Rarely is a novelist able to operate successfully in several simultaneous dimensions—personal, historical, and esthetic—without resorting to allegory, artifice, or just bad writing. In The German Lesson, Siegfried Lenz turns the trick. He has created characters with profound political and artistic significance who never lose their credibility as people….

The implications of this story are so broad that they form a kind of invisible picture of the most fundamental characteristics of the modern age: the conflicts between art and totalitarianism, between blind obedience and the dictates of conscience, between family and society, between freedom and responsibility, between the writer and his audience. And the amazing thing is that no matter which way one reads The German Lesson, there is something to be learned.

Phillip Corwin, "Read Him Any Way You Like, Mr. Lenz Scores," in The National Observer (reprinted by permission of The National Observer; © Dow...