4.25. ( )

Given how funny, subtle, and rending this book is in translation, I suspect it is a minor masterpiece in German. As WWII home-front book from the point of view of a German student/delinquent, the tone is somewhere between Hans Fallada, Flann O'Brien, and Joseph Heller. Highly enjoyable. ( )

A wonderful book, brilliantly written. If you wonder how the Nazis managed to hoodwink the people, this is the book for you. The story concerns a young man, 10 years old in 1943 and his father, a local policeman who is a Nazi stooge. 'the young man befriends an expressionist painter who is told by Berlin to not paint and they instruct the policeman to prevent him from doing so.
Later in the book, the policeman attempts to lead a Volksturm unit of older people. The young man is probably run in by the artist himself for stealing. This is a very disturbed young man and he is clearly nuts as the book shows.Great descriptions of the North German coast/ ( )

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 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. ( )

This book surprised me. It was recommended to me by P. I expected a lot, and haven't been disappointed so far. The style of writing is demanding, so it took me ages to get through the book.
The story is fascinating: a young man called Siggi tells his story from a correctional facility for young offenders on an island in the Elbe in Northern Germany. He is ordered to write an essay about "the joy of duty" (die Freude der Pflicht). The one thing that immediately comes to his mind is his father's story. He was a policeman in 1943 when "Berlin" ordered him to enforce their decision to ban his friend Max (an artist) from painting. Max and Jens have been friends for a long time, Max once even saved the policeman's life when he fell into the sea and almost drowned. Still he feels obliged to follow the rules and keep Max from painting.
Jepsen wants to write this story down, but fails to find a beginning, so he is put into solitary confinement until he can finish his assignment. Once he has started to tell the story, he can't just leave it at that - he has to tell everything.
The former friendship between Jens and Max is falling apart, the family is falling apart over Siggi's brother's dessertation, all in the name of a distant force in Berlin, that remains unnamed but ever present.
What impressed me most about the book is the pictures the storyteller paints of Bleekenwarf and of the Elbe Island on which he spends his jail sentence. Before he starts to tell the story he always sets up the stage.