Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society
The King David Report (European Classics)
Recasting the story of King David as a study of history and political power, the novel is Stefan Heym's best-known book.
Work Information
A novel that uses ancient history to show how power rewrites narrative.
By combining source criticism with political perspective, the novel reanimates the king's story from another angle. It is one of Heym's most intellectually robust books.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Northwestern Univ Pr
- Published
- 1997-11-01
- Pages
- 254 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.02 x 1.6 x 19.69 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780810115378
- ISBN-10
- 0810115379
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Classics
In this retelling of the biblical story, King Solomon commissions Ethan the Scribe to write the official history of King David. In return for the finest cooking in the land and the wages of a minor prophet, Ethan must write a proper record, full of glory and battles, statecraft and honor--a tribute to David and, of course, to Solomon, his heir. But as Ethan explores the story, he finds another life hidden behind the iron curtain dividing past from present: the story of a David who seduced, lied, bragged, and plundered his way to power. Ethan wonders: which life should be reported in the King David Report? Written by one of Germany's most acclaimed dissident authors, The King David Report is both an analysis of the writer's obligations to truth, and an astute satire on the workings of history and politics in a totalitarian state.
Stefan Heym is representative of many intellectuals in the former East Germany who found themselves torn between loyalty to the ideals of their state and disdain for the reality. He was born into a secular Jewish family in Chemnitz. As a young man, he went to the United States to escape Hitler, where he worked for a while as a journalist. In 1943 he joined the American army. His first novel, The Crusaders (1948), became a best-seller. It was loosely based on his wartime experiences and filled with contempt not only for the Nazi government, but for virtually all of German culture. Distressed by the rise of McCarthyism in the United States and by Western tolerance of former Nazi officials, Heym emigrated to East Germany in 1953 and gave his enthusiastic support to the Socialist aspirations of his new homeland. His disillusionment with East Germany was far more gradual and, by his own account, more difficult than that experienced in the United States. In 1976 Heym protested the forced emigration of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann from the German Democratic Republic. Two years later he was fined and expelled from the East German Writers' Union for accepting royalties for work published abroad. Though Heym continued to believe that the GDR was the "better-half" of Germany, disillusion with the reality of socialism moved him to turn to his Jewish heritage for inspiration in novels such as The King David Report (1972) and The Wandering Jew (1984). In 1992 he became a founding member of the "Committee for Justice," a lobby representing the interests of former East Germans in a newly united Germany.
Reviews
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A must read
This book reflects better than many other the condition of a writer living and working inside a totalitarian political system just like the one that begins to take shape in Canada today.
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History, Power Relationships, and the Process of Writing Explored Through Heym's Prolific Text
Heym is a masterful writer. The King David Report (KDR) is an exceptionally good text. Heym primarily focuses on the politicization of history. He evokes the question of what are the sources of authorship for our history. This is an essential critical question to approaching all texts, even ones that our society takes to be sacred. The process of authorship involves a editing process of one kind or another. Oftentimes the politics of that encounter between a source text or draft and its editors goes un-discussed. It also raises questions about whether our understanding of fiction automatically invalidates all possibility of the coherence of a story categorized as fiction. So if we take Heym's account to be fictional then we discount its likelihood as a coherent possible set of events and power relationships. It made me understand the value of creating a pseudo-fictional universe that pointed towards the interesting problem of the genre-place of history. Is history fiction or fact? Why so often is the default to say that a given history is fact? What does a history really look like? This text will unsettle you because it will make you more broadly question what genre the novel itself is. Is it historical fiction or a history? What is conclusively poignant about the work's structure is that it points to the possibility that things we take for granted are really politicized in ways we never realize. A masterpiece for certain.
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Brilliant!
Superb book, and very well written. Recommended.
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Ein Heym vom Feinsten
Ein phantastisches Buch! Man bekommt Einblick in biblische/jüdische Geschichte, vor allem wenn man noch Sekundärliteratur hinzuzieht, aber vor allem hält Heym der Gesellschaft und allen Diktatoren dieser Welt einen Spiegel vor. Insofern kann ich dem, was er in seinem Nachwort geschrieben hat, nur zustimmen: historischer, biblischer und Gegenwartsroman mit politischer Botschaft -alles in einem.
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No True Narratives; "All is Vanity"
Very enjoyable, playful, insightful, and sad/funny exploration of the realpolitik problems of writing history, or narrating a powerful person's life in general. The cynicism is a bit too heavy-handed, and the motives almost all negative (whereas in real life, motives are often quite mixed), but this book amply demonstrates the impossibility of telling a "true" story even within living memory of a person's life. I found Robert Pinsky's Life of David much more subtle and nuanced, and overall a far greater worker of literature, but this is definitely a worthy contribution to the canon.