Book of the month 2009

© Haus Publishing

A memorial service for the deceased teacher Stella Petersen is taking place in the auditorium of a gymnasium in a town on the Baltic Coast. The entire school congregation looks in deep mourning at the photograph of the young woman, equally well-liked by students and teachers. One of her students, the form representative Christian, is unable to meet the school principal's request for a brief address to the assembly, because he is the one most affected: the young English teacher was the first big love of his life.
The audience rises for a minute’s silence, and in that moment Christian remembers their past happiness. He tells himself and the readers the story of the past summer weeks: their first visit on his father's barge; Stella as the life-saver of her student Georg Bisanz and little Sonja; the ride on the pleasure boat ‘Katharina’ and their first halting touch; the trip to the bird sanctuary island, the shelter and the love-making in the hollow; afterwards the night together at the Lake View Hotel; nagging uncertainty about what others know about their liaison; his plans for a future together; the momentous accident of the sailing ship ‘Polarstern’; his recovery of Stella’s lifeless body and the drive in the ambulance; the funeral at sea, a reticent service showered with flowers; Stella's postcard from her sailing tour that reaches him after her death and on which she writes: “Love, Christian, is a warm, bearing wave”.

The content and language of the novella bring us into the world of sailors and stone fishers during the nineteen-seventies. Beach and sea form the vivid background of the events with realistic precision. Again there are seagulls, waves and clouds which Lenz outlines with a few strokes, also the work of the fisher men and the life at the harbour, and we experience this summer at the sea as if we were present. Lenz knows the metier of the stone fishers, an inspiration for the figure of Christian’s father. “He was a stone fisher”, Lenz tells, “he fished stones for the good of the small and inconspicuous but well visited harbours on the island ‘Ahlsen’. He brought them over and he built piers – for German pleasure sailors.

Within the background story – memorial service and discovering the cause of the death – a tender, as much as passionate, love story develops through flashbacks of the personal memories of the student Christian: selectively, not chronologically, the events accelerate on several narrative levels. Often Christian, in his first-person narrative, switches in mid-sentence from the third to the second person, to Stella, in order to bring her closer to him: “I hugged her and drew her close to me: She wasn’t astonished, she didn’t stiffen, a dreamful expression was in her very bright eyes, maybe it was just weariness, you turned your face towards me, Stella, and I kissed you.”

Experience immediately turns into memory with the abrupt realisation that nothing can be permanent. Despite the extremes of high bliss and sudden death Lenz has succeeded in writing a masterful novella in a lightly flowing, yet laconic style, (which you will want to read again very quickly).

SD