epa04435608 (FILE) A file picture dated 15 September 2009 shows German author Siegfried Lenz smoking his pipe during an interview in Hamburg, Germany. Lenz has died at the age of 88 in Hamburg on 07 October 2014, according to the publishing house Hoffmann und Campe. EPA/MAURIZIO GAMBARINI
Siegfried Lenz
Siegfried Lenz formed part of the influential Gruppe 47 with Günter Grass, and is mentioned in the same league as Grass, Heinrich Böll and W G Sebald. He served in the German navy before becoming a journalist and writer. His fiction, plays and reportage have turned him into one of Germany’s leading voices of conscience, dramatising issues of authority, memory and resistance in ambitious realistic novels, including The German Lesson (1968) and later fables such as The Lighthouse. He went to Poland with Willy Brandt on his historic trip in 1970, and also kept up an important correspondence with the greatest Jewish poet of the Holocaust, Paul Celan.
Siegfried Lenz formed part of the influential Gruppe 47 with Günter Grass, and is mentioned in the same league as Grass, Heinrich Böll and W G Sebald. He served in the German navy before becoming a journalist and writer. His fiction, plays and reportage have turned him into one of Germany’s leading voices of conscience, dramatising issues of authority, memory and resistance in ambitious realistic novels, including The German Lesson (1968) and later fables such as The Lighthouse. He went to Poland with Willy Brandt on his historic trip in 1970, and also kept up an important correspondence with the greatest Jewish poet of the Holocaust, Paul Celan.
