Despite his major reputation in Germany, Siegfried Lenz remains virtually unknown in the United States…. Perhaps this can be traced to his lengthy descriptions of unknown German landscapes, both physical and cultural. His lingering on Frisian village scenes and, even more, his plumbing of the German soul may have left Americans at a loss. In this country we have moved so drastically from even minimal concepts of duty and discipline that the representation of their misuses in German life apparently failed to strike a meaningful chord.

That was one of the central messages of The German Lesson: how duty, often a desirable quality, was converted into a fatal political liability as loyal Germans carried out dehumanizing orders under Nazism…. Lenz' book was a truly frightening picture of the Third Reich in microcosm…. The novel enabled the author to probe the whys, the implicit guilt, the missed options of...