Stefan Heym’s Hostages (1942): Writing and Adapting a Bestseller

Ian Wallace begins his article by drawing attention to the linguistic difficulties faced by an author writing in a second language. His comparative analysis reveals a series of significant changes between  Hostages , Heym’s first novel written in English and published in the USA, and  Der Fall Glasenapp , its self-translation which appeared in the GDR in 1958. Wallace contends that such changes demonstrate the importance of the cultural and historical context of publication to the complex processes of adaptation and rewriting. A further comparison with the 1943 Hollywood film version of  Hostages reinforces Wallace’s view that literary and filmic translations always involve strategies of intercultural transfer, of cultural interaction and negotiation.


University of Bath
The publication of his first novel, Hostages, in 1942 immediately established Stefan Heym, a young exile from Hitler's Germany, as a major presence on the US literary landscape.The first edition, like the edition especially prepared for the US armed forces, includes the following acknowledgement: 'My deep-felt thanks to Gertrude Gelbin whose help in editing and correcting this book has been of inestimable value.'Close inspection of the various drafts confirms the important editorial role played by Gertrude Gelbin, Heym's future wife, revealing many examples of her essential corrections to Heym's often defective English and sensible suggestions for reformulation of sections she finds 'trite' or 'melodramatic' ('Stefan:-Can you word this idea better?As it stands it is overly melodramatic -Rewrite it, please.') 1 Many changes are significant, as when she reformulates the first sentence of chapter nine and Heym simply takes this over unaltered and without demur.Despite Gelbin's best efforts, however, the published novel still includes enough fractured English to suggest that, while generally good, Heym's control of the language was at this stage of his career still far from perfect, as a selection of examples will illustrate.
On occasion the English is so clearly (and almost comically) wrong that the average American reader must have been left scratching his or her head, as when Heym writes that 'the words he shouted fell over each other' (E334: G372 'überschlugen sich'). 2 Elsewhere Gestapo Inspector Reinhardt states: 'In our work, Wallace/Hostages 2 you know, we have so little time for the amenities […]' (E136: G156 '[…] die gewöhnlichen Formen der Höflichkeit'.'Formalities' or 'proprieties' would seem more appropriate here than 'amenities'.)At one point Reinhardt is also confusingly said to be 'looking forward' (E39) to a disagreeable meeting with Reichsprotektor Heydrich, but the German version ('entgegensehen': G47) makes it clear that 'anticipating' would be more appropriate.As regards other characters in the novel, Prokosch 'blusters and brags while his foundation is splitting' (E120: G139: ' dabei geht bereits alles, worauf er sich stützt, in die Brüche') and 'Lobkowitz, hardly raising his voice, threw his answer' (E121: G140: 'fuhr fort, fast ohne seine Stimme zu erheben').Brutal Nazi interrogation is misleadingly described as merely 'quizzing people' (E23; G30: 'die Leute verhören').Reinhardt regards himself as an expert in 'soul-searching' (E295: 'analysis' would clearly be more appropriate, as the German translation shows -'Analytiker', G331), and 'principles of morale' (E245) should read 'moral principles' (G281: 'moralische Prinzipien').Sometimes a strange piece of English stems from a literal translation of a German expression (E145: 'having played all his registers'; G167: ' der nun schon alle Register gezogen hatte', for which 'having already tried everything' might be a more appropriate rendering), sometimes it is difficult to identify any such derivation ('They're rising now to ride your heart, Goddamn you': E342.This is simply cut in the German version).
For all Gelbin's efforts, then, it is evident that the English version of the novel is seriously blemished.This is no doubt accounted for by the rush in 1942 to get this potential bestseller out into the market as quickly as humanly possible.It is difficult to avoid the conclusion, however, that Heym was very badly served in this respect by a publisher with a duty to ensure that the book -written by an exile with a good but imperfect grasp of English -was properly edited by a competent native speaker.
