Schweigeminute. Geschenkausgabe [Hardcover]

Siegfried Lenz (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 127 pages
• Publisher: Hoffmann u Campe Vlg GmbH (2008)
• Language: German
• ISBN-10: 3455974538
• ISBN-13: 978-3455974539
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,715,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Love is a warm bearing wave...", October 7, 2010

By 

Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Schweigeminute (Hardcover)

Eighteen-year old Christian, high school student in a small seaside town along the Baltic Sea coast, is a silent participant in the memorial gathering for highly popular English teacher, Stella Peterson. While others praise her youthful and lively personality, express their respect or admiration for the colleague and teacher, Christian is absorbed by his own memories of Stella. In a confident, if somewhat nostalgic, tone and a very tender gentle feel for his young narrator, octogenarian Siegfried Lenz has written a touching, dreamy and somewhat idealistic love story that, tragically, ended before it had really begun.

Using the memorial assembly at the school as the frame for his novella, Lenz has Christian tell his story. His mind moves between the present and the recent past. In the now, he addresses Stella directly, expressing his intimate thoughts and feelings, his dreams of a future that he was too reticent and shy to express before. Alternating the direct voice with his account of the previous summer's events that brought Stella into his inner circle and intimately close to him. Stressing the duality of timelines, Lenz applies voice changes between the direct "you", and indirect "she" for Stella, sometimes quite abruptly. Evoking the atmosphere of the beautiful seascape around the small maritime town and describing its summer activities the reader gains insights into Christian's life, complementing his evolving love for his teacher. Christian helps his father, a "stone fisher", in the strengthening of the breakwater barriers, he takes tourists around Bird Island, and joins with friends in the annual summer festival. Stella is enjoying all the events and more, allowing the secret romance to evolve. With the depiction of the surroundings and summer activities Lenz creates a second, important narrative frame that, at least to me, adds depth and plausibility to a story that is more about a young man growing up into a new world of emotions than the depiction of an "affair". Consequently, beyond Christian's perception of her, Stella remains an enigma, her actions open to questions. She lived in Christian's imagination more than in life. The "warm bearing wave" of love, her note, written on a postcard to Christian, is the only message left to him that will have to carry him beyond the grief.

Siegfried Lenz is a highly regarded German author of long standing with a large body of fiction and non-fiction work. This short prose work, written in 2008, was his first to break a long silence following a devastating personal tragedy. In this novella, Lenz's language is straight forward and easy and also subtle when describing the very few private encounters between "the lovers". [Friederike Knabe]

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Better Reading than "Sky Mall"?, September 23, 2010

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Schweigeminute (Hardcover)

Just barely. To tell the truth, if this maudlin melodrama had been written by an American or Briton, I'd have stuffed it in the airline seat pouch and left it for the cleaners after 20 pages. But author Siegfried Lenz has earned my respect with his earlier works, particularly his short stories in the volume "Einstein überquelt die Elbe bei Hamburg" and the novel (which I read in English) "The German Lesson". That novel is a profound and complex investigation into the consciousness of a young 'rebel' and an old artist in the years of WW II. Its narrative voice is both plausible and subtle. The narrator of "Schweigeminute" -- translated as "Stella" in English -- is an eighteen-year-old male, a student who has had a sexual liaison with his teacher, a vivacious young woman possibly no more than eight or ten years older than he is. The narrator is sitting at a 'memorial service' for the teacher; thus we know from the start that she is dead, but we will need to read to the bitter end to learn how she died. The narration drifts from present-time observation of the memorial service to non-chronological memories of the affair.

Published in Germany in 2006, this novella reeks of sensational newspaper accounts of illicit sex between femal teachers and male students in the USA over the previous decade. Sex between male teachers and female students, as we all know, isn't newsworthy. If it sounds as if I'm accusing Lenz of sensationalism and exploitation, it's true. I am. This is a shallow portrayal, all from one side, of an unhealed trauma and a senseless death. To compare it, as some have, to the works of W.G. Sebald is absurd. Yes, it deals with "memory" as the essence of Life, as Sebald does, but it doesn't deal honestly or plausibly. A better comparison would be to the American romancer Danielle Steele.