A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party; a Berliner politician in a newly reunified Germany: all sound like separate characters in a novel, yet all apply to Stefan Heym, the pseudonym of Helmut Flieg, whose strikingly under-celebrated life would appear to intercept a myriad of major twentieth century historical gradients.
Despite being written in the 1960s, The Architects comes to us posthumously following years of state suppression in the GDR – Erich Honecker’s attack on Heym during a Party conference prevented the novel from seeing the light of day – and rejection in the West. It is unsurprisingly saturated with the writer’s life and times, depicting the earlier post-war world of East Germany in 1956, the very year in which Khrushchev catalysed the process of de-Stalinisation by denouncing his dictatorship and personality cult, which acts as the socio-political cornerstone for the novel.
Arnold Sundstrom is an architect who has abandoned his bourgeois Bauhaus ideals and risen to the lofty architectural heights of the Party alongside his young wife Julia, whose parents mysteriously vanished during her childhood at the height of the purges, leaving her to be brought up by her new father and future husband, Sundstrom.
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