The Crusaders

by Stefan Heym

Overview

This moving, suspense-filled story about men at war, and after wear, is a historical novel with all the drama and the verity of the best of its kind. Bu tin one major respect it differs from other stories which vividly re-create exciting and meaningful events in the past: the difference is that we, of today, made the history of which this story grew.
We know there were men in the American Army like Sergeant Dondolo and Major Willoughby, for whom World War II was chiefly a once-in-a-lifetime chance to feather their own nests in characteristic though quite dissimilar fashions. There were also unimaginative, methodical good eggs like Corporal Ambramovici, tired, honest, and frustrated officers like Colonel DeWitt, and flamboyant brass like General Farrish. And any one of us might have been Lieutenant David Yates, torn between his loyalty to his wife at home and his passion for a French girl, trying to determine, in the welter of conflict, whether he was involved in a Crusade or a Conquest. We might not know so well Sergeant Bing, fighting against his former countrymen, for whom the war was surely a personal crusade.
Men, and often women, are the theme of this novel. The story lies in the development of people, especially of Bing and Yates, under the intensified emotions of war. Some of the people are connected with a Propaganda Intelligence Unit, some with an Armored Division; others are civilians on our side and on the enemy's.
"…Unquestionably the most important fiction to come out of World War II…only a writer of understanding and sympathy, combined with creative artistry, can clothe his characters in flesh and blood—and that is exactly what Heym has done."—Capt. P. J. Searles, reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune, New York Times and Boston Post.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789120349
Publisher:	Arcole Publishing
Publication date:	02/27/2018
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	739
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Stefan Heym (10 April 1913 - 16 December 2001) was a renowned East German author and political activist who spent almost 30 years in the United States. He published works in English and German.
Born Helmut Flieg into a Jewish merchant family in Chemnitz, Saxony, he was expelled from school on account of the local Nazis in 1931. He completed school in Berlin and began a degree in media studies. He fled to Czechoslovakia in 1933, where he took the name Stefan Heym, worked for German newspapers published in Prague, including Prager Tagblatt and Bohemia, and published articles in translation by Czech newspapers.
In 1935 Heym received a grant from a Jewish student association and continued his degree at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1936. He was based in New York as Editor-in-Chief of the German-language weekly Deutsches Volksecho from 1937-1939. He published his bestselling first novel, Hostages, in 1942. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943 and returned to Europe after D-Day as a psychological warfare expert, which later became the basis for his novel Crusaders (1948).
After WWII he led the Ruhrzeitung in Essen and became editor of Die Neue Zeitung in Munich. He was transferred back to the U.S. and in the following years worked as a freelance author, wrote a column in the Soviet-run paper Tägliche Rundschau (1953-1957), and finally channelled his energies into literature.
Heym was elected to the Bundestag as an independent MP in 1994, but resigned a year later.
He was honoured with honorary doctorates from the University of Bern (1990) and University of Cambridge (1991), and honorary citizenship of Chemnitz, his birthplace (2001). He was also awarded the Jerusalem Prize (1993) for literature 'for the freedom of the individual in society', and the peace medal of the IPPNW. Previously he had won the Heinrich-Mann-Prize (1953), and the National Prize of the GDR, 2nd class (1959).
He died in Israel in 2001, aged 88.

Born Helmut Flieg into a Jewish merchant family in Chemnitz, Saxony, he was expelled from school on account of the local Nazis in 1931. He completed school in Berlin and began a degree in media studies. He fled to Czechoslovakia in 1933, where he took the name Stefan Heym, worked for German newspapers published in Prague, including Prager Tagblatt and Bohemia, and published articles in translation by Czech newspapers.
In 1935 Heym received a grant from a Jewish student association and continued his degree at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1936. He was based in New York as Editor-in-Chief of the German-language weekly Deutsches Volksecho from 1937-1939. He published his bestselling first novel, Hostages, in 1942. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943 and returned to Europe after D-Day as a psychological warfare expert, which later became the basis for his novel Crusaders (1948).
After WWII he led the Ruhrzeitung in Essen and became editor of Die Neue Zeitung in Munich. He was transferred back to the U.S. and in the following years worked as a freelance author, wrote a column in the Soviet-run paper Tägliche Rundschau (1953-1957), and finally channelled his energies into literature.
Heym was elected to the Bundestag as an independent MP in 1994, but resigned a year later.
He was honoured with honorary doctorates from the University of Bern (1990) and University of Cambridge (1991), and honorary citizenship of Chemnitz, his birthplace (2001). He was also awarded the Jerusalem Prize (1993) for literature ‘for the freedom of the individual in society’, and the peace medal of the IPPNW. Previously he had won the Heinrich-Mann-Prize (1953), and the National Prize of the GDR, 2nd class (1959).
He died in Israel in 2001, aged 88.