The immediate appeal of The German Lesson … has a good deal to do with the strict limits Lenz observed in writing it…. [He] is a master of minutely observed detail…. [He] has confined himself to a single setting, deliberately excluding all reference to anything outside the experience and consciousness of the characters—provincial characters at that, even though one of them is a painter with an international reputation.

The greater part of the action takes place during the last two years of the Second World War, at and around Rugbüll in Schleswig-Holstein, close to the Danish border. It is narrated in retrospect by Siggi Jepsen, who has been told to write an essay on "The Joys of Duty" at the school for juvenile delinquents to which he was remanded after the war, for reasons bound up with the story he tells: an account of the conflict between...