Das Vorbild

BRD, 1970-ish. Three educators from three generations and very different backgrounds meet up in Hamburg to edit a chapter for a textbook on the subject of "The Good Example". Should be easy: Just pick a short story that gives the youth, the future leaders of the Bundesrepublik, a paragon to discuss and look up to. Except... 30 years after Hitler, in the middle of the cold war and student riots and a very dreary and cold November, what does that even mean? Who the hell can agree on what's a good example in times like these - and even if you find one, who would take it seriously? Isn't this how we got here in the first place?

I love Lenz' language; the way his sentences unfold, subjunctives piled three layers deep, the slight irony that his hopeful but jaded narration takes on as he carries us through the lives of these three people over a couple of days past a cast of dozens of people just getting on with their lives, sold-out protest singers, over-it ex-wives, disillusioned academics, bored Burgessian hooligans... The central idea of the novel, the search for an ideal, is a tricksy one; Lenz makes the reader take part in the search, looking not just in the texts that our three anti-heroes peruse but in every single person here for that one Just Person that we can all agree shows us something to aspire to. Which, ironically (and I'm pretty sure that irony, too, is deliberate) makes the book just slightly annoying; the whole book becomes a case of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, you see it everywhere until you want there to be just one scene that doesn't mean what the entire book means.

But still, damn.