Heym is justifiably admired for his skill as a self-translator.However, it should not be overlooked that, when he took advantage of a six-week stay in hospital in the mid-fifties to dictate his German translation of Hostages into a tape-recorder, he also corrected the kinds of errors noted above, reshaped passages which he clearly felt had been overwritten, removed elements of 'pulp fiction' which he had originally included with a mind to meeting the needs of a popular US readership, and inserted a few judicious amendments either in the interests of historical accuracy or for essentially political reasons.The outcome of these changes was a novel which in significant respects was very different from the work he had published in his American exile, as I shall now try to show.
When the self-translation of Hostages first appeared in the GDR in 1958 under the title Der Fall Glasenapp (one draft reveals that Heym had considered calling the volume Männer um Milada) 3 its reception was highly positive, not least because it continued to be seen as 'an important and unusually effective weapon in the worldwide armed struggle against fascism' -this time not the fascism of Hitler's Germany but that alleged to be rampant in West Germany in the context of the Cold War. 4 However, there was criticism that not one of the central characters in the resistance is a communist or clearly represents Marxist views. 5Although this criticism was quickly and effectively discounted, 6 the question was not asked why Heym had chosen not to call a communist a communist.In other words, there was little appreciation that the writing of Hostages had been significantly influenced by the time and the place in and for which it had been conceived.What were also overlooked were some changes which Heym had made precisely because the German version was appearing at a different time and for a different readership.Most significantly, a member of the resistance who is described as 'one of those men who have an unqualified belief in the leader of their own choosing' (E286) becomes 'one of those who have a somewhat naïve belief in their leading comrades' 7 -a change which makes explicit the communist dimension of the resistance which Hostages was less anxious to emphasise.
Equally important were the substantial cuts which Heym made in order to remove the pot-boiler aspects of Hostages.Having evidently felt that these were an essential genuflection to (male) American popular taste, he realised they were inappropriate to the much more staid, more 'serious' cultural climate of the GDR and therefore removed them.One example will prove the point (and would also provide a fruitful starting-point for a feminist analysis of the novel): Such a wave of hot compassion filled Breda that it burst the floodgates of his reticence […] Tomorrow lay somewhere beyond them.[…] Harvest the hour before it falls into time, to be lost forever.[…] Their union was as natural as the elements; as the stars, drawn together through limitless space, unite to form a new sun; or the molecules that clash and erupt into flame.[…] Like freshets the blood of her heart inundated him, who was in her heart.[…] My flesh is burning, sweet, consuming fire.A thousand sense-threads bind me to him, each one seeking him, tasting him, drinking him.Let there be no single nerve orphaned!Each one must receive him, his immense glowing wonderful life, each one must be blessed.[…] This is the sea, the wild, joyous sea.We swim exulting, borne by its waves from unfathomable depths up into the sky, the clouds.We soar like birds, strong birds with wide-spread wings, supported by the storm, flying to the sun -up and up and up./ I am a fireball.I am light, oh so light.This man in me, this beloved child.I carry him with me to unscaleable heights, to infinite azure.I can do it […] [he kisses her] shyly, as one kisses the hem of the blue gown of the Virgin.(E194-5; G224: the entire section is cut) Another substantial cut, which removed one of the novel's least satisfying episodes, provides a clear indication of Heym's concern to edit and re-write where necessary.In the original, the success of the resistance's plot to broadcast to the Czech nation from the Nazi-controlled radio-station in Prague depends on Breda's strikingly close physical resemblance to Otokar Simek, a particularly odious Nazi announcer whom he is to replace at the microphone while managing to avoid detection.Clearly recognizing that this episode stretches the reader's credulity too far, Heym dropped it in the German version (as well as in the Seven Seas version published in 1962), instead simply requiring Breda to pose as a plumber in order to gain access to the studio and deposit there a taped message which the unsuspecting Nazis will then broadcast in the belief that it contains one of their own political commentaries.
