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Hoffmann und Campe solicited several expert editors’ opinions and in the end asked the Germanist and folklorist Dr. Otto Görner, in Karlsruhe, to take over the editorial responsibilities for the first draft (Version I) of Lenz’s text. A meeting was arranged and took place around the same time as Die Zeit published the article that first mentioned Lenz’s new novel project; therefore, editorial work began only after the review appeared. Görner was apparently as impressed by the force of the novel—“which grabs the reader by the neck”—as Paul Hühnerfeld of Die Zeit had been. After having met the author in person in Hamburg, Görner wrote him a detailed letter, indicating his fundamental approval of the novel while suggesting some corrections and indicating passages where he thought sharpening or greater emphasis was needed. In closing, he wrote, “I am sure, my dear Herr Lenz, that you will take these considerations of mine as they are meant to be taken and not as pedantry. They address only matters of technique and craft. And please allow me to use this opportunity to tell you once again how much I enjoyed our conversation at Hoffmann und Campe’s offices” (Otto Görner to Siegfried Lenz, November 13, 1951).
In all probability, it was immediately after the conversation in the publishing house and the reception of Görner’s follow-up letter that Lenz started to work on revising Version I, which he completed around the beginning of 1952. In a rapid run-through, the author tightened the first or “partisan” section of the novel, cut dialogue, and lightly polished passages here and there. But the second part, the “turncoat” section, received a thorough revision; Lenz wrote some entirely new chapters and divided up others (see below, “Text/Versions”).
The result of this assiduous reworking was a second draft of the novel, in sixteen chapters. The author had often considered calling his work The Turncoat; now he wrote that title in his own hand on the cover of the manuscript. He probably submitted this second draft (Version II) to his publisher in January 1952.
In a letter sent to Otto Görner in November 1951, the Neue Zeitung had already declined first serial rights to the novel. Some time later, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung did the same; the editor responsible for the decision was Herbert Nette, who expressed regret for it to the author himself and gave as his reason for rejecting Lenz’s book the newspaper’s recent serialization of Rolf Schroers’s novel Die Feuerschwelle (“The Fire Threshold”). According to Nette’s self-justification, the FAZ had published, “not long ago, another war novel. While it’s true that this novel, by Rolf Schroers, takes place in Italy, it also, like yours, depicts a partisan milieu. And so it is that for thoroughly banal reasons of content, we cannot consider publishing your novel at any point in the foreseeable future” (Herbert Nette to Siegfried Lenz, January 22, 1952).
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During the course of these weeks, the “reasons of content” cited by the FAZ editor appear to have led to a revised assessment of the Turncoat project in the publishing house as well. Be that as it may, the editor Otto Görner’s initially well-meaning if somewhat pedantic opinion of the story’s narrative power gave way to a profound skepticism, which he expounded upon in a detailed letter to Lenz. The overall tenor of this piece of writing suggests that it was based on a reader’s report that Görner had prepared for Hoffmann und Campe; in this report, he’d pronounced his judgment on the revision of the novel and therefore on Lenz’s second and final version.
In his first letter to Lenz, the reader’s tone had been respectful as he acknowledged the young author’s accomplishment, but now Görner seemed to arrogate to himself a position of authority in regard to the youthful writer, who was half his age. And apparently, Görner also wanted to demonstrate his energetically held views to the publisher. Görner begins this second letter by accusing Lenz of failing to make some suggested emendations to his text, changes that “had been recommended for very sound reasons.” Görner’s intentions become substantially clearer in the middle section of his letter: “An exciting and distinctive writing style is not sufficient. Whatever the circumstances, the author must jump the hurdles that come with his subject. I suggest that he provide us with a lucid outline of a new draft of his novel. Without such a plan, further work on the text is pointless. The author must compel himself to consider seriously, once and for all, the possibilities inherent in his material.” These suggestions are evidently meant more for the publisher than for the writer to whom the letter is addressed and who, no doubt, must now feel that in working on his text he has “perhaps relied all too greatly on the atmosphere of comradely understanding,” as Görner conjectures.
You can sense the panic of the publisher’s chosen reader when he comes to the essential point, which the substantial revision of the manuscript has now made clearly apparent: “…the novel should in fact be called The Turncoat—and that is an impossible title. Such a novel could have been published in 1946. But it’s a well-known fact that these days, everyone wants to ignore the past…You could do yourself immeasurable damage, and in this case, your good relations with the radio and the press won’t be of any help to you. We’re not giving you this advice because we’re academic know-it-alls, but because we know our times, because we know the developments that are taking place, and because experience has taught us that a novel can start off well and still become a literary disaster.”
