European studies blog

Exploring Europe at the British Library

13 October 2014

A German lesson for Europe: Siegfried Lenz (1926-2014)

Those searching on the map of Germany for the birthplace of Siegfried Lenz, who died last week at the age of 88, will seek in vain. Lyck in East Prussia, where he came into the world on 17 March 1926 as the son of a customs official, no longer exists; under its new name of Ełk, it is firmly on the other side of the Polish border. This symbol of displacement and dislocation is characteristic of the Europe, and more specifically the Germany, which he chronicled in his novels, plays and essays.

Lenz is probably best known for his novel Deutschstunde (1968), Cover of Siegfried's Lenz's 'Deutschstunde'translated into English as The German Lesson in the year of its publication. The story of a young boy and his friendship with Nansen, an artist whose paintings were condemned as ‘degenerate art’ and shares many features with the painter Emil Nolde, it unfolds as a series of reflections as the narrator tackles an essay entitled ‘Duty as Joy’ which he has to write as a punishment. Its apparent simplicity covers a wide range of moral and ethical issues explored elsewhere in Lenz’s work as he endeavoured to ‘take preventative actions against any danger of a recurrence’ of the Hitler era, as he declared in his acceptance in 2000 of the Goethe Prize, awarded to him on the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth.

Material released in 2007 suggested that Lenz, together with other German writers, might have joined the National Socialist Party on 20 April 1944, although he later claimed that he had been unwittingly signed up as part of a collective ‘joining’. Whatever the truth of this, his writings repeatedly address the theme of the responsibility to acknowledge the past and protect one’s historical and cultural heritage without attempting to deny its darker side. This is strikingly expressed in another of his most notable works, the novel Heimatmuseum (1978) in which a museum curator’s duties and moral dilemmas stand for those of an entire nation.

Photograph of Siegfried Lenz holding a pipeSiegfried Lenz at a poetry reading in 1969. Photograph by Lothar Schaak from the German Federal Archives, (Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F030757-0015 / Schaack, Lothar / CC-BY-SA) taken from Wikimedia Commons

Lenz himself had fled to Denmark and spent a short time as a prisoner of war just before the end of the Second World War, and acted as a translator and interpreter for the British army before studying in Hamburg and joining the editorial staff of Die Welt (1950-51). His interest in current affairs led him to spend the royalties from his first novel Es waren Habichte in der Luft (‘There were Hawks in the Air’; 1951) on a visit to Kenya, documented in a novella, Lukas, sanftmutiger Knecht (‘Luke, gentle servant’).

Lenz was an outspoken critic of the German orthographic reforms of 1996, and was equally forthright in his support for Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik after his involvement with the Social Democratic Party. His frank expression of his sometimes controversial views did not prevent him receiving numerous honours, including the honorary citizenship of his birthplace in 2011 and of Hamburg (2001), as well as the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, awarded at the 1988 Frankfurt Book Fair. Yet in his evocation of the landscapes of remote corners of Masuria and Schleswig-Holstein and his playful and humorous writings for children, he reveals himself to be not only the guardian of his country’s conscience but of its half-forgotten past and its hopes for the future.

Susan Halstead, Curator Czech & Slovak

References:

Siegfried Lenz, Deutschstunde (Hamburg, 1968). X.909/17297. (English translation, The German Lesson, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (London, 1971) X.989/13226.)

Siegfried Lenz, Heimatmuseum (Hamburg, 1978). X.989/79411. (English translation The Heritage, translated by Krishna Wilson (New York, 1981). X.950/19347.)

Siegfried Lenz, Es waren Habichte in der Luft (Hamburg, 1951). X.989/30264.

Siegfried Lenz, Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung des Friedenspreises des Deutschen Buchhandels (Frankfurt am Main, 1988). YA.1989.a.9017.

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