Storyteller Siegfried Lenz – Master of the Small Form  The Black-Market Dealer of Kindness

Siegfried Lenz was born 100 years ago. His novel “The German Lesson” became an instant bestseller and has sold more than two million copies to date. Yet as a storyteller he also mastered the short form. But what gives his short stories their distinctive lightness, and what do they reveal about the author and his time?

The literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki considered his friend Siegfried Lenz to be a “sprinter”, rather than a “long-distance runner”. While he praised the “extraordinary intensity” and concentration of Lenz’s short stories, he was far less admiring of his novels. We need not share this view – The German Lesson, at least, ranks among the most significant and influential novels of Germany’s postwar literary period. And yet, it is no coincidence that Siegfried Lenz made his name with short stories – or rather with collections of concise, thematically connected narrative gems that use the advantages of the short form while tending towards the novelistic.

The Spirit of the Postwar Era in Short Stories

Lenz’s Masurian stories So zärtlich war Suleyken from 1955 established his extraordinary popularity and remain among his most widely read books. Lehmanns Erzählungen, or Aus den Bekenntnissen eines Schwarzhändlers from 1964, and the 1975 short story collection Die Geist der Mirabelle, which are set in the fictional town of Bollerup, were equally successful. More than that, these collections spoke directly to their audience’s needs and are therefore uniquely placed to capture the spirit of the postwar era.

As lighthearted and humorous as they read, these stories were nonetheless the product of hard work. Although Lenz loved nothing more than to write, storytelling was for him first and foremost paid labour – he pursued it with the discipline of a craftsman selling goods at market. In the 1950s, freelance writers earned their living primarily through radio reports, newspaper features and, of course, short stories. This economic reality was the driving force behind the dominance of the short form – one that Lenz produced with near-industrial efficiency.

Lehmann and Scarcity as Opportunity

“Hardship is my finest time,” declares Lehmann, Lenz’s black-market dealer. “I understood early on what possibilities scarcity offers – the scarcity of all things.” A master of supply and demand, he turns 120 rather worthless “cream spoons” scavenged from military surplus into a tidy fortune. For an American victory party, he procures alcohol from a natural history museum, where it had been used to preserve animal specimens in glass jars and had thus matured into spirits. He even tracks down a genuine monument of an electoral prince for a melancholic old gentleman lost in the past.

The black marketeer who turns every hardship into a business venture is, in a sense, a reflection of the writer himself – one who shapes his stories from unlikely possibilities. “I confess, I need stories to understand the world,” Lenz once said. He sought to counter deficient reality with “complete destinies”, defying the chaos of random events with tightly constructed plots. His stories are therefore firmly rooted in everyday life – in the simple struggle to get by. His characters bear no responsibility for the bigger picture. Historical catastrophes descend upon them like bad weather.

Lehmann’s heyday lasted only until the currency reform of 1948, which undermined the very basis of his business when stability was restored. Stability, it seems, breeds stagnation. Lenz, the writer, however, remained creatively active, aligning his storytelling to the literary renewal that occurred after 1945. Indeed, Lehmanns Erzählungen begins at the end of the war, as if no “before” mattered – or merited retelling. Thus, Lenz’s readers found themselves settling into the postwar reality, anchored by this fictional “zero hour” that marked a new beginning.

How Lenz Preceded The Tin Drum

The Masurian stories unfold in an almost mythically timeless past. With So zärtlich war Suleyken, Lenz inscribed the lost lake landscapes of his childhood into West German memory, without ever striking a revanchist note. Through his quirky, mischievously sly characters and fundamentally warm-hearted approach, he invoked this submerged world in literature without seeking to reclaim it. What interested him was the soul of the land and its people, not property or territory. Sudden flashes of cunning, clumsy trickery, awkward tenderness and quiet patience – these were the virtues he discovered there. When Grass elevated the Kashubian dialect to literary prominence in The Tin Drum a few years later, Lenz had already anticipated him with his Masurian tales.

Lenz had long since made his home in Hamburg, on the Elbe and near the Baltic Sea, and therefore did not see himself as a displaced person. And yet his literature offered comfort to the millions who had been expelled from the eastern regions. Masuria – “between peat bogs and sandy wastelands”, between “lakes and pine forests” – lay, Lenz claimed, “so to speak, outside the main currents of historical events”. There, he told stories of craftsmen and broom-makers, of the full moon and bark beetles – everything he referred to as the “unassuming gold of human society”.

The Art of Feeling at Home

As if formulating a counterpoint, twenty years later, in Der Geist der Mirabelle, he wrote of the village of Bollerup: “It lies neither in the rearview of history nor in the geographical isolation conducive to idyll.” And yet, in this fictional Bollerup, very little changes. For centuries, taciturn people all named Feddersen have fished at sea, felled trees in the forest and stacked firewood by their houses. Idyllic, indeed. The first-person narrator is himself part of the village community, addressing “neighbours” story by story – as though the world extended no further than this circle. Here, homeland means persistence, both of the people and the place. In Bollerup, too, events are shaped less by contemporary history than by the weather and the seasons, by cunning and quiet shrewdness.

If Lenz transformed the loss of homeland into cheerfulness with Suleyken, in Bollerup he celebrated the very feeling of being at home. On the Danish island of Als, where he spent his summers from the 1950s onwards, he gathered tales from garrulous friends – all, in reality, named Petersen – who eagerly shared them. It would be far too simplistic to dismiss these texts as harmless. Many have done so, and that may help explain why Lenz, alongside Böll, Grass and Walser, has always been treated a little condescendingly and never received the Büchner Prize. He was considered too lighthearted, too entertaining. Yet we could argue that he offered precisely what had been so sorely missed. After 1945, was not the German longing to be seen as harmless in the eyes of the world? With the power of empathy and the unbreakable kindness Lenz embodied, German literature could once again hold its head high.

March 2026