Germany Under the Lens

...Lest this weight of circumstantial evidence oppress the reader, Lenz has perfected a totally opposite technique for rendering it more manageable the cartographer's schematization "All I've got to do," Siggi announces, ' is unroll the flat country, intersect it with a few ditches and dark canals , set on artificial hillocks the five mills I used to see from our shed, and put the dyke like a protective arm around the mills and the farms " The scene is established with a few bold, cartoon-like strokes "In order to bring back that particular morning I must distribute the trees and hedges and low-roofed farmsteads from which no pillar of smoke rises, and with a loose wrist scatter black-and-white speckled cattle on the pastures " What comfort to be in capable hands...

...Germany Under the Lens The German Lesson By Siegfried Lenz Hill and Wang 471 pp $8 95 Reviewed by Kingsley Shorter Siggi Jepsen, confined in a reformatory on an island in the Elbe, is commanded to write an essay on "The Joys of Duty '" The theme unlocks his past Overwhelmed by memory, he turns m a blank copybook and is put in solitary to complete the task To the bewilderment of his captors, he remains there many months, watching the changing seasons on the river outside his cell, and writes the story of his childhood's bitter end in the last years of the War...

...The painter himself is about the only ray of light m the lad's lonely existence But eventually even he withdraws his support after Siggi, beginning to crack, takes to stealing his paintings m order to protect them Meanwhile Siggi's schoolmates bully him for being too clever The end of the War brings no relief-for Siggi's father the ban on Nansen has long since become a personal vendetta which he pursues implacably, despite the honors belatedly heaped on the painter Finally, at his own father's instigation, he is branded a juvenile delinquent...

...Precise observation is the key "I don't want my plain to be mistaken for any other plain I am not speaking of some landscape, just any landscape, but of my own landscape, and I am not trying to rediscover some unspecified misfortune, but my own particular misfortune-in short, I am not telling just somebody's story, some story that doesn't commit me personally " This insistence on the exact time of day, the exact configuration of the heavens, the exact wind strength and direction-and the corresponding exactness of observation about persons and their movements, gestures, speech-powerfully recreates the feel of childhood the directness of the child's experience...

...The Get man Lesson is m the end tragic, not so much because of the events themselves but because of their resistance to interpretation, because they cannot truly be grasped And if they cannot be grasped, neither can they be transcended "I am linked to that place for ever It is no use turning away, or putting one's hands over one's ears, and least of all is it any use going away" Why, he asks, why, why, why are they the way they are, the people "down our way " "And I put my questions to their way of walking and of standing, to their glances and their words And whatever I learn from any of it does not satisfy me " The tone is so fresh and youthful throughout, and the conclusion so despairing, that one is quietly appalled...

...Siggi's father-a memorably hateful character-as the village policeman, his childhood hero is the local painter, Max Ludwig Nansen, whose reputation is international The father and the painter come into mortal conflict when instructions arrive "from Berlin" forbidding Nansen-who appears to be modeled on Edvard Munch-to paint and ordering the confiscation of his work ("a witches' sabbath in paint, an essay m degeneracy") It is the policeman's job-his "duty"-to inform Nansen of the interdict and to see that it is carried out Jens Ole Jepsen's concept of duty, and his blind, destructive obstinacy in its performance, is the theme of Siggi's essay, and of this book...

...Siggi's excavation is thorough But meaning is not so easily come by The brute facts of experience have a way of surviving all explanations intact Siggi shows m great and compelling detail how his father and the painter behaved the way they did, how it was inevitable that they should have done so, and how their conflict partially unhinged him, he is unable, however, to understand why...

...Siggi is reassuringly anchored m his cell, whose contents lead themselves to finite inventory, the reader can breathe with him there, between dives to his private Atlantis The breathers help, for what Siggi fetches up from under 10 years of silt is depressing stuff His father beats him bloody for disobedience to arbitrary rules His mother, a gaunt dyspeptic woman, locks herself in her room between meals to weep over the ingratitude of her children His lumpish sister Hilke takes up with an epileptic accordionist who is forbidden entry to the house on suspicion of being a gypsy His brother Klaas mutilates himself to escape the front, deserts, forces Siggi to hide him, endures a succession of dumbly pathetic mishaps, and in the end goes off with Siggi's crush, the painter's adopted daughter Jutta...

