A pair of boots – impossibly large, reaching up to the thighs and marred by holes in the shaft – is the focal point of an early and previously unpublished story by Siegfried Lenz (“The German Lesson”). The short text, written in two versions in laconic everyday language, is entitled “Homesickness or something similar” and is now included in a new collection, “Emergency Notice”, published on the 10th anniversary of the author’s death.
It’s about a war veteran whose shoes are stolen while he sleeps at a train station. It is then, sold by the thief, ends up on a detour with the wife of the man released from the camp, who unsuspectingly and happily wants to give him a gift.
Hemingway’s influence
Significantly influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s straightforward American “short stories,” the undated story testifies to a time in broken Germany when you couldn’t buy anything. The heavy shoes have already been properly described, and the writer Lenz gives here simply but briefly, “an abstract of those shoes which were once supposed to have trodden Europe.”
The short story in its double edition is characterized by a unique sense of humor, and is among the first 32 discoveries in the collection that were previously published only in newspapers from the estate of the author, who died at the age of 88. On October 7, 2014 in his hometown of Hamburg. Selected and with an afterword by literary scholar Maren Ermisch.
A great commentator on development
Hamburg publisher Hoffmann & Kampe, with whom Lenz was associated throughout his life as an author from his novel “Their Habits in the Air” (1951), is honoring one of its greats on the 10th anniversary of his death. Along with colleagues such as Gunter Gross (“The Tin Drum”) and Heinrich Paul (“Where have you been, Adam?”), the East Prussian laureate is considered the best companion and commentator on the developments of the Federal Republic. Not least about how Germans deal with their Nazi past.
As he was accepted into the NSDAP in 1944 and left a cadet training ship shortly before the end of the war, Lenz had a practical influence on the developments. He remained firmly in the SPD and supported President Willy Brandt’s Eastern Policy in the 1970s, which sought reconciliation.
A clear time traveler
His “urgent notice” reflects a clairvoyant but by no means stubborn time traveler of more than six German decades. This is how you experience the emotional states and first creative efforts of the losers of the war “At Kadiks und Geeses, Adamikstrasse 15” (“Die Welt” in 1955). The end and the beginning are the same. The new thing that was about to enter was unknown.
“The Brotherhood of Blackmailers” (1952) is about those who were once hiding on the Eastern Front – and who used it to blackmail each other after 1945. “I wanted to remind you of the time when you could do anything without asking anyone. In Ukraine – well, remember? Then you were the God of Korystavka!” the writer threatened one of the fugitives.
About the widow of a slain resistance fighter
The text “Urgent Notice” tells the story of the widow of a slain resistance fighter who wants to write her memoirs for a Hamburg weekly newspaper – with furiously grotesque results. In the mood for an economic miracle comes “Mr. Schmelz’s Weekend.” Federal Republican Everyday Life” (“Die Welt” in 1956). In it, Lenz describes the hustle and bustle of a family of bed manufacturers: mother and daughter design their luxurious life according to the guidelines of the American magazine “Harper’s”, while the father fights mercilessly for pennies.
Gifted to wife and friends
A special place in the book is occupied by stories that the writer gave as gifts to friends and his second wife. Former chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD), for example, received “How Extremism Rises” (1989) from him on his 70th birthday. Interestingly, Lenz offers an ironic analysis of precisely charted, but ultimately inhumane policy, not to the RAF, but to passionate and self-confident environmentalists.
Between reality and experiment
Stylistically, the magazine-trained author moves between realism and experimentation. Young Lens also had to consider the aspect of sales in newspapers, for example. A group of stories does not always refer to the fair coexistence of humans and animals. One day, the hero sees Riemke transforming himself into a horse, and Kafkaesque (“On der Deisel”, 1957). A cat demands a birthday present (“The Thing with the Smoked Eels”, 1956 in “Sontagsplot”) – and Budgeriger, who has shared the apartment with the first-person narrator for six years, at least congratulates him on his special day (“Animals have a good reputation”, undated).
Finessiniger is a humanist
How much does a conscious humanist hope to influence his readers through literature? In 2009, the 83-year-old Lenz explained that during a staged reading of his work “The Test Person” on stage at Hamburg’s Ernst Deutsch Theater, it would happen “unobserved, pigeon-toed, quietly.” And in short: “You don’t radically change, but you get a new way of looking at reality, new evaluation standards, however, according to Lenz, it is “to come to concrete conclusions for politics and diplomacy.” .” We can still count on this in 2024 – new wars may once again escalate into a global upheaval.
Siegfried Lens: Collection “Urgent Notice”, Verlag Hoffmann & Campe, €25
