[In the following essay, Hanson uncovers the techniques that make Lenz's story "Die Festung" one of his best.]

Siegfried Lenz is one of the most highly respected and gifted writers in present-day Germany. He has not achieved the same notoriety, nor the same exposure as Günter Grass, his friend, and fellow-campaigner on behalf of the S.P.D., but at the age of 47 he has a body of work behind him which must put him, not only in Germany but probably in Europe also, in the forefront as a writer, particularly in the field of the short story. Where Grass is baroque imagination, poetic wordplay and Black Comedy, Lenz is a skilled, more subdued craftsman, with a keen eye for detail, an impressive and careful control of language and a fine sense of the architecture of his stories. Stylistically he is the absolute antithesis of Grass who exploits German vocabulary and syntax ruthlessly and often bewilderingly, whereas Lenz's style is fundamentally simple; he breaks down sentences, lingers on particular words and phrases, often repeating them 'leitmotivartig'. He is less spectacular than Grass in every respect, but he possesses all the qualities of the born story-teller, has already treated in his stories a wide range of themes and subjects from his Baltic origins (the mood he can evoke here is in some ways reminiscent of Storm), his present Hamburg domicile and from contemporary Germany in general. He has written vividly too of southern regions that he has visited, most notably Sardinia and Kenya. What is perhaps more important, he has already indicated a stylistic and technical versatility which, whilst in no way putting him with the 'avant garde' as an innovator, suggests that he is a writer at work within the most respectable traditions of fiction. Little wonder that his name is now often mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway, who, Lenz maintains, has been an important influence on his work, Conrad and Thomas Mann. Lenz belonged, like Grass, to the Gruppe 47, but this does not mean that he emerges from his stories and novels as a politically committed writer nor that he 'speaks for a generation' in the sense that Bőáll did in the late 'forties and early 'fifties in stories like, 'Der Zug war pünktlich', 'Und sagte kein einziges Wort' or 'Das Brot der frühen fahre'. Indeed, the political significance of the Gruppe 47 has in the past been much exaggerated. It always functioned primarily as a forum for ideas about 'Work in Progress'. Lenz is first and foremost a creative writer, his medium, prose and the tradition on which he has drawn has been that which E. M. Forster defines as the 'and then tradition'. Action is his starting point in many of the stories that he has written so far. His narratives have been predominantly linear—his novel Deutschstunde is a significant exception—and he has shown himself to be eminently capable of arousing tension. To hold the reader to the line of a story until its very last word is no mean achievement, but Lenz has achieved much more than this. Lenz is a realist whose ultimate interest is in people and their relationships, and the multiple possibilities inherent in human character. Not the black and white strokes, but the grey shaded areas of human experience are what he can reproduce with a fine sensitivity. Responsibility and aspiration, indifference and weakness are his chief concerns.

Lenz was born in 1926 in East Prussia at Lyck, 'die Perle Masurens' as he nostalgically remembers it, and lives today in Hamburg and Denmark. Since 1951, when his first novel Es waren Habichte in der Luft earned him a literary prize, he has been a full-time writer, regularly publishing novels, short stories and a number of radio plays. His five volumes of short stories indicate a clear predilection for the shorter prose form and he is of course by no means alone here. The 'Kurzgeschichte' has been the dominant form in Germany since the war and this perhaps can be accounted for, as Professor Hinton Thomas has suggested, by the fact that 'the short story offers the writer valuable liberties in a time of uncertainty and flux'. It is true to say that what Lenz refuses to give us in his stories is certainty. His method, however, is assured and the short story 'Die Festung' is an impressive illustration of this.

'Die Festung' appeared in 1958 in the collection of short stories Jäger des Spotts—stories which defy a neat collective paraphrase but which all reveal Lenz's ability to grip the reader, to use a wide range of fictional devices, to create a wide range of settings in which to develop themes concerning the hunt and the hunted, the scornful and the scorned. It is tempting to see his work in mythical terms but his landscapes do not take on the nightmare or fairy-tale quality of Kafka's. His work does not have the strangeness of Kafka's fictional world. Lenz is a concrete writer in another, older tradition. 'Die Festung' is among the most subtle, and the most moving, of all the stories in the volume. It is a tight and compact piece of prose writing, has tension which makes us read it through rapidly because we are made to feel that its outcome is important and it has an intensely human quality—the people in it we recognize as real. Its realism is totally satisfying—even, as the two men and the boy are described sitting down to bacon, eggs, coffee and bread, physically satisfying! It is a masterpiece of verbal economy, where much is suggested and little is said. Lenz is aware, as were the great 19th century writers of Novellen, of the value of the omission. The story is set in a region of windswept reeds and sea and river-washed peat near the Baltic coast. This is an area where there are squalls and storms even in high summer. The narrator relives an incident in his boyhood as if for the first time; he observes his father working his land, scything the grass by a river bank, totally absorbed in his task, aided by his massive, half-idiot labourer Noah Tisch. The boy builds a castle in the sand by a shed. A stranger arrives and talks with the boy's father, out of sight of the boy down the slope by the river bank. The man goes off through the wind and is soon lost on the dark horizon of a gathering storm. The father comes up from the river bank, makes a hole with his foot in the wall of the boy's castle and goes on to destroy it. The three of them have breakfast. We learn that the stranger has come to inform the boy's father that the army is going to re-claim their land for military manoeuvres. The father had been given this land on a 99-year lease after he had lost his own land in Masuria in Poland at the end of the war. The two men go out again from the cottage. When the boy joins them he sees that Noah has built a sturdier castle for him and is now helping his father to put barbed wire around their remote croft. They are going to make their gesture when the soldiers come. As Lenz has written in another, yet here very relevant context:—'Die Welt erprobt, zeichnet und zerbricht den Menschen; sein Problem heißt: Ausdauer gewinnen; wer keine Ausdauer aufbringt, wird die Feuerprobe nicht bestehen'.

