German writer who tackled the burdens of the past

Siegfried Lenz, who has died aged 88, was one of Germany's most significant postwar writers whose novels explored individuals' culpability for the horrors of Nazism and the struggle to shape a new national identity.

Lenz, whose work was translated into more than 30 languages, is best known for his novel The German Lesson (Deutschstunde), published in 1968, in which a boy watches his policeman father doggedly follow orders aimed at preventing their artist neighbour, who has been branded "degenerate" by the Nazis, from painting in the remote German-Danish borderlands.

Born in 1926 in the east Prussian city of Lyck, which today is Elk in Poland, Lenz was the son of a customs officer.

He served in the German navy from the age of 18 in the last year of the second World War and after deserting spent time as a prisoner of war of the British before eventually settling in Hamburg.

Federal archives show that he was listed as a member of the Nazi party from 1943, but Lenz insisted that he was inscribed as part of a group and knew nothing about his membership.

After his release he attended university in Hamburg and later became a collaborator of the newspaper Die Welt. In Hamburg too he met his future wife, Liselotte, who was later to illustrate some of his books.

Gruppe 47

He became part of Gruppe 47, a group of postwar writers including Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass and Ingeborg Bachmann who felt duty bound to engage with the legacy of German fascism in their work, exposing and disrupting society’s urge to forget.

He also took an active part, with Böll and others, in the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which rallied writers and intellectuals against totalitarianism in the cold war era and which was later discovered to have been indirectly funded by America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

Together with Grass, Lenz became involved with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), in particular supporting the Ostpolitik (opening to the east) of Chancellor Willy Brandt.

He was invited in 1970 to attend the signing of the German-Polish treaty, an occasion when Brandt, in a gesture of reconciliation and penance for German crimes, kneeled at the site of the Warsaw ghetto (a highly symbolic event referred to in German as the Kniefall von Warschau).

Lenz saw it as his duty as a writer to help his people to “pay off the enormous debts” which “the Germans together with their honoured Führer had burdened themselves” and to “take preventive actions against any danger of a recurrence”.

25 million books sold

In the course of his long active life, Lenz wrote scores of novels, short stories, stage plays, radio plays and essays. An estimated 25 million copies of his books have been sold, in German and in translation.

On hearing of Lenz's death, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeir said: "Part of Germany has died today. . .Like no other, Siegfried Lenz observed German society and shaped it with his work. His love of his country, his connection to both his home towns – one in Poland, the other in the north of Germany – are literary foundations for our own sense of self," he said.

His first wife, Liselotte, died in 2006. In 2010 he married Ulla Reimer, who survives him.