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Novelist Siegfried Lenz dies aged 88

One of Germany's last literary lions of the World War II generation, Siegfried Lenz, who was credited with helping his country grapple with its Nazi legacy, died on Tuesday aged 88, his publisher said.

Novelist Siegfried Lenz dies aged 88
Siegfried Lenz. Photo: DPA

Lenz captured some of his country's most prestigious prizes for novels such as the widely translated "Deutschstunde" (German Lesson), "Das Vorbild" (An Exemplary Life) and "Heimatmuseum" (The Heritage).

His publisher throughout his five-decade-long career, Hoffmann und Campe, called him in its obituary "one of the most important and most-read writers in German literature".  

Lenz was an impassioned participant in the intellectual life of his era, and held lively debates with luminaries such as Nobel laureate Gunter Grass and poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan.

"Siegfried Lenz was one of these people you don't find anymore – a writer who is loved beyond the community of literature aficionados," Daniel Kampa of Hoffmann und Campe said in a statement.

He was an "artist who saw his writing as a moral duty and who engaged with world events," Kampa added.

"German Lesson", published in 1968, in particular laid bare how Nazi ideology infected a culture that had prided itself on its refinement and sophistication.

Although Lenz was widely revered for injecting a moral conscience into the literature of the post-war period, he himself expressed frustration about the limited impact of books on Western society.

"As a writer I learned how little literature is capable of, how meagre and unpredictable its effect was and still is," Lenz said as he accepted the peace prize of the German Publishers' Association in 1988.

Born in Lyck in East Prussia in 1926, Lenz was called up to serve in Hitler's navy before deserting in April 1945.

After a brief period as a prisoner of war, Lenz moved to the northern port city of Hamburg to study philosophy and literature.

He became active in the Social Democratic Party and developed a friendship with Helmut Schmidt, who was chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, that would last more than 50 years.

The cause of his death was not released.

SEE ALSO: Gunter Grass hangs up novelist pen

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HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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