What are the various elements in this extremely simple tale that when put together transform it into such an effective 'Kurzgeschichte', a model of the form? The tone of the story is influenced by the fact that the 'point of view' of the narrative is almost wholly that of the young boy describing the events as they actually happened. This accounts for the basic tension in the story—like the boy we have to wait until we learn the significance of the visitation—and it accounts too for the child-like quality of much of the narrative, its total simplicity. There is a complete lack of analysis. The atmosphere that the boy conveys is clearly part of the effectiveness of the story—the darkening sky with the approaching storm, the black crows rising up from the poplars (they recur and function as a leitmotiv), the wind, the salty air. This is a 'flaches trauriges Land', but it is a desolate region that has become a home, a farm, security. 'Hier, unter dem weiten Himmel, in all der Weglosigkeit und Verlorenheit, bekam er das neue Land . . .'. The Wilderness has had to serve as the Promised Land and Lenz is showing again that nearness of opposites, a nearness that is accentuated at a moment of crisis, that is a recurrent feature of many of his stories. The atmosphere too is made more real as a result of Lenz's verbal precision, most clearly illustrated perhaps in the impressively observed breakfast scene. 'Ich spürte ihre wunderbare Gier, ich spürte die Wärme des Essens, und die weiche, wohlige Müdigkeit, die es hervorrief, und ich empfand zum ersten Male die räuberische Schönheit des Essens: die geöffneten Lippen, das Brechen, das Mahlen'. Lenz's keen eye for detail—the way, for example, the father drags his feet through the grass to clean his boots of mud, the sand that momentarily rests on his instep as he breaks down his son's vulnerable castle walls, the 'wippendes Brett' over which Noah pushes his barrow—creates a clear and full set of visual images with the maximum of economy.

