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Photo © Thorsten Doerk
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Siegfried Lenz, born in the former East Prussia in 1926, has been called a voice of conscience in post-war Germany. Only nineteen when WWII ended, he translated for the Allies while studying German and English-language literature in Hamburg. A few years later he accepted an editor's position with the large Allies-run newspaper Die Welt and completed his first novel, which launched his full-time writing career. Since then he has published many short stories, radio plays, and over fifteen novels, his latest, written when he was over eighty, a bestseller. Lenz has received many German awards and achieved worldwide fame through his book The German Lesson (originally, Die Deutschstunde, 1969). (2010)