Siegfried Lenz (1926–2014)

Három tanár ha összeröffen. Mégpedig azért, hogy kidolgozzák az általuk szerkesztett olvasókönyv harmadik fejezetét. A feladat: olyan példaképet találni, akiből a német ifjúság majd magatartási mintákat meríthet. Hamburgban vagyunk, a '60as, '70es években, úgyhogy nem opció az aktuális nemzetvezető bajtársat beemelni a szövegbe, pedig meglennének 10 perc alatt, pálinkázással, levezető cigizéssel együtt. Nekik bizony törni kell a fejüket, vitatkozni kell, show more mert bizony mindannyian kész ötlettel jöttek - csak épp ha megkapargatjuk a dolgot, akkor kiderül, ezek az ötletek nem egy általános példaképet tartalmaznak, hanem valamit, ami inkább róluk árul el sokat. Mert bizony, amikor útra keltek, nem csak dolgos agyukat hozták magukkal, hanem gondjaikat, fájdalmaikat és frusztrációikat is, így hát amikor megoldást keresnek az olvasókönyv ügyében, valójában saját ügyeikre, saját problémáikra keresnek választ - és talán saját hibáikra feloldozást.

Én meg azt mondom, ha láttok egy antikváriumot, menjetek be, és kérdezzétek meg, akad-e egy Lenz-kötet. (Új kiadást ne keressetek, az sajna nem nagyon akad.) Lenz ugyanis egy olyan kor írója (és - szerencsés körülmény - elképesztő magyar fordítót is kapott), amikor a németség kénytelen volt újradefiniálni magát. A második világháború végeztével ott álltak porig rombolt moralitással, csupa olyan kérdéssel, amire a válaszokat már elfeledték. Ám szerencsére akadtak íróik, akik nem féltek elővenni ezeket a kérdéseket, megforgatni, letisztítani, és nagyregénnyé kristályosítani. Lenz ezek közül az írók közül az egyik legjobb, három nagyregénye - Németóra, Honismereti gyűjtemény és A példakép - olyan erővel fogalmazza meg az ún. "német problémát", hogy az felér egy egész éves "Németország a XX. században" szemináriummal. Úgy moralizál, hogy nem ítélkezik, úgy tökéletesen pontos mind az emberábrázolásban, mind a cselekményvezetésben, hogy közben marad ereje játékosságra és önironikusságra is. Szóval vásároljatok Lenz-könyveket. Megérdemli ő is, és megérdemlitek ti is. show less

This was the book that launched Lenz's career, a collection of comic short stories, set in an imaginary village in the Masurian Lake District where he grew up himself. The stories are set at some vaguely defined moment in the past, probably around 1900. The villagers are depicted as unsophisticated rustics, innocent of most of the refinements of civilisation, who talk a charmingly eccentric dialect full of strange consonant shifts and random Polish words and have a strange brand of show more home-brewed logic (also home-brewed Schnapps, of course), but who nevertheless have a strange way of coming out on top in conflicts with external authority.

Most of the stories have a fable-like air, the kind of comic anecdotes that have been told for so long in a community that they have become detached from whatever facts they might once have been based on and re-attached to people the storyteller claims to have known. There's the grandfather who is accidentally put on the conscription list and soon has the sergeant-major tearing his hair out, the aunt who dies on a shopping trip over the border and has to be smuggled back past the frontier guards so that she can be buried at home, the tongue-tied lover who proposes by handing over the baptismal certificate he's had drawn up, the two obstinate farmers whose carts meet on a narrow track, the disreputable family that lays on an Easter feast of ingeniously stolen food, and so on. And the two men coming home from market who each con the other into eating half a frog.