It is not, however, just the tension, the atmosphere and the linguistic control that makes the story successful, but also, and possibly primarily, the people in it. To talk of characterisation here is perhaps to use the wrong word. Lenz does not try to apply the methods of the novel to those of the short story. What he gives is not a broad and detailed insight into characters, but indications, clues which set off chain reactions in the mind of the reader who feels consequently that he is actually experiencing the story he is reading. The boy through whose eyes we see everything, gives his simple factual account, reveals his simple childmind. We feel that he is the one who has to learn some kind of lesson from the experiences narrated in the story. (A similar father/son relationship can be found in the story 'Das Wrack' which is also part of Jäger des Spotts.) There is in the boy a sense of total trust, an understanding that is beyond words and is only made clear in the story through gesture. Thus as his father destroys his castle: ' . . . und während er zuschlug und zerstörte, was ich begraben hatte, suchte ich seinen Blick. Er wich mir nichts aus, ich sah in seine tiefliegenden Augen, ich tat es schweigend und fassungslos . . .' Then, 'gab er mir die Hand . . . und da ergriff ich sie mit beiden Händen'. This is a tense moment; the boy, like us, does not know what it all means, but a gesture—a look, a clasping of hands—indicates not only that this is a critical situation but also indicates strength, communion. (Lenz in many of his stories likes to establish a situation where an action can just as easily go one of two ways, ways which represent the difference between success and failure. The story 'Der Läufer' plays agonisingly on this device.) The man who comes to talk to the boy's father has a vital role in the story, since he is the means by which we are made aware that the story is dealing with a crucial situation, but here, particularly, Lenz does not achieve the effect he is seeking by giving us a study of the man in depth. The boy describes his arrival: 'den Mann . . . , der in jenem Juni vor dem Gewitter den kleinen Weg heraufkam . . . Diesen Weg kam der Mann herauf, er war klein und mager und steckte in einem schwarzen Tuchanzug, ich hatte ihn nie vorher gesehen'. Momentarily he stands over the father, higher up the bank and then disappears out of the boy's sight to deliver his information. Then the boy sees him again: '. . . da kam der schwarze, magere Man schon wieder herauf, blickte nach dem Gewitter, und ging, von einem Windstoß getroffen, den Weg zur Holzbrücke eilig jetzt und sich vom Wind treiben lassend'. And this is all we have of him in the story—'der Mann', 'das Gewitter', 'klein', 'mager', 'schwarz',—and of course this is all we need. He hangs darkly over the whole story like one of the storm clouds that we know are overhead. We sense something almost devilish. Finally, of the two main characters in the story, the father and his faithful labourer, it is hard to decide which is evoked the more successfully. Noah Tisch is a brilliantly observed sketch. He is deficient mentally, but physically he is massive ('er [reichte] bis zum Teerdach des Schuppens'), powerful and yet gentle in a way that perhaps only the mentally deficient can be. The picture of Noah is made more effective through contrasts, both within Noah himself and in the way he contrasts with the father, and also in the boy's simple—and very real—response to him. Noah with his 'sanftes, irres Lachen' grunts and groans as he works 'als ob er unter Dampf stünde'. The boy touches on the essential contrast in the man: '. . . er lachte ständig sein sanftes, irres Lachen, doch (my italics) er besaß eine so fürchterliche Kraft, daß es einen schaudern konnte'. He is an elemental man—we remember the way his whole face is alight, as he dips his way through his breakfast—and the elemental is both attractive and frightening. (Lenz is again touching on opposing impulses.) Noah emerges as real because he is a simple man, a manual worker who expresses himself physically rather than mentally and this in most cases is all we would have to go on in real life. Lenz gives us here what we get in day-to-day encounters with other people. The central feature of Noah's life is his affection for and fidelity towards the boy's father, with whom he has been since they worked the dry fields together in Sunowo in Masuria: ' . . . sie hatten gesät zusammen und gerodet und geerntet, und Noah liebt meinen Alten mehr als alles auf der Welt . . .' and now with that instinct that is clearly the man, he senses that the father is threatened. This is turn is sensed by the boy: '. . . ich spürte, dass auch er gespannt war'. (It is important to notice how this idea of 'gespannt sein' which is articulated here for the first time fits easily and naturally into the story at this point. That the reader is quite ready for it is a further indication that Lenz has established a tense atmosphere with the arrival of the 'schwarze magere Mann'.) Noah's instinctive reaction when he senses that his much-loved master is threatened brings out the contrasts in the man—and the boy is frightened:

Ich ängstigte mich vor ihm, wie ich mich seit je geängstigt hatte vor diesem Mann, wenn sein Lachen breiter und starrer wurde, wenn der Ausdruck seines milden Irrsinns verschwand und sein Kopf zu nicken begann, dieser mächtige, schwere, tragische Kopf. Niemand wußte, was dies breite Lachen und das Nicken des Kopfes ankündigte: eine tumultuarische Wut oder eine ebenso tumultuarische Zärtlichkeit.

A power at the very core of humanity, and yet a power that can destroy is what we are made to sense in Noah, 'dieser mächtige, schwere, tragische Kopf. Lenz evokes a character in depth here without seeming to probe deeply at all. This is a measure of his skill as a short story writer. The father, the man from Sunowo (note how frequently the idea recurs), is the key figure in the story. He has had to leave his homeland, to begin again and now finds that after all his dogged, single-minded efforts he is probably going to have to move on again. Work is his task which he has pursued relentlessly: 'Wenn mein Vater arbeitete, dann arbeitete er, und es gab nichts in der Welt, das ihn abhalten oder unterbrechen konnte'. There is total application, total concentration as he scythes the grass by the river's edge. We have a vivid and precise picture of the man: '. . . sein Gang war schleppend, der Kopf immer schräg gelegt, ein runder, kurzgeschorener Kopf, und sein Rücken war schon ein wenig gekrümmt'. A timeless figure is evoked here (surely the fact that he is wielding a scythe is not a mere chance), a man who has been condemned to wander, like the mayor in 'Schwierige Trauer', and who looks as though he is going to be forced to wander Europe again. But he refuses to let this happen. This is the decision that results from the crisis that is depicted in the story. His work has been a 'Verzweiflungsarbeit'; he has desperately stuck to his difficult task right up to the appearance of the dark stranger: 'er hatte das Land für neunundneunzig Jahre übernommen: daran hielt er sich, mein Alter, der Neusiedler'. Despite the new crisis he is going to keep to his task. This is what he finally decides after he had duly pondered the implications of the visitation that day. The reader of course is kept in suspense whilst he ponders: '. . . wir wussten, dass etwas gesagt werden musste, und dass das, was zu sagen war, nur von meinem Alten kommen konnte. Aber mein Alter sagte nie etwas, das halb und unbedacht war und das er nicht zu Ende gekaut hatte'.