The end of the novel brings a further change which shows again how Heym sees the opportunity to translate his exile novel as an opportunity both to adapt it to a new and very different readership and also to improve it through some judicious editing.On the last page of the English version Reinhardt predicts that his successors and Heydrich himself will fail just as he has in the struggle against the Czechs and that Heydrich will meet a violent end.Heym's American readers were of course keenly aware that Heydrich had indeed been assassinated less than six months before the novel appeared in late 1942 (Heym recalled that at the time he was working on the eighth or ninth chapter), 8 and this would have lent a prophetic certainty to Reinhardt's anticipation of the Nazis' ultimate defeat.In the German version, however, Heym chooses to omit the prediction of Heydrich's violent death -perhaps because, in 1958 when Heym's self-translation was published, Heydrich had been dead for over sixteen years and Heym may have felt that any prediction of his death would have lacked the dramatic impact it had in 1942.
A final example of Heym's role as an improving adapter of his own novel concerns his depiction of the resistance.One of the main thematic strands of Hostages focuses on a cargo of munitions which the Nazis are keeping on boats in Prague docks and which they intend to send to the Eastern front for use against the Russian people.The resistance's plan is to blow up these munitions with the help of Prague's longshoremen.Heym appears to have realised how unlikely (indeed, given Prague's location, how misconceived) this episode was.While Prague is situated on the banks of the Moldau, it does not have the kind of port facilities implied by reference to 'longshoremen' and 'piers'.In the interests of historical realism Heym therefore switches in Der Fall Glasenapp from boats to the railways and from longshoremen to railwaymen.
In sum, it can be said that Der Fall Glasenapp is an adaptation rather than a straightforward translation of Hostages -a rewriting (to use Lefevere's term) 9 which takes account of a new historical context, readership, culture, and, in a sense, of a new, i.e. more experienced, author.The German text makes explicit what could only be suggested in the English (e.g. the use of 'Genossen' [comrades] -a striking example of the politics of translation), removes material which the 'mature' author believes the 'inexperienced' author should have omitted, includes aspects which the new target readership will understand (e.g. the reference to the German boxing legend Max Schmeling) while deleting others which had been aimed at the original target readership.Despite the identity of author and translator, the comparison between Hostages and Der Fall Glasenapp reveals that literary translation can never be reduced to straightforward linguistic decoding, but always involves strategies of intercultural transfer, of cultural interaction and negotiation.
In preparing the Seven Seas edition of the novel (published as The Glasenapp Case in 1962) Heym took the opportunity to make a further series of minor linguistic excisions, additions and other improvements.Although not every example of less than perfect English in the 1942 edition was changed, he did remove some of the most jarringly obvious instances. 10Many of the important adjustments made in the German edition were retained, particularly the removal of the sub-plot involving Otokar Simek and the transformation of the longshoremen and their barges into railwaymen and trains.Interestingly, the decision to expurgate the pot-boiler aspects in the German edition was rescinded here, with Heym evidently believing that a version of his work intended for English-speaking readers need not be inhibited by the requirements of a GDR readership (or censor).Given Heym's own later reworkings of the novel, particularly to the German version published in 1958, it is ironic that, when Hostages was turned into a Hollywood film in 1943, he quickly let it be known that he had had no direct involvement in the adaptation of the novel and that he had strong reservations about the changes which had been made in the movie.Speaking as a US soldier to a group of fellow conscripts at a showing held in Camp Ritchie on 23 October 1943, Private Heym stressed that Hollywood had left out some material he would have retained and had added other material of their own, all supposedly in the belief that this would increase the film's public appeal: By taking no action Heym failed to exploit an opportunity which, had Hollywood agreed, might have significantly improved the quality of the film and also, incidentally, reinforced the many significant contributions made by numerous actors from the émigré community, particularly Oscar Homolka's excellent portrayal of the quisling Preissinger and Reinhold Schünzel's superb performance as a ruthless, selfserving Nazi officer.Despite being praised as 'a major achievement' by an uncritical reviewer in the Hollywood Reporter, 13 the uninspired music score by Victor Young, with its monotonous echoing of assertive Wagnerian motifs whenever Nazi brutality is to be invoked and its banal use of Dvorak's wistfully lyrical Slavonic Dance No. 2 in E minor whenever the qualities of Czech patriotism are to be intimated, is an irritating weakness but one which Heym might have helped avoid.

