In his weighty book [Heimatmuseum, Lenz] tells the story of a Masurian Heimatmuseum, from its creation by an uncle of the narrator Zygmunt Rogalla, through its sixty-year history up until its deliberate incineration by the narrator himself. Like the situation in Böll's Billard um halbzehn in which Robert Faemel blows up the monastery built by his grandfather, Rogalla's Akt der Befreiung is similarly motivated, even though the reasons for the museum's destruction are several and fundamentally more complex than in Böll's book. They generate the overall suspense of the novel and are only revealed at the book's end.

Heimatmuseum should appeal most favorably to those intimately familiar with the German-Polish area it so vividly describes—i.e. Masuren, a region of thick forests, glistening lakes, strange wildlife and mystical folk customs. In fact the initial half of the novel is a collection of tales, all of which taken together make up a loose cultural history of the area and its inhabitants…. Of less interest to the uninitiated reader is Lenz's liberal use of regional dialect.

The speed of the narrative picks up appreciably around the novel's midpoint. The Nazi takeover is experienced in this corner of Europe with the same apprehension as elsewhere, within as well as beyond the borders of the Reich…. A crisis is reached when the museum, whose custodianship Rogalla has inherited from his deceased uncle, is to be converted from a regional museum of Masurian culture and history into a Grenzland-Museum, a restructured showcase emphasizing Nazi ideals and dedicated to visually justifying German as opposed to Slavic ownership of and rights to the region. The richness of the Masurian past as symbolized by the museum's contents and the near-mystical intermingling of "Geschichte, Heimat, Erinnerung" run like a current through this book, and the attempt at prostituting this relationship by the Nazis (and later by more contemporary factions) implants in Rogalla the idea of the museum's destruction a generation later…. After concluding that recent history has essentially not instructed, due to its cyclical nature, and has been grossly misused at the expense of home, family, tradition and memory, Rogalla destroys his beloved structure.

The novel is not without flaws. Lenz has attempted to give his long, often fragmented story more cohesion by having each part narrated by Rogalla as he is lying in a hospital bed recovering from burns received during the museum fire. A certain Martin Witt, presumably the reader, comes to visit him on more than a dozen occasions, each time being treated to another lengthy chapter of the narrative. This situation in itself, together with the sterile hospital surroundings and the initial confused state of the badly burned narrator, tends to opaque the work and presage the less-than-optimistic "moral" of the novel following the museum's destruction. The near daily, almost automatic appearance of Herr Witt and Rogalla's continued referral to him as simply "mein Lieber," take on a ritualistic tone which only anesthetizes the reader further.

In addition to a short-circuited attempt at giving this long book more cohesiveness, Lenz seems to have deviated little from his own earlier themes of guilt and atonement, duty and conscience, freedom and moral responsibility. While reading this novel, I kept fighting off the impressions that it had all been told before, in the so-called "Verlorene-Heimat" novels by other German writers and in more polished prose by Grass and Böll. Yet the clarity with which Lenz describes events from the Masurian past and his undeniable gift for storytelling (i.e., short story telling) demonstrate that the main problem with this novel lies more in form and structure rather than in literary relevance or content. Visitors to the Heimatmuseum will undoubtedly have more controversial, diverse opinions regarding its contents than would be the case with most bestselling German novels. (pp. 497-98)