A German Master
KAHN, LOTHAR
A German Master An Exemplary Life By Siegfried Lenz Translated by Douglas Parmee Hill and Wang, 423 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by Lothar Kahn Professor of Modern Languages, Central Connecticut State...
...Just when the three begin to despair that any real example of perfect values could withstand close scrutiny, for instance, they stumble upon the story of Lucy Beerbaum...
...But here they encounter problems...
...Again he uses a bleak North German landscape, this time the metropolis of Hamburg on gray and rainy November days...
...Lenz did his novel no favor in creating her...
...Suessfeldt and Heller—Pundt has by now withdrawn from the project-—submit her story to the publisher...
...Janpeter Heller, by contrast, is a vital part of the plot and a foil to Pundt...
...Modestly, thoughtfully, undramatically, she insisted on her starvation rations and died...
...The hero, a rebel son who defied obedience, stood in sharp contradistinction to his policeman-father, whose sense of allegiance to the state became increasingly obsessive and criminal...
...In his strictest schoolmaster's voice he bids them stop and is stopped himself, his limp body set adrift in a boat on the Alster...
...How were these specimens of human failure, who started out barely suspecting their inadequacies, chosen to prepare a chapter to mold the young...
...As they read and reject each other's suggestions, they not only recognize the shortcomings of their proposals but become aware of the paucity of their individual lives as well—revealed to us by Lenz in between consideration of their proposals...
...More than any other writer today, with the possible exception of Saul Bellow, Lenz is frightened by the intellectual, cultural and political clutter of our times, and by forces so complex and contradictory that simple solutions are beyond reach...
...Rita Suessfeldt...
...they do not find any suitable...
...But if this novel is not quite on the level of The German Lesson, it nevertheless confirms Lenz' place alongside Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll and Uwe Johnson as one of the top writers in Germany today...
...Now, in An Exemplary Life, Lenz anchors himself in the present...
...Neither the stunning critical and popular success in Europe of his previous novel, The German Lesson, nor the generally laudatory reviews it received on this side of the Atlantic has catapulted him into the American literary limelight...
...Again, too, he confronts his characters with the social and individual choices that may elevate or debase a human being...
...At least part of the trouble rests with the people selected to compose the anthology...
...He does not claim inspirational examples do not exist, rather that every human life is suspect in some quarters, and all are potentially dangerous, futile or self-destructive...
...a return to the past to investigate the values that—exaggerated and perverted—had led to monstrous and destructive behavior...
...We know them through the way they eat, drink and drive, the places they visit, their actions in the face of old and new situations...
...Reviewed by Lothar Kahn Professor of Modern Languages, Central Connecticut State College...
...For the new work addresses itself to a simple question: Given a free hand to come up with "an exemplary life,' a perfect model of conduct for youngsters to emulate, could we produce such a life, whether real or fictional...
...the third is a relatively young teacher, Jan-peter Heller, an expert on rock music and participant in the youth demonstrations of the late '60s...
...In a foolish effort to be one of the youthful crowd—he knows every phase of The Scene—he has alienated his wife and ruined his marriage...
...If his work nevertheless avoids generating black despair, it is because of his subtle humor, his dexterous use of unobtrusive irony, his amusing situations...
...The novel enabled the author to probe the whys, the implicit guilt, the missed options of the Nazi years...
...Heller is not aware of it, but his brand of modern cynicism barely conceals his disenchantments and inner bankruptcy, and his gestures of idealism are pathetic and amusing...
...Suessfeldt, part of an ill-defined menage a trois, is forever ignoring traffic regulations as she flits from one cultural meeting to another...
...they dissect them...
...Yet Bellow always salvages a remnant of hope through some prescriptive formula...
...It is also highly readable for a deeply philosophical work, thanks in large part to Lenz' admirable tendency to let his characters be defined by what they are doing and how they do it...
...When her Greek friends and colleagues were imprisoned by the Colonels in 1967, as an expression of protest and solidarity she decided to share their privations...
...It was search without breastbeating but with a persuasive moral earnestness...
...Valentin Pundt...
...Her role is never made clear, however...
...His lingering on Frisian village scenes and, even more, his plumbing of the German soul may have left Americans at a loss...
...The oldest is a retired Luneburg school principal...
...Lenz does not...
...Saved through a miracle, Pundt lies in a hospital room questioning his worth and decides to quit the project...
...True, the exemplary lives rejected by the trio are invented by Lenz in a manner that allows him to stack his case, and the many stories and the novella within the book occasionally distract...
...In this country we have moved so drastically from even minimal concepts of duty and discipline that the representation of their misuses in German life apparently failed to strike a meaningful chord...
...they had better search for a new model of conduct...
...That was one of the central messages of The German Lesson: how duty, often a desirable quality, was converted into a fatal political liability as loyal Germans carried out dehumanizing orders under Nazism...
...An Exemplary Life is a fascinating but tricky and ambiguous novel...
...author, "Insight and Action: The Life and Work of Lion Feuchtwanger" Despite his major reputation in Germany, Siegfried Lenz remains virtually unknown in the United States...
...Like Wolfgang Koeppen's earlier Death in Rome, Lenz' book was a truly frightening picture of the Third Reich in microcosm...
...But they are told promptly by a youthful editor that passive resistance is not "in" with the young...
...They read their stories to each other...
...A committee of three, charged by the Ministry of Education for North German lands with finding a paradigmatic story for inclusion in a school reader, meets in a run-down Hamburg hotel to exchange the results of their respective searches...
...Perhaps this can be traced to his lengthy descriptions of unknown German landscapes, both physical and cultural...
...Old Valentin Pundt thinks about his single son, who for no apparent reason killed himself shortly after brilliantly passing his examinations in Hamburg...
...The three had experienced no difficulty with the first two sections, one on Work and Festivals, the other on Home and Abroad...
...Lenz gives no answer but, as in The German Lesson, he skillfully explores the dichotomy between the purity of an ideal and its application in human practice, or, from another vantage, the distance between precept and preceptor...
...Yet Pundt, a man of the old school, performs perhaps the most exemplary act in the book...
...Trying to understand the tragedy, Valentin begins to see his own existence in a new and frightening light...
...A distinguished scientist at a Hamburg institute, Lucy had been raised in Greece...
...He meets former pupils—his son's friends—and discovers that they perceived him as an authoritarian figure whose heavy hand must have rested oppressively on his son's psyche...
...It is easy to sense Lenz' distrust, once again, of moral absolutes, especially in the political sphere...
...the second is a somewhat sloppy, eccentric publisher's reader and pedagogical consultant, Dr...
...He hears some whimpering sounds and comes upon two helpless people being trampled by members of a vicious gang...
...She calmly rejected the arguments of those who insisted that her self-imposed suffering was a futile gesture destined to be soon forgotten, and sought to persuade her to participate in an imminent scientific breakthrough at the institute...
...In spite of many reservations about Lucy's actions, Dr...
Vol. 59 • December 1976 • No. 24
