In 1931, Helmut Flieg was forced by the local Nazi authorities in his hometown of Chemnitz to leave school for publishing an anti-militarist poem. Two years later, he took on the pseudonym Stefan Heym in exile. Before that, the son of a Jewish merchant family had been able to complete secondary school in Berlin and began to study journalism. But in 1933, when the Nazis took power, he was forced to leave Germany for Czechoslovakia. With the help of a scholarship, he made his way in 1935 to the United States, where he became editor-in-chief of a German language communist newspaper. As a solider in the US Army, he was one of the so-called “Ritchie Boys,” a unit consisting largely of German emigrants that was mobilized in the Second World War for psychological warfare. As a writer with socialist ideals in United States of the McCarthy era, he saw himself forced once again to emigrate. He moved to the GDR, where he became one of the country’s most important writers, but also a critic.