Siegfried Lenz was born in
Lyck,
East Prussia (now
Ełk, Poland), the son of a customs officer. After graduating in 1943 he was drafted into the
Kriegsmarine. According to documents released in June 2007, he joined the
Nazi Party at the age of 18 on 20 April 1944 along with several other German authors and personalities such as
Dieter Hildebrandt and
Martin Walser. However Lenz subsequently said he had been included in a collective ‘joining’ of the Party without his knowledge. In
World War II he was a soldier in the German
Kriegsmarine and served as a
Fähnrich zur See (officer cadet) on the
Admiral Scheer, the
German auxiliary cruiser Hansa, and for a short period in
Naestved in
Denmark. Shortly after the
German surrender at Lüneburg Heath he deserted and was held briefly as a
prisoner of war in
Schleswig-Holstein. He then worked as an interpreter for the British army. At the
University of Hamburg, he studied
philosophy,
English and
literary history. His studies were cut off early when he became an intern for the daily newspaper
Die Welt, where he served as an editor from 1950 to 1951. It was there he met his future wife, Liselotte, whom he married in 1949. In 1951, Lenz used the money he had earned from his first novel,
Habichte in der Luft ("Hawks in the air"), to finance a trip to
Kenya. During his time there he wrote about the
Mau Mau Uprising in his short story "
Lukas, sanftmütiger Knecht" ("Luke, gentle servant"). After 1951, Lenz worked as a freelance writer in Hamburg, where he joined the
Group 47 group of writers. Together with
Günter Grass he became engaged with the
Social Democratic Party and championed the
Ostpolitik of
Willy Brandt. As a supporter of rapprochement with Eastern Europe, he was a member of the German delegation at the signing of the
Treaty of Warsaw (1970). In October 2011, he was made an honorary citizen of his home town
Ełk, which had become Polish as a result of the border changes promulgated at the 1945
Potsdam Conference. In 2003, Lenz joined the Verein für deutsche Rechtschreibung und Sprachpflege (Society for German Spelling and Language Cultivation) to protest against the
German orthography reform of 1996. His wife, Liselotte, died in 2006 after 57 years of marriage. Four years later he married his 74-year-old neighbour, Ulla, who had helped him after the death of his wife. Siegfried Lenz died at the age of 88 on 7 October 2014 in
Hamburg. After his death, a previously unpublished novel,
Der Überläufer ("The Turncoat"), which Lenz had written in 1951, was published. Found among his effects, it is a novel about a German soldier who defects to Soviet forces. ==Honours==