There was little in Siegfried Lenz's two earlier novels published here [The Lightship and The Survivor] to herald the beauty and richness of The German Lesson. Both struck me as heavily upholstered short stories….

Both books were well written, but neither amounted to more than its synopsis; one feels that the author conceived the theme first, and only then clothed it in incident. In The German Lesson it is the other way about: The theme grows irresistibly out of the material. Since the theme is the joys of duty as experienced by a law-abiding, indeed law-enforcing, German under the Nazi regime, Lenz takes us to the heart of the 20th-century agony. This is, then, an ambitious book.

What is unusual about it is that Lenz has chosen to deal with issues of universal significance in a setting so apparently peripheral, so local, that a mere outline of the novel must make it sound like a genre work—closely observed but minor, miniature; or an exercise in nostalgia. In fact, it is neither. Set amid the peat bogs, dykes and desolate water meadows along Germany's North Sea Coast, The German Lesson is so powerful an evocation of place that I found myself combing the map of Schleswig-Holstein for the villages that stud the narrative.

Some are real, some are fictitious; for like everyone's childhood in retrospect, Lenz's landscape is a haunting superposition of precise coordinates on the inner world that only in childhood is coextensive with actual fields, actual woods. Through the eyes of the 11-year-old Siggi we come to know the ever changing cloud formations, the dramatic play of light over the sea, the omnipresent force of the wind; through his eyes the characters, too, take on an inevitable, almost elemental force. (p. 9)

Reading Lenz makes one realize the extent to which grotesquerie has been a substitute for feeling in postwar German writing. It is as if what happened under Hitler was so dreadful that art is impotent to represent it; as if everything now must be ghoulish, a dance of death on the ruins of sensibility; as if we'd been numbed by the sheer scale of the disaster, to the point of believing the facts to be beyond human reckoning, incomprehensible. Lenz deals with this by narrowing the scope but at the same time hugely increasing the magnification, cranking his lens down into the culture where the protozoa of totalitarianism thrive and multiply. Instead of inventing bizarre incidents, Lenz brings a naturalist's attention to bear on the minutiae of "ordinary" behavior, the microevents that cumulatively produced the megalomania, the camps, and all the rest of it.

The story is seen through the eyes of a child, but recounted when the narrator is already a young man. The immediacy of the one qualified by the ironic perspective of the other gives the book both freshness and great depth. A child does not theorize; he experiences and feels accordingly. Reconstructing the events 10 years later, Siggi seeks the meaning of his ordeal in a painstakingly minute examination of his memories.

Precise observation is the key…. [The] insistence on the exact time of day, the exact configuration of the heavens, the exact wind strength and direction—and the corresponding exactness of observation about persons and their movements, gestures, speech—powerfully recreates the feel of childhood, the directness of the child's experience.

Lest this weight of circumstantial evidence oppress the reader, Lenz has perfected a totally opposite technique for rendering it more manageable: the cartographer's schematization. (pp. 9-10)

Siggi is reassuringly anchored in his cell, whose contents lend themselves to finite inventory; the reader can breathe with him there, between dives to his private Atlantis. The breathers help, for what Siggi fetches up from under 10 years of silt is depressing stuff. (p. 10)

Siggi's excavation is thorough. But meaning is not so easily come by: The brute facts of experience have a way of surviving all explanations intact. Siggi shows in great and compelling detail how his father and the painter behaved the way they did, how it was inevitable that they should have done so, and how their conflict partially unhinged him; he is unable, however, to understand why.

As if to illustrate the intransigence of experience, the futility of explication, Lenz introduces a young psychologist who visits Siggi in his cell and reads him excerpts from a clinical study of his "case." Like Siggi-the-narrator's own map-making simplifications, this "objective" commentary is reassuring because it appears to make sense of otherwise senseless phenomena. Siggi knows better: "No, Wolfgang Mackenroth! It was like that and yet it was not like that at all."

The German Lesson is in the end tragic, not so much because of the events themselves but because of their resistance to interpretation, because they cannot truly be grasped. And if they cannot be grasped, neither can they be transcended…. Why, he asks, why, why, why are they the way they are, the people "down our way." "And I put my questions to their way of walking and of standing, to their glances and their words. And whatever I learn from any of it does not satisfy me." The tone is so fresh and youthful throughout, and the conclusion so despairing, that one is quietly appalled.

There is much more to be said in praise of The German Lesson. But perhaps Tolstoy's dictum about happy and unhappy families applies to art, too: All good novels resemble one another, every bad novel is bad in its own special way. A list of Lenz's achievements in The German Lesson would surely be as dull as the book itself is enthralling. It isn't perfect; occasionally—very occasionally—Lenz lapses into archness, or sentimentality, or preachiness. Yet these are minor flaws in a major work. Let me simply say I was really sorry when I got to the end, and leave it at that. (pp. 10-11)