should encounter him.

And I would especially like to thank Mrs Heym for her wise support of our work.

This year's award is deliberately unscheduled. On the occasion of the 100th birthday of its namesake.

Ladies and gentlemen,

In the best sense of the word, if I may say so, Stefan Heym was a notorious spoilsport. Whether as a schoolboy in a nationalistically inflamed country, as a soldier in the US army, as a writer in the GDR or as a senior citizen in the Bundestag of a reunified Germany.

As an 18-year-old schoolboy in Chemnitz, he writes:

"We teach murder! We spit murder!

We have great export in murderers!"

These lines are part of the poem "Export Business". An anti-war poem in a country where less than two years were to pass before the National Socialists came to power.

What drives him? He is part of a Jewish family. Is he reckless or courageous? A question of life.

He initially fights as a soldier in the US army against Nazi Germany. Stationed in the American occupation zone after the war and working as an editor, Heym then refuses to write an anti-Soviet article.

With his refusal, he renounces his position as an editor and his stay in his native country. He is sent back to the USA.

Later, as a writer in the GDR, he wrote books that were bound to be banned. He publishes in the West and accepts the punishment.

An interim ban on Heym's writing was lifted by the SED regime. Perhaps also as an offer of a kind of coexistence.

Signing a letter of protest against Wolf Biermann's expulsion is his response to this offer.

And even in his old age, he fortunately learns nothing new: his demand that German reunification should not only be realised politically, legally and financially, but also understood as a major cultural task, disturbs the image of blossoming landscapes.

Taking the easy way out. That was not his way. And he vehemently blocks this path for us, his readers, perhaps even his admirers.

In his writings, he wants to confront the follower, drag him out of the protection that institutions and abstract structures offer him.

He contrasts this with the responsible, free and freely expressing individual. As part of a society that is equally characterised by law and justice.

Heym not only demands this responsibility and then hides behind his work. It is the way he leads his own life that deprives us of any alibi for acting against our own conscience.

"Sometimes I want to shout at people, 'Don't look at me like that, I'm no smarter than you are'," he once said in an interview. You could take it from him.

It is sentences like this that take away the fear of one's own courage. Heym honours his high standards with the insight that no one is born a hero.

Yes, you can be wrong. Yes, one must not and should not turn one's own opinion into a rigid dogma. But the values and principles that form the basis of our perception and judgement must remain.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Heym provokes the human need to categorise, to classify.

In a 20th century so marked by ideological, territorial and moral fronts, in which black and white have long been the dominant colours, he draws in a variety of nuances. He prefers to sit between the chairs of East and West, capitalism and socialism.

His commitment to the USA despite his socialist convictions, his staying in the GDR, his seat in the PDS parliamentary group in the Bundestag.

He seems almost unreasonable at times. On closer inspection, however, Heym's actions were guided by reason. He recognised the boundaries, the injustice, the divisiveness, even in a united Germany.

His political episode also fits in with this. Which he was neither afraid to start nor to end.

Ladies and gentlemen,

We must not make the mistake of reading Heym merely as an author and personality of contemporary German-German history.

The temptation is there. After all, the world has fundamentally changed its face in the past 20 years.

Heym has always focussed on the individual, illuminating his work and his possibilities in the big picture.

In a globalised world, this big picture really does seem quite big. And the individual is becoming smaller and smaller, his impact and therefore his responsibility smaller.

In contrast, a chapter in the great textbook of these years shows us that the structures and institutions in which we live ultimately always depend on people and their decisions.

After all, who wants to decide whether it was the fault of the person who bet on the bankruptcy of states or the system that made this possible?

In your books, Christoph Hein, you also discuss with us how individuals think and act within the system of social, legal, political and, not least, interpersonal rules.

But you have much more in common with Stefan Heym. You, too, have written from life, got to know it from a wide variety of perspectives, as an assembly worker, waiter, translator and, last but not least, as a dramaturge and storyteller.

And like Heym, your writing skills and the success that came with them gave you a degree of invulnerability that the GDR had to allow.

But, to pick up on the second title of your famous book: You didn't bathe in "dragon's blood" either. With your criticism of GDR censorship, for example, you jeopardised this fragile security.

Together with Stefan Heym, you took the opportunity to speak freely and publicly in 1989. No doubt you also shared Heym's feelings, which he described in the famous image of the open window.

Later, as chairman of the all-German PEN Club or as co-editor of "Freitag", you were also committed to free and opinionated speech.

Perhaps this commitment is particularly necessary in a society like ours, in which the possession of fundamental rights and freedoms seems so self-evident that we are in danger of forgetting how to use them.

Honoured guests,

Today we are awarding the International Stefan Heym Prize of the City of Chemnitz for the third time. We are honouring a great son of the city and the prizewinner Christoph Hein.

I am very pleased to invite this evening's laudator, Ingo Schulze, to the front.