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.
Siegfried Lenz was born in Lyck,
East Prussia; now Ełk, Poland, the son of a customs officer. After graduating
in 1943, he was drafted into the Kriegsmarine.
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 there, he 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.
In 2003, Lenz joined the Verein
für deutsche Rechtschreibung und Sprachpflege (Society for German Spelling and
Language Cultivation) to protest the German orthography reform of 1996.
He died at the age of 88 on 7
October 2014 in Hamburg.
After his death, a previously
unpublished novel, Der Überläufer (The Turncoat), which Lenz had written in
1951, was published. Unwelcome in the cold-war era, this novel about a German
soldier who defects to Soviet Union forces, was found among his effects.
No comments:
Post a Comment