Heym could have had few initial complaints about the film's director, Frank
Tuttle, and one of its screenwriters, Lester Cole, since both were known to have strong communist sympathies, but they faced enormous pressure from the studio to subordinate the anti-fascist message to the requirements of the love interest.
According to Cole's account, the film's brash and devious Executive Producer, Buddy de Sylva, made clear that what primarily interested him about the two young lovers, Milada and Breda, was not their membership of the Czech resistance: Nazi-Shmazi, a man is a man to her [Milada], and here is this gorgeous hunk of meat [Breda] who looks at her in a way that she melts.Like hypnotized.
Before she knows it she's in bed with him, and he is something.[…] Got it?Love, sex, politics, the works.We got it all in one package.It's just that sex hooks her into the underground, not that intellectual political crap. 14 their credit the film-makers proved resistant to the particularly primitive gender politics which de Sylva would have imposed on their work.Despite such unpromising circumstances the screenplay somehow manages to take characters and incidents from what (in an odd slip of the memory?)Cole calls the eight exciting stories which make up the book and to construct from them a coherent dramatic narrative.Cole and his co-writer, Frank Butler, keep the focus from beginning to end primarily on the novel's essential political message that, even in the face of brutal repression, the Czech underground is brave and resourceful.Early drafts opened with the focus on anti-Nazi protests by students at Prague University 15 or on the Nazis' brutal destruction of Lidice in response to the assassination of Heydrich, 16 but, while later versions removed these references to well-known historical events, the insistence on the anti-fascist underground's brave resistance was never compromised.Heym's novel was written with the interest of the American reading public in action, romance and a fast-moving plot clearly in mind, and the same is very much true of the film.
Yet, while it is true that the final shot does show Milada and Breda walking side by side along the water-front while in the background the munitions barges sabotaged by the underground continue to explode spectacularly, the development of the love interest remains relatively restrained throughout the film and never threatens to displace the anti-fascist message as the main focus of attention.
An equally important consideration were the wishes of Joseph Breen of the Hays Office, the strait-laced organisation in Hollywood responsible for ensuring that the spirit and letter of the Production Code, the film industry's attempt at selfregulation, were respected by the moviemakers.The correspondence which Paramount conducted with Breen as Hostages went into production provides a fascinating case study of the at times farcically prim standards which Breen sought to impose.Commenting on the first pages of script to reach him, Breen notes: We regret to report that these sequences contain one element which could not be approved under the provisions of the Production Code.This element is the use of a room containing a number of public toilets as a location for various scenes in the picture, together with the use of the expression 'lavatory attendant' in the reference to the story's hero.
It is imperative that both the location and the expression be changed, or we will be unable to approve the finished picture. 17ace/Hostages 12 While the studio proved able to resist any change to the location, the term 'lavatory attendant' was in due course replaced by 'washroom attendant' but not before Breen had repeatedly had to insist on this.Similarly, his request that the reference to Glasenapp's being 'sick to his stomach' should be 'handled carefully and inoffensively' is reiterated in order 'to avoid anything which might be offensive to mixed audiences.Also, we ask that the retching sound be omitted.' 18Breen's sensitivity to lavatorial allusion is equally apparent in his request both that the scene in which a hostage is seen carrying a slop bucket be omitted as well as 'any other indication of this bucket in any succeeding scenes,' 19 and also -a particular challenge to the filmmakers' ingenuity!-'that there will be no water closet doors showing in the washroom.' 20Given also Breen's anxiety to avoid 'any suggestion of a sex affair' ('With this in mind we ask that the business of the door slowly closing be omitted.') 21ere can never have been any doubt that the pot-boiler aspects of Heym's novel would have to be air-brushed out of the screenplay.