And because Görner, on closer inspection, considers a novel in which deserters from the German Wehrmacht go over to the Red Army simply unimaginable in the political climate of the Adenauer period and in view of the ominously hardening relations between the Western powers and the Eastern Bloc, he proposes to Lenz that he should totally rework his material and reimagine his characters. Görner particularly insists that the author must give Proska, the turncoat, a “positive” antagonist to balance his conduct and make it appear more outlandish. And in order to keep anything else from going awry, the reader writes, “Make yourself an outline for how you’re going to proceed, and organize your material well. Write up this outline for us, let’s say 3–4 pages with keywords and brief sentences. And then, once we reach a mutual agreement, follow your outline step by step and turn it into a narrative.”
And with this, the novel for which Lenz had signed a contract was basically rejected. And in a mixture of threat and broad hint, the official reader added, “My dear Herr Lenz, don’t consider making some sort of angry gesture and deciding to write a new book.”
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Lenz’s response is quite clear and the attitude he displays quite admirable, considering the number of months he’d spent working on this important second novel.
Siegfried Lenz
Hamburg 13 Isestr. 88
Hamburg, January 24, 1952
Dear Dr. Görner,
Thank you for your detailed letter, to which I would like to respond as follows:
You consider the second version of my manuscript a failure. On this point I have nothing to say, except that I completely respect your judgment.
You reproach me for not having worked hard enough and for not having made the necessary mental effort. That is certainly not the case. As a general rule, I personally have to take more trouble and to expend more agonizing patience on a single “transitional” page than on eight pages of continuous text—and that’s what I’ve done. The fact that the plot I’ve come up with strikes you as insufficiently thought through, especially as regarding the possible consequences of publishing the manuscript, demonstrates to me that when I write, I must “turn my back” on intuition, that I need to practice ceaseless self-control when I write, and lastly that I began this manuscript without regard for my limitations. I didn’t succeed in jumping the hurdles, nor will I ever. Those hurdles were not built for me. I gave quite serious thought to the possibilities offered by my material; I found only my possibilities, and as it turns out, they’re not sufficient.
You r
eproach me for having abused your trust and attempted to trick you. This reproach, as you will understand, deeply wounds me, and I’m inclined to take it as an involuntary offense. What might I have expected to gain from such an attempt? Besides, you are content merely to state that I tried to trick you, for you give no explanation of how or by what means I endeavored to accomplish that end. In your first, benevolent letter, you asked me to reflect upon your suggestions for the further development of the plot and to see whether I would deem them acceptable. I have so reflected, dear Dr. Görner, but I’ve been unable to accept all of them, because some of them run counter to my possibilities. I cannot believe that you see in these inevitable omissions sufficient reason to accuse me of a breach of trust.
You reproach me because my reworking of the manuscript has led, you say, to almost no improvement. Toward the end, I believed I had already made too many changes to the character Proska. However, I admit that the writer sees his characters’ reflections only from a very short distance away and with many facets, like looking through compound eyes.
You write that I should make no angry gesture. Why would I do that, dear Dr. Görner, especially seeing that it could in no way help me? I’ve given a lot of thought to your letter, I’ve read and reread it over and over, I’ve also slept on it, and now I’d like to say to you, calmly, deliberately, and completely dispassionately, that I will never write this novel, and that I won’t write it because I can’t write it.
I shall look on this work as an indispensable exercise, as proper training, which in the end is the conditio sine qua non for every young writer. I’m convinced that I’ve learned a great many things I wouldn’t have learned without making this effort! It’s our failed attempts that pay the greatest dividends, even though they may be hard to recognize at first. Perhaps, in two or three years, I may venture to show you a new manuscript, a manuscript that’s better and a little more mature.
In the meantime, I offer you my heartfelt thanks for your trouble, for your interest, and for all the good advice.
With my best regards,
yours sincerely,
S. Lenz
P.S. I’m sending Herr Soelter, in whose name you wrote the letter to me, a carbon copy of this reply.
Eventually, and to avoid further burdening the relationship between author and publisher, there was a pro forma understanding that the novel, shorn of its incriminating “turncoat” section, would be published as a novella at some later, more auspicious time. As the years passed, this compromise, which seemed highly unlikely to succeed anyway, faded from memory: the publishing director of Hoffmann und Campe, Rudolf Soelter, died in 1953; the reader, Otto Görner, died two years later. And so in the end, Lenz laid the entire business to rest, looked ahead rather than behind, and turned to fresh literary projects. In 1953, his novel Duell mit dem Schatten (“Duel with the Shadow”) appeared and has been considered his second book ever since. Only two years after that, in 1955, his short-story collection So zärtlich war Suleyken (“So Tender Was Suleyken”) followed. This book’s enormous success also definitively consigned to oblivion whatever remained of the disagreements beween publisher and author during their ill-fated collaboration on The Turncoat. Siegfried Lenz remained loyal to the Hamburg publishing house Hoffmann und Campe for the rest of his life.
