SOURCE: A review of The Selected Stories of Siegfried Lenz, in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 186-87.

In this brief review of The Selected Stories of Siegfried Lenz, Strawser raises some interesting points about Lenz's popularity in Germany and in the United States, and about the quality of Lenz's acclaimed story "Ein Kriegsende."

In the United States, Great Britain, and Canada, the three most widely known and read German authors of novels and short fiction from the postwar period are certainly Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Christa Wolf. Most of the works of these writers were promptly rendered in English and appeared in translation within several years of their original publication. Such has also been the case for the novels of Siegfried Lenz, who is best known in both German and English literary circles for his novel Deutschstunde (1968; The German Lesson, 1971). The publication...