Siegfried Lenz Summary

Next to Günter Grass and Martin Walser, Siegfried Lenz is the most highly acclaimed and popular living German novelist and author of short stories; along with Grass, Walser, and Heinrich Böl... Read more

Critical Essay by Kenneth Lamott [In The Survivor Siegfried Lenz] created a dilemma of a not unfamiliar sort. The Resistance in a Norwegian village has tried to assassinate a German general. In retali... Read more

Critical Essay by David Pryce-jones [An Exemplary Life] is an exemplary novel. It is on the abiding subject of all good fiction—how should one live now? Three people have met in Hamburg to edit... Read more

Critical Essay by G. P. Butler ["Die Phantasie"], the last, longest, and most recently written of the thirteen pieces which go to make up this collection, Einstein überquert die E... Read more

Critical Essay by Thomas Hajewski In his weighty book [Heimatmuseum, Lenz] tells the story of a Masurian Heimatmuseum, from its creation by an uncle of the narrator Zygmunt Rogalla, through its sixty-... Read more

Critical Essay by S. N. Plaice The concept of "Heimat" has no adequate equivalent in English because German history has charged it with such disreputable connotations. The Nazis appropri... Read more

Critical Essay by Hanna Geldrich-leffman The image of blindness, actual physical blindness, appears in literature from the earliest times to our days. When we confront the image, a bewildering array o... Read more

Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement Herr Lenz is perhaps regarded most highly for the distinction of his contributions to the short story and the novel; it is in these fields that his majo... Read more

Critical Essay by Michael Hamburger The immediate appeal of The German Lesson … has a good deal to do with the strict limits Lenz observed in writing it…. [He] is a master of minutely ob... Read more

Critical Essay by Kingsley Shorter There was little in Siegfried Lenz's two earlier novels published here [The Lightship and The Survivor] to herald the beauty and richness of The German Lesson... Read more

Critical Essay by D. Keith Mano The German Lesson is good, but not nearly so good as it appears. Siegfried Lenz writes in what I'd call the accretive style: sentences go three steps forward, tw... Read more

In the following essay, Russ discusses thematic similarities between six stories that are set during festivals or holidays. Siegfried Lenz's fiction discloses a continual preoccupation with a l... Read more

In this essay, Murdoch analyzes Lenz's use of irony in the stories "Der Amüsierdoktor" and "Mein verdrossenes Gesicht. " Studies of the prose fiction of Siegf... Read more

In the following assessment of The Selected Stories of Siegfried Lenz, Demetz names Lenz "the last gentleman of German writing" in view of the deft understatement of Lenz's politi... Read more