There was little in Siegfried Lenz's two earlier novels published here [The Lightship and The Survivor] to herald the beauty and richness of The German Lesson. Both struck me as heavily upholstered short stories….

Both books were well written, but neither amounted to more than its synopsis; one feels that the author conceived the theme first, and only then clothed it in incident. In The German Lesson it is the other way about: The theme grows irresistibly out of the material. Since the theme is the joys of duty as experienced by a law-abiding, indeed law-enforcing, German under the Nazi regime, Lenz takes us to the heart of the 20th-century agony. This is, then, an ambitious book.

What is unusual about it is that Lenz has chosen to deal with issues of universal significance in a setting so apparently peripheral, so local, that a mere outline of the...