Soldiers in the war believed to be forgotten and who only reappear after decades can also be found among the books. One such book was published recently. It grew up speaking English, its title “On smiling peace” comes from a line from Shakespeare’s war drama “King John”, its material comes from the Second World War. It is approaching eighty, its author has been dead for twenty years. Now it has been translated into German for the first time. The peace that Shakespeare smiles seductively but is full of betrayal has turned into a “Flaming Peace”, probably not only because book titles like to adorn themselves with alliteration, but also because there is no peace in this novel, but many explosions , Crashes, grenade strikes.
When the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Stefan Heym was not yet twenty years old, but he was already on the way to authorship. Even as a high school student in his native Chemnitz, he had caused offense with an anti-militarist poem. The local social democratic newspaper People’s Voicewho had printed it was banned in early March 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire. At the same time Heym emigrated to Czechoslovakia from Berlin, where he had graduated from high school and wanted to become a journalist.
After two years in exile in Prague, he came to the United States on a scholarship from a Jewish fraternity. From 1937 to 1939 he was editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine German people’s echo, but German-language journalism was soon followed by publishing in English. He published his first novels and short stories in the language of the host country. He knew Europe and wrote for the American market, which already had an impact on his debut novel “Hostages” (1942) about five hostages of the German occupying forces in Prague who are facing certain death in a communal cell.
Stefan Heym: Flaming hearts. Novel. Translated from English by Bernhard Robben. With a comment by the translator and an afterword by Michael Müller. C. Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich 2021. 480 pages, 24 euros.
It was also a great success and filmed in Hollywood a year later because Heym had combined the political-anti-fascist core plot of the novel – it was first published in German in 1958 under the title “Der Fall Glasenapp” – with broadly painted melodramatic elements. “Of smiling Peace” was Heym’s second novel. When he began to write it in the fall of 1943, he was already a citizen of the United States and a member of the US Army.
At Camp Ritchie in Maryland he completed the training program with which the army trained emigrants from Germany and Austria, including many Jews, in psychological and journalistic warfare and prepared them for deployment in Europe. There could be several reasons why Heym set his new novel in the North African theater of war and had it begin with the Allied landing in Algiers in early November 1942.
On the one hand, the German-Italian units of Army Group Africa had already surrendered in May 1943, and even if the novel ended before this point in time, it was clear that the story told of a defeat of the German Wehrmacht, as it had previously been – far more catastrophically – in Stalingrad had taken place. On the other hand, the film “Casablanca” came out at the end of 1942, in which, as in the film adaptation of Heyms “Hostages”, many emigrants appeared, and it had made the North African theater of war popular. And finally Heym, who had never been to North Africa, was able to make up for his lack of view by talking to experienced soldiers of the army and doing research in the library at Camp Ritchie, which contained documents on the course of the war in Africa.
At the center of the World War I melodram is a French lover
Above all, Heym, who had gone to the school of journalism, wrote quickly. The fact that he created the rough version of the manuscript in a few months also had to do with the fact that the form of the novel did not oppose him. He had tried the mix of current political novels and melodrama in the occupied Prague of the “Hostages”, now he tried it out in a new setting, with a greatly expanded staff extending beyond Europe.
He made the main characters the German-born American Bert Wolff, who as a former inmate of a concentration camp and Spain fighter has the experience of being a victim and defeat against German National Socialism in his bones, and as his counterpart the cynically arrogant Major Ludwig von Liszt, a member of the German General staff driven from its comfortable existence in Algiers by Allied troops.
This existence includes going in and out of the house of his lover, the French Marguerite Fresneau. It is the center of the melodrama that sets in, with the close-up of Sergeant Shadow McManus’s landing on the Algerian coast, the war novel has barely begun. Shadow is one of the many characters between a simple soldier and a general into whom Heym has fanned out his homage to the US Army. A large number of them do not survive the drastic battle scenes; every single death attests to the warning: one must not underestimate the Germans, even if they are wavering.
After leaving McCarthy America in the post-war period, Stefan Heym went to the GDR via Prague, became a praised author, later got into conflict with the SED leadership and supported the civil rights movement.
(Photo: Marcel Antonisse / Anefo / Nationaal Archief)
Marguerite Fresnau comes from the ambiguous Vichy France, which is staged in “Casablanca”. She can only become the heroine of the melodrama, which attracts the desire of all male protagonists, including the good American Bert Wollf, because she is more than an embodiment of the opportunism and collaboration of the Vichy world. There is a good Samaritan woman in her who takes care of the dead and wounded after the crash of a German Junker machine, as well as a sincere lover who can become the victim of a veritable betrayal of love.
Like all “Ritchie Boys”, Stefan Heym had received psychological training and instruction in interrogation techniques. His hero Bert Wolff, who sees interrogations as a spiritual duel and condemns the Gestapo methods in which the interrogated person is broken by physical violence, this knowledge benefits in the tough fight with the villain Ludwig von Liszt. As Arthur Koestler’s “Solar Eclipse” shows, interrogations in novels can be used to analyze the political world in which they take place. The young Stefan Heym did not have the ambition to develop such an analysis with a view to Ludwig von Liszt or the self-reflections of the anti-fascist Bert Wolff.
His novel relies entirely on the battle scenes and the game of intrigues between the Germans, the Allies and the seedy boss of the Battalion d’Afrique, which comes from old French colonial tradition, on the capture and escape of the villain across the desert, on the omens of defeat in one’s face German generals in Tunis. As soon as the war novel arrives somewhere, the melodrama is already there, driven by a very old figure in war literature, the woman as the victor’s trophy. Stefan Heym stages them consistently as a sexual fascination. Accompanied by cynical sayings, she is allowed to survive. It is no coincidence that they enter the port of marriage and resignation at the end of the novel. In “Of smiling Peace” the melodrama always has the last word in relation to the historical-political contemporary novel.
When the original English edition of the book appeared in autumn 1944, the Allies had already landed in Normandy. Its author left it in the past and only wanted to see it as a transitional work to his international hit novel “The Crusaders” (“The bitter laurel”, 1948). In fact, this work is not an important novel, it did not have to be and it did not want to be. But a contemporary witness. This can now be read in the dialogue-safe translation by Bernhard Robben, which does not evade the colportage elements of the original. An epilogue by Michael Müller provides brief information on the conditions in which it was created.