Francesco Mazzaferro. The ‘myth’ of Emil Nolde in the novel ‘The German Lesson’ by Siegfried Lenz. Part One

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Francesco Mazzaferro
The ‘myth’ of Emil Nolde in the novel ‘The German Lesson’ by Siegfried Lenz.

Part One

[Original Version: January 2017 - New version: April 2019]

Fig. 1) Siegfried Lenz a few months before his recent death (2014)

I have already devoted a book review to Emil Nolde’s Memoirs. He wrote his autobiographic texts in the 1930s, when he was sympathising for the Nazis. Then, after Nolde had suffered the expurgation by the national socialist regime and, of course, after the German democratisation, the Memoirs were reviewed first by him and later on by the Nolde Foundation, in the early years after the war. I also stressed how the success of the novel Deutschstunde (The German Lesson) by Siegfried Lenz contributed to overturning his image in the German culture, making of Nolde a hero of German resistance. I am coming back to this topic for two reasons. First, 2017 will be the 150th anniversary of his birth, and the Nolde Foundation has announced the publication of a scientific research by Bernhard Fulda and Aya Soika, exactly on the important variation of Nolde’s public image during the last century. Second, both in Germany [1] and in France [2] an important stream of studies on art literature has recently focused on the value of the ekphrasis (the literary description of art pieces) as a rethorical tool to describe art used by the most prominent novelists and poets, stressing that the description of art in fiction and lyrics can crucially influence the art taste of the public. No doubt, ekphrasis was also one of the dominant literary tools in Siegfried Lenz’s masterpiece, as two scholars (Petersen [3] and Grothmann [4]) have also evidenced, devoting two specific essays on the issue. 

This is not a comprehensive review of the novel by itself, of its features and qualities, of the importance and fortune it had within and outside Germany. It is not a discussion of the central themes of the novel (the sense of duty, its abuse under repressive regimes, the social consensus in conservative societies, the conflict among generations, and the dynamics of German society during and after national-socialism). The first part of this post analyses the correspondence between the contents of the fiction and the life and art of Emil Nolde, stressing that Siegfried Lenz made all possible to make clear he really meant to take inspiration from the figure of Emil Nolde and wanted to talk about him. This ‘literary variation’ of the ‘original painter’ ended up attributing – almost by osmosis – new attributes to the collective perception of the German society about Emil Nolde. When I am speaking of a ‘literary variation,’ I have in mind the process through which music composers can ‘take’ somebody else’s melodic theme and submit it to tonal variations, to the point that the variation may become more famous than the original melodies (consider Ludwig van Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations vs. the original waltz by Anton Diabelli). I am describing therefore a process through which a literate (Lenz) has got inspiration from a visual artist (Nolde), so to speak borrowing from his art and his memoirs, and had ended up enhancing the artist’s fortune in the overall perception of the society. In sum, he lent ideas from Nolde, but payed that loan back with interests! 

The second and the third part of the review are devoted to the ekphrasis, i.e. the way in which some of the main paintings by Nolde – of course with many deviations due to the needs of fiction - are object of a literary portray by Lenz in the novel. In reality, we will show that the choice of wording by Lenz confirmed the overall critical analysis on Nolde’s painting made by the leading art critic Werner Haftmann in those years.

The German Lesson

I have in front of me a recent German edition of the novel Deutschstunde (2008, Hoffman und Campe [5] – this is the German version I read and consulted afterwards), an original version of the same dated 1968, also published by Hoffman und Campe [6] (having the original at hand is not a fetishist mania: it was necessary, because various essays over several decades included quotes of the numbering of pages of the original version), and an English (The German lesson [7]) and Italian (Lezione di Tedesco [8]) version, respectively translated by Ernest Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins for the English one and by Luisa Coeta for the Italian one. I used the two translations for all passages I will quote in English and Italian (and the page numbering will refer to those editions, published respectively by New Direction in 1986 and by Neri Pozza in 2006). The novel Deutschstunde was sold in Germany more than two millions times, and was translated in 21 other languages. It is thereby one of the most successful German novels of after-war Germany.

The novel crosses chronologically the years of World War II and the 1950s. We will make reference only to the three main figures: a painter, called Max Ludwig Nansen; a policeman, called Jens Jepsen; and the latter’s youngest son Siggi Jepsen.