It's celebrating a lost culture, of course: most of the surviving German-speaking residents of East Prussia escaped to the west in 1945, and no doubt they were among the first to buy this book. But Lenz doesn't go into that here: it's a pleasant, slightly tongue-in-cheek, snapshot of Masurian culture as people remembered it. He analyses Heimat-nostalgia and its political ramifications in detail in some of his later novels, especially Heimatmuseum — in this book it's just about having a bit of fun. show less

Thirty years after I first read it, this still managed to surprise me. Those who complain about deficiencies in the balance between the style and the political theme are probably right, but all the same, Lenz does a remarkable job of portraying the North German landscape and people in his big, flat, repetitive descriptive structures. There is a deliberate element of monotony, but it doesn't make the book boring; on the contrary, you're drawn in and made to look for the fine detail under the show more big grey skies.
What I didn't really take in the first time I read it is how ambivalent Lenz is in his treatment of the main story. We start off on Siggi's side, seeing his father as a misguided and obsessive "slave of duty" (I couldn't help thinking of the Pirates of Penzance...) but after a while we realise that practically everyone else, including Siggi, is the victim of some kind of self-destructive obsession too. We can put this down to the distorted moral universe of the Third Reich if we want to, but Lenz seems to leave it open. Is it the particular stubbornness of the Northern character? Is the world just like that? It's interesting that Lenz chose to set what people would see as his big wartime novel in a place that was scarcely affected by the war, and make the chief victim of Nazi persecution a painter of nationalist views who had been involved in Völkisch politics and was a Nazi party member himself for a while. show less

It's a tragedy: Stella Petersen, a young woman, an English teacher at a high school in northern Germany, has died. The school holds a memorial service, and one by one they step up to give their eulogies: the principal, other teachers, a representative of the students.

In the audience sits Christian, one of the students. He was asked to say a few words, but while the others speak for all but one minute, he's quiet. He sits there remembering the summer, their summer, in the small seaside town show more with beach parties (this is the late 50s, after all), regattas, and clandestine meetings. It's a short service, so it's a short novel; in just over 100 pages, and in quick flashbacks, we get to follow Christian's and Stella's hesitant, very inappropriate, and ultimately (as we know) doomed relationship.

So, yet another novel by an aging writer reminiscing about first discovering the physical act of love, eh? Well sure, if you want to get technical, but it's a lot more than that. Though on the one hand, this is really that simple: a story about falling in love for the first time, back when everything is still life and death, everything or nothing, when you still think love is all that matters and your feelings are automatically returned. Lenz's style is wonderfully and deceptively light, letting Christian the narrator set the whole thing in such simple tones (teenagers love hard, but they're not always noted for their empathy) that we almost, but only almost, don't notice the obvious: that Stella is an adult, with a couple more years on him, and a complicated life full of issues and relationships that Christian has no part of. Christian certainly doesn't notice; he's too busy making plans of a little lighthousekeeper's house for two.

That difference in storylines, that confusion of subject and object run throughout the novel. Christian, in love with (the idea of being in love with) a person who's supposed to be an authority figure, dreaming of being her Man, struggles to be consistent in how he addresses and thinks of her; shifting between du and Sie when talking to her and between you and she when describing her to himself. It's as if he's trying to deliver a eulogy to her, yet ends up telling himself their story instead, fixing it in his memory as he wants to remember it, encasing her in amber. And throughout the novel, rock by rock, a breakwater is built outside the little town to keep the big waves from ruining the nostalgic calm.

There's a tone in A Minute's Silence that reminds me of the paintings of the Skagen painters; the wide open sky, the false nostalgia of easy life in a place where most people have to work hard for everything, the hazy North Sea light. At other times it reminds me of Isherwood's A Single Man; not just the way it's set in a single day but dealing in memories and their role in how we see (or fail to see) ourselves and relate to others, or coping with the death of a loved one, or even the way the discussion of a different book (Orwell's Animal Farm; Christian misses the point of it entirely) plays an important part in the narrative. But also the way the author manages to charge every word of his simple story and featherlight prose with meaning. If you wanted to, you could pick every paragraph apart hunting for symbolism and find it - yet that's never necessary. That's just all the little shades of blue that make up the whole picture, give it depth. Mostly, though, A Minute's Silence is just itself: a simple but haunting story about a young man, a slightly older woman, and how we become... well, slightly older. A eulogy for getting it both right and wrong. show less