The King David Report     by Stefan Heym Original title: Der König David Bericht Original language: German Published by Northwestern University Press Pub. Date: 1997 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.75 x 7.81 x 5.14 ISBN: 0810115379 List Price: $19.00, £12.08 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £10.87 Buy online from Amazon.com for $13.30 Published by Abacus Pub. Date: 1984 Format: Paperback, 254 pages Not available for ordering

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Stefan Heym has been a thorn in the side of several regimes in the course of his long life. He left Germany for Czechoslovakia in 1933, and went to America in 1935. In the Second World War he fought in the American Army, but during the McCarthy period he returned his medals and went to live in East Germany, where he quickly fell foul of the authorities, keeping out of prison through a combination of his international status as a writer and his experience of dealing with secret services. After reunification in 1990 he won a seat in the German parliament as a representative of the PDS, the reformed communist party, to the dislike of a number of politicians who tried to discredit him as a Stasi (E.German secret police) collaborator. Since his years in America he has written most of his novels in both German and English.

Much of this experience informs Heym’s best-known novel, The King David Report. Through an account of how the story of David in the Bible might have come to be told, the book provides a profound and witty examination of the relationship between the writer and the authoritarian state (also the subject of The Queen against Defoe), with many insights into the establishment and exercise of absolute power.

The historian, Ethan of Ezra, is ordered by King Solomon to produce the official version of the life of Solomon’s predecessor David in The One and Only True and Authoritative, Historically Correct and Approved Report on the Amazing Rise, God-fearing Life, Heroic Deeds, and Wonderful Achievements of David the Son of Jesse, King of Judah for Seven Years and of both Judah and Israel for Thirty-three, Chosen of God, and Father of King Solomon. The sting is in the tail, of course: the purpose of the Report is not to publish the truth, but to legitimise Solomon’s rule. Ethan, the scholar in the halls of power, has to perform a delicate balancing act. He pursues his researches among the state archives, and with David’s soldiers and concubines, with Zadok the Priest, Bathsheba, and the rest, even taking a drug-induced trip to the witch of Endor. In spite of his awareness of the danger, he is driven by his historian’s natural desire to find out what ‘really’ happened, but he knows that the report must contain what Solomon wants, while appearing to be the work of an independent writer. He cannot win. At the end he is banished, the king takes his concubine, and even appropriates his own poems, which we know today as ‘the Song of Solomon’. History is not written by the Ethans of this world, but by those in power.

Solomon’s Israel has all the appurtenances of the modern totalitarian state: secret police, show trials, agents provocateurs, citizens disappearing without trace or becoming ‘non-persons’, various factions jockeying for power, especially the priesthood and the military (a reflection, this, of the frequent conflict between the ideological and executive branches of the Communist state). Particular understanding of the situation of the writer is shown in the clever way that Solomon, who knows well what is going on in Ethan’s mind, makes him into an accomplice. Ethan’s moral refuge (besides the fact that he feels he has no choice if he wants to stay alive) is the traditional scientist’s defence that it is his duty to gather the material, not to make value-judgments about it.

As well as the writing of history, The King David Report also throws light on the historical processes themselves. The Israelites under David are a nation at a key point in their development, at the time of transition from the bronze to the iron age. David begins their transformation from a group of nomadic tribes into a settled nation. David’s empire, with its centralised bureaucracies, especially the army and the priesthood, is a response to historical changes to which a tribe must adapt or disappear. This is a further complication of the moral maze the novel presents, without providing a neat way out: if David’s ruthlessness is simply a response to historical necessity, does that mean it is justified; and if it is historically justified, does that mean it is morally justified?

The language of the novel is a brilliant mixture of Biblical pastiche and modern phraseology, the latter often being used to reveal the naked truth behind the fine exterior of Solomon’s public image. Heym’s examination of questions of history, politics and morality in The King David Report is more serious in fundamental conception and also wittier in execution than the American writer Joseph Heller’s use of much the same material in God Knows.

‘I saw that Solomon had thought of practically everything, and that there was no escaping his favour. I also saw that I might end, as some writers did, with my head cut off and my body nailed to the city wall, but that, on the other hand, I might wax fat and prosperous if I guarded my tongue and used my stylus wisely. With some luck and the aid of our Lord Yahveh, I might even insert in the King David Report a word here and a line there by which later generations would perceive what manner of man David ben Jesse was: who served as a whore simultaneously to a king and the king’s son and the king’s daughter, who fought as a hired soldier against his own blood, who had his own son and his most loyal servants assassinated while loudly bewailing their death, and who forged a people out of a motley of miserable peasants and recalcitrant nomads.

So I rose and said to King Solomon that in his boundless wisdom he had persuaded me to accept the position...’ p11