The painter Max receives from the Ministry in Berlin the peremptory order to terminate any art activity, being included by the nazi regime in the list of “degenerated artists”. As he has been in the past member of nationalistic local groups in Northern Germany, he has no real reasons, in fact, to oppose Nazism. However, since he is a free spirit, he challenges and violates the prohibition, painting secretly. Moreover, he is far from any fanaticism, and wants therefore to remain friend of Jens (the policeman who must enforce the ban) and of Siggi, the latter’s youngest son. Following his instinct, he also takes – in many respect – very courageous initiatives, among others hosting the eldest son of the policeman, who deserted from the Wehrmacht, and risks therefore to be executed, if discovered. After the war, he will return to be the well-known artist he was before having been banned by Nazis, even if his time as artist is exhausted, in terms of style: other orientations in painting will settle in the future.

The policeman Jens is prisoner of an obsession: the categorical imperative to bring all his duties to an end, under any circumstance and at any cost. He knows the painter personally since his youth; he is of course well aware that Max Nansen has saved his life once; after all, he does not have anything personal against him. Nevertheless, the policeman will persecute him with appalling consistency, in the hope of discovering the forbidden art work and sending him to jail. After the war end, he continues on his own initiative to exercise police controls on the painter as a personal mania, to show him that bans and rules should be always applied and that also successful artists should abide by them. Finally (long after Nazism had already collapsed), he finds out where the once prohibited art pieces were hidden and destroys them. The policeman is presumably the one who burns a mill where several paintings had been hidden by his own son, provoking a permanent psychological trauma to the latter. Shortly afterwards, he also discovers that another masterpiece art work of the painter is a portrait of his own daughter, and plans to destroy it. To protect that painting from destruction, the son Siggi will steal it, hiding it also to the painter. The son will become a compulsive thief of Max’s paintings. At the end, it will be the father to denounce his own son, once he is asked to investigate about the repetitive theft of art pieces by the painter from galleries and art collections in several locations. The policeman is unable to express the simplest feelings of human understanding vis-à-vis any of his family members and friends, being completely captured by a pathologically magnified sense of duty, ending up in solitude.

Siggi, the son of the policeman is the narrator of the novel; after the war he has been arrested because of kleptomania of art painting and is detained in a reformatory: after having helped – as a child, during the war – saving the art work of the painter from his own father, he observes how the latter continues maniacally to implement his tasks also after the end of national-socialism. Once the father burns the shelter he had found for the painter’s art pieces, the son starts suffering hallucinations, seeing burning paintings everywhere. He will therefore be obliged by an internal voice to steal all the paintings of his friend Max. The novel has the form of his own written memoirs: in fact, in the reformatory, during the German lesson (hence, the title), he is tasked by the teacher to write a composition with the title “The Joys of Duty”. This topic is in fact too important for him to be exhausted within the one hour of a simple composition. It is the central theme of his life, the one which has put his mental health at risk. He fails therefore to write anything for the composition during the German lesson, and is therefore punished to write it down in his cell, remaining in isolation until he will have finished his piece: he will do it by producing the full novel, in voluntary isolation over more than one hundred days. To make sure he can finish his piece, he implores that his punishment is not suspended until he is able to finish the entire story. Once the novel is finished, he forwards his diaries to the director of the reformatory, as an act liberating him from any past psychical complex.

In extreme synthesis, the painter is the moral hero and the policeman the immoral figure; the son of the policeman is forced to interact with both, suffering a psychological trauma because of it. In many respect, this triangle is also the symbol of the difficult human challenges to which after-war Germany was exposed, in the traumatic re-assessment of its own values. It is well-known that the Israeli novelist Amos Oz said that this novel let him change views on Germany, overcoming the black-white picture he had of it.

The parallel lives of Emil Nolde and Max Ludwig Nansen

Already from the first pages, at the beginning of the novel, the reader notices a number of interesting parallels between the fiction and Nolde’s memoirs. First, we are in the same region of Germany, Schleswig-Holstein. Second, the painter is named Nansen, very close to the Nolde’s surname before 1902 (he was born as Emil Hansen). Third, Nolde lived some time in Ruttebüll and passed the last decades of his life in Seebüll, while the policeman in the story operates from the (invented) Rugbüll. Fourth, Nolde also passed some time of his life in Utenwarf, which becomes here the inspiration for the very close location where the painter lives, the (also invented) Bleekenwarf. Finally, the painter Nansen is exactly in the same situation Nolde was in 1941, after he had been notified a prohibition to paint.