The various pressures on the screenwriters from the studio and from the Hays Office do not explain all the differences between film and novel, of course.As is inevitable whenever material from one genre is reworked in another, the screenwriters were compelled to modify Heym's story in order to meet the requirements of a film and, in particular, of a film intended for a mass audience.In order to reduce the complexity of the plot, the psychological experiment which Dr Wallerstein conducts with his cell-mates is cut, as is the romantic sub-plot linking Lobkowitz and Prokosch with Mara and her child.All three -Wallerstein, Lobkowitz and Prokosch -are reduced to little more than bit parts in the film.Perhaps more surprisingly, the radio broadcast to the Czech people which Heym's resistance fighters manage to pull off and which clearly held out strong dramatic possibilities was also cut.The screenwriters evidently opted not to deviate from and therefore undermine the strong plot line which is suggested in the opening scenes and which leads directly to the resistance's successful attack on Nazi munitions at the conclusion.They also reconfigure the principal characters in the plot in order to produce a structure of relationships which an American audience would find familiar.Breda therefore becomes a newspaper reporter on the Prague Daily Herald who pretends to collaborate with the Nazis while actually being a leading member of the Prague underground.The figure of Jan Pavel, Milada's fiancé, is introduced in order to form with Milada and Breda an example of Hollywood's all-too-familiar romantic triangle, raising the equally stereotypical question of who will 'win the girl'.
Another new character is the old man Josef, who is used to carry forward the recurrent debate in Hollywood's anti-Nazi films about the moral wisdom or otherwise of sacrificing the life of one hostage in order to save that of many others.In Hangmen also die, the underground decides that Heydrich's assassin, Svoboda, should not hand himself over to the Nazis because he is a symbol of the Czech people's resistance to the Nazis.By contrast, Josef in Hostages is willing to 'confess' to the murder of Glasenapp in order to save 26 innocent hostages, including Janoshik.His reasons, interestingly, are not so much moral as practical and pragmatic.He believes his usefulness to the resistance is almost at an end and that the Nazis are about to arrest him anyway.He argues that the Nazis will see him as the 'logical' assassin in that he has a clear motive -revenge for the daughter whom the Nazis killed.His confession is therefore the best practical step which can be taken to ensure that Janoshik can deliver his message to the underground.As it happens, Josef is killed by the Nazis before he can give himself up, but Breda is delegated to take his place, thus reinforcing the underground's decision that the sacrifice of one life is justified when this can save that of many others.Milada herself is transformed into the unfortunate daughter of the egoistic quisling, Preissinger, a shift which involves her, in one particularly powerful scene, in the moral conflict of having to choose between delivering to the tender mercies of the Nazis either her father (a venal, opportunistic capitalist who is a leading collaborator, but her father none the less) or the resistance as represented by Breda.Finally, in what looks like a concession to Hollywood's need for a 'happy ending' Janoshik is allowed to survive the bloodshed and general mayhem of the closing scenes, but not before the full extent of Nazi brutality has been demonstrated by the execution by firing squad of their Czech hostages.
Other changes are made, some of which are clearly intended to reinforce the negative impression of the Nazis which the general public would have gleaned from media coverage of the war.The Nazis' degrading treatment of women, for example, is highlighted early in the film when we learn that Glasenapp's fiancée has been made to join a breeding colony where she will be ruthlessly treated as no more than a means to produce new 'heroes' for the Führer, while in a later scene innocent and frightened young Polish girls are forced to line up before Nazi officers leering lasciviously at their helpless sexual prey.A further change is the introduction of the cunning and utterly ruthless General, played with chilling skill by Reinhold Schünzel, one of half a dozen actors of German background who take leading roles in the film.It is the General who comes up with the plan to keep Preissinger in captivity so that he and others can pocket the profits from the capitalist's coal syndicate and then, displeased by Reinhardt's failure to prevent the underground's success and -even more -anxious to remove the only person who knows the real reason why he is determined to keep Preissinger under lock and key, murders him in cold blood while making it look like suicide.Finally, in an obvious attempt to be as up to date with historical events as possible, the film is located in 1943 (as we are informed at the outset).Given that the assassination of Heydrich took place on 27 June 1942, it was therefore clearly impossible to include Reinhardt's encounters with the Reichsprotektor in the film.

