Siegfried Lenz


Siegfried Lenz was a German writer of novels, short stories and essays, as well as dramas for radio and the theatre. In 2000 he received the Goethe Prize on the 250th Anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's birth.

Life

Siegfried Lenz was born in Lyck, East Prussia, the son of a customs officer. After graduating in 1943 he was drafted into the Kriegsmarine.
According to documents released in June 2007 he joined the Nazi Party at the age of 18 on 20 April 1944 along with several other German authors and personalities such as Dieter Hildebrandt and Martin Walser. However Lenz subsequently said he had been included in a collective ‘joining’ of the Party without his knowledge. In World War II he was a soldier in the German Kriegsmarine and served as a Fähnrich zur See on the Admiral Scheer, the German auxiliary cruiser Hansa, and for a short period in Naestved in Denmark. Shortly after the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath he deserted and was held briefly as a prisoner of war in Schleswig-Holstein. He then worked as an interpreter for the British army.
At the University of Hamburg he studied philosophy, English and literary history. His studies were cut off early when he became an intern for the daily newspaper Die Welt, where he served as an editor from 1950 to 1951. It was there he met his future wife, Liselotte, whom he married in 1949.
In 1951 Lenz used the money he had earned from his first novel, Habichte in der Luft, to finance a trip to Kenya. During his time therehe wrote about the Mau Mau Uprising in his short story "Lukas, sanftmütiger Knecht". After 1951 Lenz worked as a freelance writer in Hamburg, where he joined the Group 47 group of writers. Together with Günter Grass he became engaged with the Social Democratic Party and championed the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt. As a supporter of rapprochement with Eastern Europe he was a member of the German delegation at the signing of the Treaty of Warsaw. In October 2011 he was made an honorary citizen of his home town Ełk, which had become Polish as a result of the border changes promulgated at the 1945 Potsdam Conference.
In 2003 Lenz joined the Verein für deutsche Rechtschreibung und Sprachpflege to protest against the German orthography reform of 1996.
His wife, Liselotte, died in 2006 after 57 years of marriage. Four years later he married his 74-year-old neighbour, Ulla, who had helped him after the death of his wife. Siegfried Lenz died at the age of 88 on 7 October 2014 in Hamburg.
After his death a previously unpublished novel, Der Überläufer, which Lenz had written in 1951, was published. Found among his effects, it is a novel about a German soldier who defects to Soviet forces.

Ethics

Romanian-German literary critic Gerhardt Csejka described Lenz as one of the German authors who saw it as his duty to help the German people "pay off the enormous debts" with which "the Germans together with their... Führer had burdened themselves." Lenz saw it as his obligation to "take preventive actions against any danger of a recurrence," Csejka said."

Honors

In 1988 Lenz was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a prize given annually at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Goethe Prize of Frankfurt am Main was given to Lenz in 2000. A year later Lenz was honoured with the highest decoration of Hamburg, honorary citizenship. In 2004 Lenz was named an honorary citizen of Schleswig Holstein and in October 2011 an honorary citizen of his hometown Ełk. In 2010 he won the Italian International Nonino Prize.

Siegfried Lenz Prize

The Siegfried Lenz Prize is a literary prize awarded every two years in Hamburg by the Siegfried Lenz Foundation. The prize is awarded to "international writers who have gained recognition with their narrative work and whose creative work is close to the spirit of Siegfried Lenz." A five-member jury appointed by the Foundation selects winners. The prize includes an award of 50,000 euros, ranking among the highest-endowed literature awards in Germany. The prize was initiated by Siegfried Lenz in 2014 before his death in October of that year.

Selected bibliography

Novels