The Turncoat
Page 26
This edition preserves the orthographical choices made by the author; only small faults in punctuation and orthography due to writing or typing errors have been silently corrected.
Six months before his death in October 2014, Siegfried Lenz entrusted his personal archive to the German Literary Archive in Marbach am Neckar. The items in Lenz’s archive included both the manuscript and the typescript of his hitherto unpublished second novel, which was discovered only when the materials were being examined and organized.
The novel was published in Germany in 2016 to great success and acclaim, both from the general reading public and from literary critics. Since then, The Turncoat has been translated into fourteen languages. A film version of Lenz’s novel premiered on German television in April 2020.
ABOUT THE TITLE
The publishing contract of March 1951 states the new novel’s working title as…da gibt’s ein Wiedersehen (“…We’ll Meet Again”). This title alludes to the old soldier’s song “Nun geht’s ans Abschiednehmen” (“Now We Must Say Farewell”), which was written by Hugo Zuschneid (1861–1932). The lines Lenz had in mind when he chose his working title—“In der Heimat, in der Heimat, / da gibt’s ein Wiedersehen” (“In the homeland, in the homeland, we’ll meet again”)—are part of the song’s refrain.
During the work on his book, Lenz considered another title: Der Sumpf (“The Marsh”). This refers to the first part of the novel (Chapters 2 through 8), which deals with the partisans’ war against the Germans. The brigades of the Soviet resistance chiefly carried out their attacks and acts of sabotage from bases in the impenetrable forests and marshlands of Belarus and Ukraine, in which the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht showed themselves to be hopelessly overmatched.
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In the course of the heavy revisions and additions made in the second half of the novel (Chapters 9–16 in the present volume), the “turncoat story” was given more and more weight relative to the “partisan story” set in the Russian marshlands, on what was from a German viewpoint the Eastern front. And so the further progress of Lenz’s novel made him feel increasingly justified in his later choice of a title, which he first proposed in his negotiations with the publishing house. In the end, he himself gave his second novel the title Der Überläufer (“The Turncoat”), writing it in his own hand on the folder containing the second, revised version, along with a subtitle that may be translated as “Death Does the Music.”
LIFE AND WORKS
Life
Siegfried Lenz, the son of a customs official, was born on March 17, 1926, in Lyck, a small city in the Masurian region of what was then East Prussia. After graduating from high school in 1943, Lenz was drafted, age seventeen, into the German navy. Shortly before the end of the Second World War, he deserted and was taken prisoner by the British, who employed him as an interpreter.
After the war, he attended the University of Hamburg before interrupting his studies to accept an internship at the German daily newspaper Die Welt, where he eventually became an editor (1950–1951). While at Die Welt, he met his future wife, Liselotte (“Lilo”), whom he married in 1949. Their union lasted until Liselotte’s death some fifty-seven years later, in 2006. From 1951 on, beginning with the success of his first book, Es waren Habichte in der Luft (“There Were Hawks in the Air”), Lenz lived as a freelance author in Hamburg, where he died at the age of eighty-eight on October 7, 2014.
Works
Siegfried Lenz was a prolific writer whose enormous output included fiction (novels, novellas, short stories), plays for the theater, radio plays, essays, and journalism. The following chronological list contains only those titles—all of them fiction—that have been translated into English, beginning with The Turncoat.
1951
Der Überläufer, Lenz’s second book, written in 1951 but not published until 2016 (English: The Turncoat)
1960
Das Feuerschiff, a short-story collection (English: The Lightship)
1968
Deutschstunde, a novel (English: The German Lesson)
1973
Das Vorbild, a novel (English: An Exemplary Life)
1978
Heimatmuseum, a novel (English: The Heritage)
1985
Exerzierplatz, a novel (English: Training Ground)
2006
Die Erzählungen, Lenz’s collected stories, published in one volume on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Twenty-six of these stories, about a third of the total, appear in English in The Selected Stories of Siegfried Lenz.
2008
Schweigeminute, a novella (English: Stella in the United States, A Minute’s Silence in the United Kingdom)
SIEGFRIED LENZ, born in Lyck in East Prussia in 1926, is one of the most important and widely read writers in postwar and present-day European literature. During World War II he deserted the German army and was briefly held as a prisoner of war. He published twelve novels, including The German Lesson, and produced several collections of short stories, essays, and plays. His works have won numerous prizes, including the Goethe Prize and the German Booksellers’ Peace Prize.
JOHN CULLEN is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Susanna Tamaro’s Follow Your Heart, Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck, Carla Guelfenbein’s In the Distance with You, Juli Zeh’s Empty Hearts, Patrick Modiano’s Villa Triste, and Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation. He lives on the Shoreline in southern Connecticut.
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