Among the few postwar German writers who have reached an international audience, 63-year-old Siegfried Lenz has been least tempted to be an educator of the entire nation or a front-page prophet of dire events. In matters of language he is less innovative than Günter Grass, who has never been particularly coy in his public appearances, and far less eager to push his somewhat left-of-center political views than Heinrich Boll, who, in his recurrent fits of rage, wrote with a hammer, not with a pen. In his inclinations and habits, Mr. Lenz is a quiet north German who believes that perhaps his writing will do more to enlighten his fellow citizens than speeches from grandstands; and being a skeptic who in the last year of World War II deserted from the navy (handing over his gun to a Danish student), he supports the Social Democrats without wanting to be a member of the party organization.

In 40 years of writing, he has produced a wide range of stories and novels (his famous German Lesson was translated into 19 languages), plays for the theater and other media and at least three collections of critical essays, including his conversations with the psychoanalyst Manes Sperber and the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. His voice has remained as sober, steady and sympathisch as ever—so much so that many of his critics have long asked whether it is really possible to say anything about the brutalities of recent German history as calmly as he prefers to do.

The Selected Stories of Siegfried Lenz, edited and ably translated by Breon Mitchell, offers an ambitious panorama of his slowly changing narratives. Unfortunately, at least one-third of the pieces by now belong to literary history rather than to contemporary writing, and their translation comes at least 15 years too late. It was not the best of ideas to include so many of his village stories—nostalgic, easy and rarely impressive. Readers who do not happen to come from distant East Prussian Masuria (now part of Poland) or from the provinces of Schleswig-Holstein probably can do without them—in spite of their sturdy peasants and fishermen, always shrewd and lovable, and the boards groaning with a Gogolian abundance of "bacon, eggs, smoked ham, cabbage soup, honey, onion cake, and canned pears."

Mr. Lenz's early political parables, written in the 1950's, are all of the most welcome persuasion, unmasking the lies of the dictators and the cynical manipulation of public opinion in totalitarian regimes; but they are also curiously abstract, without precise color or singular characters, inevitably lacking edge and analytical force. One story, "Heilmann," is an instructive example of how a good German honestly wants to confront the realities of the Holocaust and fails to offer more than pious sentimentalities. The merchant Heilmann, the "last man of the Hebrew faith" in a distant corner of Masuria, had long waited for the moment "when it was his turn as well." He sleeps fully dressed to be ready, and when the local policeman whom he has known since he was a boy takes him away, they stomp together through the forest. When the aging policeman has a stomach cramp and rests in a hut, Heilmann carefully undoes the man's belt buckle, laying his rifle across his lap, until they are again ready to march to a border village where captive Jews dig trenches and shots are heard. Mr. Lenz has constructed a rather Teutonic character haplessly in awe of authority and inevitable fate; Heilmann has decided "to forgo any action which might alter what he had so often expected, experienced, and lived through in nights of listening and dreaming." He does not want to give in "to the weakness of hope" and, in his Wagnerian loyalty to destiny, even walks ahead of the police.

Yet Mr. Lenz is far too sensitive to be content forever to imitate existential epiphanies à la Hemingway, as did many younger writers returning from the war, or to create plaster cast dictators and paper Jews. In the 1970's he threw away his literary blinkers, looked more directly at the vicissitudes of West German society after the "economic miracle" and began to experiment with combinations of narrative styles and ingenious syntactic games. (It is a pity that the selection does not include the exhilarating story "Einstein Crosses the Elbe Near Hamburg," which illuminates the relativity of "facts" in three incredibly long sentences that form the text.) There are foolish scholars in highly subsidized research institutes ("Eskimo Lamps"), German physicians burdened by their memories of how they behaved 40 years ago ("The Punishment"), a once-powerful corporation manager who has been shunted aside and now listens even to lowly job applicants ("The Great Wildenberg") and a young woman who, having given up her own studies to enable her refugee friend to finish his, suddenly collapses when she hears that he has completed all his courses successfully ("The Exam").

In his best stories Mr. Lenz continues to rely on suggestive understatement but fastidiously avoids the allegorical. In "The Waves of Lake Balaton," a West German couple eagerly wait to see relatives from the German Democratic Republic for a brief Hungarian vacation, but the East Germans immediately go to see the last wild horses of the plains rather than stay a few hours with the Westerners, who do not even know how condescending they themselves are. In "The End of a War," the most powerful story in this volume, a minesweeper is sent by the high command in 1945 to rescue wounded German soldiers from Baltic shores controlled by Soviet ships and planes. The crew refuses to follow orders and, a few hours after the official capitulation of Nazi Germany, returns to a base only to run up against unchanged navy ideas of order and honor and a hastily summoned court martial. (When the sailors address their commander, they say "Mr. Kaleu" in this version. But "Kaleu" is not, as the translator seems to believe, a family name; it is an abbreviated navy term of rank, Kapitän-Leutnant, and what they are saying is "Captain-Lieutenant, Sir!") "The End of a War" is a compassionate and corrosive story of large implications, and it shows what Mr. Lenz, the last gentleman of German writing, can really do.