»Selbstversetzung« als literarisches Prinzip. Siegfried Lenz (1926–2014) zum 100. Geburtstag. Vortrag mit Textbeispielen mit Dr. Katja Schlenker und Prof. Dr. Winfrid Halder

In the organizer's words:

Siegfried Lenz would have been 100 years old on March 17, 2026. By then, however, the great German writer's death would have been more than a decade ago. Nevertheless, Lenz is certainly still one of the most prominent German authors of the 20th century. It may be significant that his early novel "Der Überläufer", which was only published posthumously in 2016 and was written in the early 1950s but remained unpublished at the time due to political concerns on the part of the publisher, topped the bestseller lists for weeks. Countless readers still vividly remember books such as "Deutschstunde" (1968) or "Heimatmuseum" (1978) and many more. They were sensational successes. Lenz was one of Germany's leading authors from the beginning of the 1960s at the latest; he had no shortage of prominence and renown, even if the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920-2013), who was a friend of his, had a few things to criticize. Lenz repeatedly emphasized that he used the method of "self-displacement" to write in situations that his literary characters then had to live through. As a result, his books almost always have something to do with Lenz's own biography, as he himself had often experienced these situations in the same or a similar way. Nevertheless, Lenz said little directly about many of the things that shaped his personal life; indeed, he was persistently silent about some of them. For example, about the family he was born into in Lyck, East Prussia, in 1926. Lenz also made rather indirect references to his time as a very young man serving in the Nazi navy. The evening attempts to get closer to Siegfried Lenz as a person by collecting and commenting on scattered statements and brief autobiographical texts.