This is the relevant passage describing the situation of the painter in the novel: “They had already forbidden him [Max Ludwig Nansen] to paint, and it was up to my father, the Rugbüll policeman, to keep an eye on him, day in, day out, summer and winter, and see that the ban was not broken. His duty was to stop anything that might lead to a picture, any sketch or study, any undesirable concern with the light; in short, it was his duty as a policeman to make sure that no painting was done in Bleekenwarf. My father and Max Ludwig Nansen had known each other all their lives, they had grown up together and, both hailing from Glüserup, they knew what to expect of each other, perhaps even what was in store of them, and what either of them might do to the other. Little else is as carefully preserved in the storeroom of my memory as are those encounters between the two, my father and Max Ludwig Nansen. So I opened my copybook confidently, put my pocket-mirror besides it, and tried to describe my father’s trip to Bleekenwarf, and indeed not only them but all those ruses, simple or elaborate, those plans, stratagems and cunning manoeuvres he worked out in his slow, suspicious way. And since Dr Korbjuhn was so keen on it, I also intended to describe the joy that must surely have been gained from the execution of that duty“ [9].

It is well-known that Emil Nolde, in the real life, violated the prohibition, by producing secretly his so-called ‘unpainted pictures’; also Nansen decides – in the fiction – not to comply with the prohibition, and tells it directly to the policeman. They are discussing: the painter recalls Jens Jepsen that they are born in the same village, they know each other since a life and are aware that the policeman owes his life to him. The policeman pushes back strongly. “’A time comes when people are quits,’ my father said. ‘Now listen to me, Jens,’ the painter said, ‘there are things a chap cannot give up. I didn’t give up that time when I jumped in after you. And I’m not going to give up now either, I want you to understand: I’m going on painting. I’ll paint pictures that’ll be invisible to the likes of you. There’ll be so much light in them, you fellows won’t see a thing. Invisible pictures“ [10].

The physical description of the painter is also very similar to Nolde’s few self-portrays. I find remarkable the reference in the first pages of the novel to the same felt hat (Nolde always had one) and the way he dressed it, as well as to the grey-blue eyes. “He wore a hat, a felt hat, which he used to pull so far forward that his grey eyes were shadowed by the narrow brim. His overcoat was old, the back of it threadbare – that grey-blue overcoat with the inexhaustible pockets, capacious enough – as he had once threateningly told us – to put children in, should they disturb him in his work” [11].

Another element common to reality and fiction is that Nolde in real life and Nansen in the fiction were widows, after a very long, strong and intimate marriage (with Ada in reality and Ditte in the fiction, both dead of pneumonia, both singers, who had both given up their careers to support their husbands, in moments of extreme economic necessity and isolation in the art world).

Also several other features of the personality correspond: in the novel, in occasion of the 60-year birthday of his long-life friend Theo Busbeck – the gallery owner and art critic from Cologne who had stood by in most difficult time and now lived with him in this extreme Northern part of Germany - Max Nansen mentions “I am not one to make long speeches” [12] and speaks “with the frequent use of the active participle” [13]. Lenz knew from the memoirs that Nolde was not perfectly proficient in German: in particular, he made a frequent and grammatically inaccurate use of active participle, inexistent in German and borrowed from Danish. The pages of Nolde’s Memoirs [14] and those of Hans Fehr’s Book of Friendship [15] contain a very similar description of the 70-year birthday of Nolde himself in 1937, which was held in a close group of intimate friends (20 guests). Nolde had been just formally informed about the prohibition to paint and his friends feared that the previously planned, much larger celebration would be seen by the police authorities as a provocation. Hans Fehr, the Swiss friend who supported him all-life long, is the model for the gallery owner from Cologne.