Conclusion
While it is clearly true that his novel was given the 'Hollywood treatment', Heym should have been the last person to criticise this, since he himself had written Hostages very much with the needs of a mass readership in mind (and would later significantly rework it for a GDR/German readership).Despite Heym's strictures, we can conclude by agreeing with Helmut G. Asper's recent judgement that the film, while no masterpiece, deserves to be better known than is currently the case and can be counted among the top 30 of the approximately 300 anti-Nazi films which Hollywood made after Pearl Harbour. 22e success of Hostages shows that, like some other exiles in the USA such as Fritz Lang and Kurt Weill, Stefan Heym successfully adapted to conditions there, consciously planning the creation of a bestseller by shaping his first novel to meet what he saw as the needs of the popular reading market. 23His remarkable ability to write in English so soon after his exile in the USA began is rightly much admired, but, mindful not least of the crucial contribution made by Gelbin to which I referred at the outset, I would argue against any tendency towards exaggeration of this achievement as far as Hostages is concerned.Close reading of the novel suggests that this is the work of a gifted storyteller who is still, however, in some respects a raw apprentice.
Der Fall Glasenapp is often regarded as one proof of Heym's undoubted ability as a self-translator.Comparison of Hostages and Der Fall Glasenapp reveals, however, that the latter is not a straightforward translation but a carefully edited and in part rewritten version of the novel.In other words, Heym has adapted the novel he wrote in his American exile for the very different needs of the post-war European country of his choice, the GDR.Furthermore, some of the changes suggest that Heym is reflecting his own experience when, in The Eyes of Reason (1951) -the last of the four novels he published in English during his exile in the USA, his narrator comments on Lida's account of how she coped with the German occupation of her country, Czechoslovakia: Joseph had to admit that Lida had told her tale expertly.She had avoided the melodramatic and kept to understatement.She had known what details to embellish, and when to let the stark facts speak for themselves. 24ym's self-translation of Hostages demonstrates that this was a lesson he himself had largely learned by 1958.
2 References to the English version are included in the text as E followed by page number.References to the German version are included in the text as G followed by So, please don't hold me responsible if you like or dislike some of the features in the picture about to be shown.Out in Hollywood, they have their own conception of what the public goes for -and they have left out much of what I would have liked to have on the screen; and have added some of what the Hollywood producers felt would give the audience a kick. 11hile it is certainly true that Hostages has never achieved anything like the popularity or attracted the serious comment that other anti-fascist films such as Hangmen also die have known, its qualities are arguably such that it deserves to be far better known than is currently the case.This might have been even more true if Heym had taken a less 'hands-off' attitude at least to the question of the film's music.It is known that Hanns Eisler, who had provided an imaginative musical score for Fritz Lang's Hangmen also die, expressed a willingness to do the same for Hostages.In a letter dated 7 January 1943, Heym responded to Eisler's offer as follows: Dear Hanns Eisler, Thanks for your wire.I should be very glad to have you write the music for 'Hostages'.Unfortunately, I have no influence whatever on who does what with the movie.My book, once having been bought by Paramount, has become a 'property' and, at that, a property not anymore belonging to me.Since you are on the coast, I think it best if you got in touch with the studio and with Frank Tuttle.If it will help you any, tell them that I would wholly approve of your doing the score.Best regards to Lou.Yours, [signed Stefan Heym] 12