Few in the West had heard of Christoph Hein in 1982, when he received the prestigious Heinrich Mann Prize for Literature. Unlike many East German writers who were equally critical of censorship and of the Stalinist regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and who were forcibly expatriated, were compelled to exercise "self-censorship," or simply remained silent, Hein stood out as the country's most eloquent and respected advocate of freedom of speech, press, and artistic expression. Hein established himself as one of the most significant European writers of the late twentieth century with his long novella Der fremde Freund (1982; translated as The Distant Lover, 1989), which was translated into more than twenty languages within a short time of its publication and became an international best-seller in both Eastern and Western Europe. His controversial play Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q (The True Story of Ah Q; published, 1984), which premiered at...