The figure of Nolde between reality and the spirit of 1968

In some respects, Lenz has produced in the novel a figure (Max Nansen) who is a ‘better’ Nolde, one who was more in line not only with his “German lesson”, not only with his own personal preferences, but above all with the Zeitgeist, i.e. the spirit of the time. It was 1968, and Germany was – together with France – at the centre of the students’ revolt in Europe. The two main slogans of the students in the streets were ‘L'imagination au pouvoir’ and "Il est interdit d'interdire!" The historical figure of Emil Nolde offered, from this angle, some inspiring indications to the students who were manifesting in the streets.

Indeed, Nolde can be seen as a victim of an oppressing power. His art had been classified by National-socialism as ‘degenerated’ and the painter had been notified, together with only a few others (Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Edwin Scharff) a veritable prohibition to produce any new art pieces, to be checked by the local police and whenever necessary by the Gestapo. Previously, the painter had suffered the cancellation of several exhibitions, the seizure of 1,052 artworks exposed in public and private collections (he was the most successful artist of the Weimar Republic, which explains why Nolde was the one with by far the highest number of pieces seized) and finally an order to present to authorities his entire art production in the last two years (54 pieces, all of which were confiscated).

Moreover, Nolde offered three other features as a very precious source of inspiration for the age of the student revolution. First of all, as already mentioned, he had indeed violated the ban, by clandestinely producing around 1300 watercolours, called ‘unpainted pictures’. There had been, therefore, an active form of opposition to authorities, even if in a secretive form. Secondly, as a painter he was breaking all formal conventions of his time, thereby practicing a type of art uniquely led by imagination; a painter who could be described as exclusively driven by his own personal preferences, as a free individual. Finally, he was anchored to the territory, to his region, his landscapes, and very far from the power games in the art trade market.

And yet, a reality check permits very easily to find out that Nolde’s fictional reconstruction was not perfectly fitting with the painter life. Max Nansen is different from Nolde in five aspects: (i) biography; (ii) ideology; (iii) some specific events, (iv) some aesthetic aspects and (v) the relationship with his region.

The biography

In terms of their respective biographies, Nansen’s fictional curriculum narrated in the novel [16] displays him as a much stronger opponent to National-Socialism than Nolde may ever have been. As member of the German minority in Denmark’s Northern Schleswig (he kept the Danish nationality also when he moved to Seebüll, in Germany), Nolde was – perhaps indirectly, through his membership in a trade union – member of a sister party of the NSADP. There is no evidence than he ever ceased membership (indeed, there is growing evidence, including new documentation discovered in Switzerland in 2013, that he was passionately sticking to the regime, even if he was victim of persecution by authorities). He always claimed that his persecution was – above all – the result of incompetence and misunderstanding (his art was ‘German, strong, austere and profound’, as he wrote to Minister Josef Goebbels to claim his paintings back). The forthcoming publication of the research by Bernhard Fulda and Aya Soika will be crucial to establish truth.

Lenz’s variation of Nolde (i.e. Max Ludwig Hansen) is depicted as a veritable enemy of national-socialism. He quits ‘in disgust’ a nationalist movement of which he has been member before national-socialism; he has refused a number of appointments offered by the Nazis, resigned from a number of academic positions and finally exited the national socialist party. He his perhaps a ‘private’ enemy of Nationalsocialism, as he never tried in the fiction of the novel to create a group of resistant militants (probably impossible) of the artists, but still clearly an enemy. He is also a fair enemy, who is still able to distinguish between individuals (like the policeman) and authorities. After all, he does not hate the policeman persecuting him, as the two know each other since years and originate from the same village (an ingenuity by Lenz: civil wars are always fought among villagers, born in the same ten square kilometres).


The ideological elements

I have already mentioned in my previous essay on Nolde’s memoirs that his autobiographic texts preceding the war revealed a proximity with anti-Semitism and other aspects of nazi ideology. In the afterwar version of the Memoirs all these references disappear. Indeed, in occasion of the Frankfurt retrospective exhibition on Nolde at the Städel museum in 2014, and following a furious article by the Germanist Jochen Hieber, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 25 April 2014 [17], several critics have reproached Lenz to have fallen in a trap, believing to the ‘revised identity’ which Nolde and others had been able to construe after the end of World War II. A few days before the article, talking on the same topic in the small town of Marbach - where his entire personal archive is located – Siegfried Lenz admitted that Nolde was a ‘problematic person’ (problematischer Mensch), who behaved politically ‘a little catastrophically’ (ein bisschen katastrophal). He also mentioned that he had intentionally provided an ambivalent picture of the painter in his novel, without giving further clarifications. 

