Arts Siegfried Lenz, Novelist of Germany’s Past, Dies at 88 By WILLIAM YARDLEYOCT. 10, 2014 Siegfried Lenz, a German writer acclaimed for novels and stories that frankly explored his country’s role in the rise of Nazism, died on Tuesday in Hamburg. He was 88. His death was announced by his longtime publisher, Hoffmann & Campe. Along with Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and other German writers who rose to international prominence after World War II, Mr. Lenz was a member of Gruppe 47, a literary cohort that encouraged democracy, free expression and confrontation with Germany’s Nazi era. His stories often placed Nazism in the context of broader German history and identity. Mr. Lenz had already published several well-received novels before he reached a wider audience with what is regarded by many as his most important work, the novel “The German Lesson.” Published in 1968, it tells the story of Siggi Jepsen, a young man in a school for juvenile delinquents who is required to write an essay on “The Joys of Duty.” The essay soon grows into a book, an aching recollection of how his father, a German police officer in a small northern coastal town during the war, became obsessed with enforcing an order to stop an artist — one of the officer’s old friends and a beloved mentor of Siggi — from painting. “The policeman, bent on doing his duty, asking no questions and giving no quarter, emerges in this masterful portrait not as another caricature of a Nazi robot but as a complexly ordinary human being whose devotion to what he regards as his duty is every bit as intense as the artist’s devotion to his art,” the novelist and biographer Ernst Pawel, reviewing an English translation of the book, wrote in The New York Times in 1972. Mr. Lenz was known for a sardonic wit. At one point in “The German Lesson,” the police officer catches the artist with a sketch pad, only to learn that it is filled with blank pages. When the artist “confesses” that he had made several invisible drawings, the officer promptly confiscates the sketch pad. “You know what the game is, Max,” he tells the painter. “You know what my duty is. These sheets are going to be examined.” Max responds: “Yes, yes. Go on, have them examined, for all I care. Have them put into the mincing machine, for all I care. You won’t succeed in destroying them.” Mr. Lenz admired William Faulkner’s distinctive use of memory as a literary device and the way he linked personal and historical trauma. Many of his own stories insist that memories and the past be accepted and honestly recounted, no matter how disgraceful they might be, because distorting them can lead to new tragedies. Reviewing another of his novels, “The Heritage,” in 1981, Salman Rushdie wrote in The Times that its theme was “the vast gulf between Germany’s past and present: a gulf created by the Nazi’s unscrupulous use of the idea of homeland, heritage and history to justify and legitimize xenophobia, tyranny and the doctrine of ethnic purity.” Mr. Rushdie praised the book, a fable about a rug weaver who preserves but later destroys relics in a museum in East Prussia, as “an attempt to rescue the past from its exploiters: a fable of reclamation, the very writing of which entails a kind of heroism.” Mr. Lenz wrote several dozen novels and books of short stories and was regularly at the top of best-seller lists in Germany. In 1999 he received the Goethe Prize, awarded every three years. Well into his 80s, he wrote another best seller, “A Minute’s Silence,” a novella about a teenager’s romance with his young teacher and his anguish in recalling how the affair ended in tragedy. Mr. Lenz’s wife of more than 50 years, Liselotte, died several years ago. Complete information about survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Lenz was born on March 3, 1926, in Lyck, in what was then East Prussia and is now Elk, Poland. At 18, he was drafted into the German Navy in the last year of World War II. He deserted in April 1945 and was briefly held as a prisoner of war. In 2007, German news outlets reported that Mr. Lenz and many other prominent elderly Germans had been members of the Nazi Party during the war. He and others responded that they were teenagers at the time and had been made members against their will, sometimes without their knowing. The revelations roiled the country, though not as much as the admission a year before by Mr. Grass, a particularly vocal critic of Germany’s past, that he had become a member, at 17, of the Waffen SS, a notorious Nazi division. After the war, Mr. Lenz studied philosophy and literature in Hamburg. He also became active in West Germany’s Social Democratic Party and befriended the West German chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. An ardent supporter of West German reconciliation with East Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union, he traveled to Warsaw with Mr. Grass and Mr. Brandt in 1970 to signal West Germany’s good will.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 06:11:26 +0000
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