Das Vorbild [An Exemplary Life] tells the tales of a small but ill-assorted official committee in search of a model (potential idols appear along the way, but a model is what is wanted), an agreed example of estimable attitudes and behaviour which, if suitably written up, might be included in a textbook for use in German schools.

Lenz is an accomplished short-story writer, and any quest for neatly depictable episodes which demonstrate the ways in which more or less admirable people think and act would give his talents scope. The scope in this case is vast, since the stories under scrutiny are presented not with their inventor's commendation but, in essence, as the choices made, the models proposed by three highly disparate educationists. And each of these in turn has a history, a far from exemplary domestic background, which emerges as yet another semi-independent narrative within the whole...