I'm finding it very difficult to choke back hostility to Siegfried Lenz's "The German Lesson," to resist complaining that a certain ponderousness weighs it down, a certain unwillingness to come to the point, a certain metaphysical elusiveness. I want to indulge my prejudice against the Teutonic imagination, to agree with a not unperceptive student I once knew, who in a fit of exasperation with Johann Fichte (I believe it was) scrawled at the bottom of a term paper the message that "GERMANS CAN'T WRITE."…

My inclination is to sum up Mr. Lenz's plot and theme with a series of questions that may make his work sound somewhat less than compelling. Why is the story's hero, Siggi Jepsen, locked up in a prison for juvenile delinquents on an island in the river Elbe? Why has Siggi been assigned by prison authorities to write an essay on "The Joys of...