Stefan Heym’s Radek

Stefan Heym, leading dissident of the GDR and between 1994 and 1995 ‘Alterspräsident’ of the first post‐unification Bundestag, has published what will probably be his final novel. Radek (Munich 1995) is the story of one of the leading propagandists of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1919, an enigmatic exile who later turned informant and co‐operated in the staging of his own show trial in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The novel’s reception in the German press provides an insight into the nature of the debate surrounding the new Germany: critics from both left and right used the text to focus on socio‐political issues. Neglect of the literary means employed to present a complex political subject has, however, resulted in a restricted understanding of the novel’s import, especially of its author’s attitude towards his subject matter. Radek is not only an interpretation of history, an evaluation of the ideology of which Heym has been a lifelong supporter; it also serves as a fictional space in which Heym is able to explore an ambivalent attitude to his own past as a major public participant in the socialist experiment which came to an end in 1989

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