...Reading Lenz makes one realize the extent to which grotesquerie has been a substitute for feeling in postwar German writing It is as if what happened under Hitler was so dreadful that art is impotent to represent it, as if everything now must be ghoulish, a dance of death on the ruins of sensibility, as if we'd been numbed by the sheer scale of the disaster, to the point of believing the facts to be beyond human reckoning, incomprehensible Lenz deals with this by narrowing the scope but at the same time hugely increasing the magnification, cranking his lens down into the culture where the protozoa of totalitarianism thrive and multiply Instead of inventing bizarre incidents, Lenz brings a naturalist's attention to bear on the minutiae of "ordinary" behavior,the microevents that cumulatively produced the megalomania, the camps, and all the rest of it...

...The story is seen through the eyes of a child, but recounted when the narrator is already a young man The immediacy of the one qualified by the ironic perspective of the other gives the book both freshness and great depth A child does not theorize, he experiences and feels accordingly Reconstructing the events 10 years later, Siggi seeks the meaning of his ordeal in a painstakingly minute examination of his memories...

...What is unusual about it is that Lenz has chosen to deal with issues of universal significance m a setting so apparently peripheral, so local, that a mere outline of the novel must make it sound like a genre work-closely observed but minor, miniature, or an exercise in nostalgia In fact, it is neither Set amid the peat bogs, dykes and desolate water meadows along Germany's North Sea Coast, The German Lesson is so powerful an evocation of place that I found myself combing the map of Schleswig-Holstein for the villages that stud the narrative Some are real, some are fictitious, for like everyone's childhood in retrospect, Lenz's landscape is a haunting superposition of precise coordinates on the inner world that only in childhood is coextensive with actual fields, actual woods Through the eyes of the 11-year-old Siggi we come to know the ever changing cloud formations, the dramatic play of light over the sea, the omnipresent force of the wind, through his eyes the characters, too, take on an inevitable, almost elemental force...

...As if to illustrate the intransigence of experience, the futility of explication, Lenz introduces a young psychologist who visits Siggi in his cell and reads him excerpts from a clinical study of his "case' Like Siggi-the-narrator's own map-making simplifications, this "objective" commentary is reassuring because it appears to make sense of otherwise senseless phenomena Siggi knows better "No, Wolfgang Mackenroth1 It was like that and yet it was not like that at all...

...Siggi's father and the painter are exemplars of the authoritarian and liberal personality types They have known each other all their lives, and in boyhood the painter-to-be even saved the policeman-to-be from drowning At first Jepsen is reluctant to carry out his orders, abashed "It wasn't my idea, Max You know it wasn't" But before long he is doing his duty with a vengeance, spurred by what he regards as the treachery of his own children His eldest son deserts from the Army and takes refuge with the painter His daughter secretly models for the painter And Siggi becomes the painter's confidant and friend Since the boy is also entrusted by his father with the task of spying on Nansen, he is grievously torn between the two men...

...Both books were well written, but neither amounted to more than its synopsis, one feels that the author conceived the theme first, and only then clothed it in incident In The German Lesson it is the other way about The theme grows irresistibly out of the material Since the theme is the joys of duty as experienced by a law-abiding, indeed law-enforcing, German under the Nazi regime, Lenz takes us to the heart of the 20th-century agony This is, then, an ambitious book...

...There is much more to be said m praise of The German Lesson But perhaps Tolstoy's dictum about happy and unhappy families applies to art, too All good novels resemble one another, every bad novel is bad in its own special way A list of Lenz's achievements in The German Lesson would surely be as dull as the book itself is enthralling It isn't perfect, occasionally-very occasionally-Lenz lapses into archness, or sentimentality, or preachiness Yet these are minor flaws in a major work Let me simply say I was really sorry when I got to the end, and leave it at that...

...There was little in Siegfried Lenz's two earlier novels published here to herald the beauty and richness of The German Lesson Both struck me as heavily upholstered short...

...stories The Lightship (1962), hospitably if quietly received by U S critics, was about the dilemma facing an elderly sea captain when a gang of escaped criminals commandeers his ship Should he resist them and jeopardize the lives of his crew, or do nothing, braving the unreflecting contempt of his men7 He does nothing-until the crooks threaten to destroy the very raison d'etre of his lightship by moving it, whereupon he is seen to be fearless The Sutvivor (1965), a better piece of work, sank like a stone, I couldn't find a single review The dilemma there confronted the leader of the resistance movement in a small Norwegian town Should he surrender and save the lives of the townspeople held as hostages by the Nazis, or should he continue to lead the resistance, which would collapse without him...