What now of the ending of the story? Does it have a meaning? Indeed, need it have a 'meaning'? Does Archibald Macleish's idea that 'a poem must not mean but be' not apply equally well to a short story of this kind? The breakfast over, Noah 'lachte sein mildes, irres Lachen' and accompanies the father out into the courtyard. When the boy joins them he finds that the two men are at work on the barbed wire, 'und während sie das alles taten, hörte ich sie murmeln und leise lachen, und mein Alter lachte wie Noah Tisch'. There is a wholly convincing ambiguity about this. Are we to assume that the gesture that the father is now making is futile, that he must inevitably fail and is now, like Noah, virtually out of his mind? Or are we to assume that this gesture, though small, signifies hope and the possibility that they will not be moved on again after all? (A further question one might ask is whether in fact the reader is right to ask questions that look for an answer outside the narrative in some hypothetical continuation of the story. The story stops with the common laugh of Noah and the father and the trio waiting inside their newly established compound. Is it fruitful to try to take the analysis further once the story itself has finished?) Even if we try to surmise an action outside the action of the story we do not, however, get very far. Madness or hope? It certainly seems unlikely that Noah's rabbit gun which he is holding at the ready as the story ends, will have much effect on the soldiers when they come, but on the other hand we know too from the story that there is a strength in Noah and the father, the man from Sunowo, that is stronger than that of guns. But the ambiguity remains and that perhaps is what short stories are for! Certainly Lenz fulfils in his short stories that fantasy he had as a student in Hamburg concerning a future career as a teacher calling for his students to accept paradox and contradiction: '. . . sie sollten die Chancen des Widerspruchs, des Widerrufs bekenntnishaft kennenlernen'.

The attempt has been made here to try to give some indication of how this particular short story of Lenz's 'works'. One can of course go only so far with this. One can isolate and look at the various elements that make up the story and suggest how these elements are treated and what the author indicates through them. But when these elements are seen together again, when the story is re-read and reexperienced as a unit one can only feel like Gerhart Hauptmann when faced with Holz's compendium of rules for Naturalistic art: 'Mit diesen Regeln kann man Schuhmacher ausbilden; das Geheimnis aber bleibt'. Analysis will take us so far into a story like 'Die Festung' and then we must sense that everything fits, that the author has had us in his grip during the course of his story, has suggested to us something of human character and human relationships, has given us the 'feel' of real life, has mirrored a world in a grain of sand. The 'truth' of this story—as Lenz puts it himself in an essay specifically concerned with fictional truth—'. . . fugt sich keinem Plan, sie überzeugt und betrifft uns, indem sie uns einer Erfahrung innewerden läßt, die über die bloße Tatsache weit hinausgeht'.

At the end of his valuable article on Lenz written in 1965, C. A. H. Russ suggests, that if Lenz succeeds 'in fusing experiment with the traditional narrative virtues which are his already, he may emerge as a major artist'. Suffice it to add here that since this suggestion was made Lenz has produced a novel of considerable proportions, Deutschstunde (1968), which has been widely acclaimed as a bold technical achievement. When asked recently in an interview with Marcel Reich Ranicki what had pleased him most about the enthusiastic reception of the novel he replied: 'Die kritische Rechtfertigung, den Roman als eine dem Helden auferlegte Strafarbeit zu erzählen'. In short, he felt that his experiment had been a success. More recently still, Lenz has published a short story, 'Einstein überquert die Elbe bei Hamburg—Geschichte in drei Sätzen' which is 'eine Photographie zum Lesen' of the packed harbour at Hamburg and a 'tour de force' of experimental writing. We may well now be dealing with a major artist. But Lenz consciously shuns the more extreme devices of the current avant-garde. He is clearly unimpressed by the collage-technique of a Handke or the documentations of a Peter Weiß or Heinar Kipphardt. For his part he will continue to work 'an Geschichten—Geschichten, mit denen gewiß nichts entschieden wird, die vielleicht aber ein bißchen von der Identität der Wirklichkeit lüften können'. Thus what is most impressive in this most recent story is not the experiment in itself but what we were able to observe already in 'Die Festung', namely his artistic control, the precision of his language, the structuring of his story, his control over the leitmotiv-like phrase or gesture, which gives a total cohesion to his stories and his ability through a character sketch to suggest a depth of character without actually describing it in depth. Lenz is clearly a master of the small gesture; his technique is that of cumulative suggestion. It was the technique of the great Realists of the 19th century, of Storm, Raabe and Fontane, and it was Thomas Mann's way. Lenz is in very good company already.