TEXT/VERSIONS
Lenz probably began the first draft of his second novel at the end of May 1951, after his return from his African trip. Writing by hand, he filled a large-format notebook with Chapters 1–8 and the beginning of Chapter 9. Then, having run out of room, he turned to the same notebook in which he’d written his first novel, Es waren Habichte in der Luft, and completed the second novel (from the end of Chapter 9 through Chapter 12) on the pages that had been left blank.
Making at least two carbon copies on her typewriter, Liselotte Lenz gradually produced the initial typescript of the novel, whose handwritten draft exhibits only a few corrections, additions, and deletions. This typescript of the new novel (Version I: twelve chapters, 276 numbered pages, and two carbon copies, in the Siegfried Lenz Literary Estate in the German Literary Archive in Marbach am Neckar) reached the publisher’s hands probably by early autumn 1951 and certainly by October of that year. This version was the basis of the judgment pronounced by Dr. Otto Görner on November 10, 1951, on the occasion of his meeting with Lenz in Hoffmann und Campe’s offices at 41 Harvestehuder Weg in Hamburg, within walking distance of the apartment on 88 Isestrasse where Lenz and his wife lived in those days.
Immediately after this conversation at the publishing house and the encouraging letter Dr. Görner, the publisher’s reader, subsequently sent him, Lenz began the revision of his novel. To this end, he divided the second carbon copy of the novel into two parts and very heavily revised Chapters 9 through 12. In the course of the revision, those four chapters became the final eight chapters (9–16) of the current edition, but the novel didn’t get significantly longer. The newly written ninth chapter greatly helps to illuminate the author’s intentions in making these revisions, which resulted in Version II of his text. Lenz first wrote the new chapter in his Habichte notebook, in which he’d already written the final chapters of Version I.
This new Chapter 9 (this page in the present volume) serves as the hinge between the first or “partisan” section of the novel and its second or “turncoat” section; during the course of the night described here, Proska encounters his comrade Milk Roll, and following a conversation, Proska decides to change sides, as his friend has already done. Milk Roll and Proska are both prisoners of war in this chapter, waiting to be executed (at dawn, they’ve been told); Lenz thus places his principal character in a state of emergency, where he must choose either extinction or treason, because the single alternative to certain death is to join the struggle against “the Gang” (as he calls Germany’s rulers) on the side of the enemy.
Chapter 10 remained essentially the same. Proska accompanies a former German officer, also a deserter and in charge of frontline propaganda for the Soviets, on his final mission. The new Chapter 11—with, at its center, a last meeting between Proska and his lover, Wanda—is mainly based on parts of the old Chapter 9.
Events during the Soviet Army’s westward advance had been Lenz’s focus in Chapter 11 of Version I; now he divided those events into two chapters. In Chapter 12 (this page in the present volume), Proska appears as an adviser to a Soviet battlefront commander in combat with his, Proska’s, former comrades; in Chapter 13 (this page), the Red Army’s westward progress takes Proska to his homeland in East Prussia. At Proska’s sister Maria’s farm near the East Prussian town of Sybba, immediately adjacent to Lyck, things start moving fast and tragedy ensues, both for Proska’s comrade Milk Roll and for his brother-in-law, Rogalski. As readers of the novel will know, Lenz depicted those tragic developments in Chapter 13 of his revised version, but he had already included them in his first version.
The closing episodes, set in the Soviet Occupied Zone in Germany after the war, were originally part of a single chapter; the revised version expands them to three entire chapters (14–16). Lenz used parts of his original Chapter 12, the final chapter of Version I, in the closing chapter (16) of Version II. By contrast, Chapters 14 and 15 of the second version were newly written. Wanda appears once again, but only in the form of a hallucination unmistakably attributable to Proska’s longing for his “Squirrel.”
In these last chapters, which include both rewritten and new material, Lenz gave his depiction of life in the Soviet Occupied Zone after the end of the war not only increased volume but also notably greater depth. He portrays the suffocating constrictions of the totalitarian power structures in the SOZ, with their all-pervasive system of spying, ideological indoctrination, and control over individual lives, more effectively and in greater detail in the second, revised version of his novel.
In a scene that Lenz incorporated into his closing
chapter (16), Proska makes a last-minute escape from apparently imminent arrest by fleeing the Soviet zone to the West. This scene, like others, was totally new, written by Lenz for inclusion in the revised version of his novel.
While the revisions of the first part (Chapters 1–8) were made by hand, all at one go, on the second carbon copy of Version I of Lenz’s text, the substantial additions, rearrangements, and new divisions of the chapters in the second part made it absolutely necessary to produce a new typescript containing Chapters 9–16.
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The basis of the present edition is the complete typescript of Version II that Lenz kept in a single folder. This typescript comprises the corrected Chapters 1–8, taken from a carbon copy of the Version I typescript, and the substantial ly newly written and heavily revised Chapters 9–16 (Version II typescript).
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