Specific events

In terms of the specific events narrated in the fiction, Max Ludwig Nansen takes initiatives or is exposed to adverse events of which there is no evidence in Nolde’s memoirs. First of all, most probably Nolde never thought of hiding and protecting a deserter of the Wehrmacht. After all, it would have been a very serious crime under the German law of war and not few civilians assisting deserters were immediately executed across the country (important to know: Siegfried Lenz deserted in Denmark from the Kriegsmarine and survived because he was taken prisoner by the British army; the elder son of the policeman is perhaps a personification of himself). Second, it is possible that the Gestapo made some controls at Nolde’s house in Seebüll, but there is no evidence that Nolde was really brought away from his house and queried for some days in a station of the secret police forces, like it happens to Nansen in the fiction. In fact, several scholars think that the implementation of the ban was rather soft, and certainly much less invasive that the ‘normal’ brutal methods used by the Gestapo. After all, Nolde was permitted to travel undisturbed across the Third Reich (Berlin, Vienna) and – at least in a first phase – to perhaps even sell art pieces. The German tax administration noticed that he had some sizeable income from purchase of art (still 80,000 Marks in 1940, despite all prohibitions. It was perhaps for that reason that he was imposed in 1941 a complete ban on very art activity). In sum, Nolde was violating bans, but still paying taxes from art purchases to the administration which had banned his art!

Aesthetic issues

At the time Lenz prepared and drafted the novel, the still prevailing view of art critics (discussed in an indeed very impressive monograph by Werner Haftmann in 1958) was that Nolde was creating in a sort of primal, panic and orphic state, like if he were in trance: in the novel itself, an art critic with the fictional name of Hans-Dieter Hübscher  (but I am firmly convinced it is a personification of Werner Haftmann) makes similar considerations: “The Hamburg critic did not cling to a slip of paper. He spoke with eyes shut, in short, clipped sentences, frequently licking his lips and smiling in a feeble, worried way as if the words he was using did not entirely meet with his approval, as if they were merely a stop-gap. He went on and on, extending himself over the full range from ‘panic natural force as the nucleus of the painter’s experience’ down to ‘mighty sweep of artistic expressiveness in Nansen’s work (…) [and] hieroglyphs of expressiveness and new conceptions of planes (…) [and] the painter’s quest for the primal human condition. (…) The critic (…) began to speak of the enduring pictorial elements, plane, colour, light and pattern. (…) [He] was now talking of colour-schemes that Nansen was always experimenting with in the attempt to unify them in a ‘universal chord’, a general tonal tension comprehending everything (…) Hübscher wound up by saying: ‘This work bears testimony to the fact that the sonority of colour can transform an intuitively  glimpsed meaning into pure paint” [18].

And yet, with the exception of this page where he gives the floor to an art critic, Lenz avoids any ‘irrational’ and ‘spiritualist’ interpretation of Nansen’s art. Such a theory of art was coherent with the aesthetic theories of the early nineteenth century (inspired by the romantic theory of the ‘priesthood of art’) but not necessarily with those of 1968. From this point of view, the long considerations on art and art creation he spends on the artist’s self-portrait (see the second part of this post) are an attempt to rationalise: believing in the 1968’s slogan of ‘imagination au pouvoir’ means for Lenz to believe in the capacity of the painter to ‘enhance, modify and dominate’ reality in active terms, to imagine what does not exist yet, and not to act as a passive medium to set primal emotions on a surface.

The relationship with the region

Lenz shows Max Nansen as a perfectly integrated man in the social network of his village. In reality, Noldes’ memoirs explain that he never managed to convince the inhabitants of his village about the merits of his art, which was so innovative to be understandable only in urban centres. Moreover, he was also a very intimate, almost introverted and at times ill-tempered person, emotionally linked only to the wife (a passionate love all the life long, with the permanent concern for the wife’s always fragile health conditions) and a really small circle of friends only. To think of him like the real centre of the life of a local community is really out of reality.

How to produce a hero at the right time

All in all, the sum of these different variations produced a quite sizeable change to the original theme. Siegfried Lenz proposed intentionally a ‘better’ variation of Nolde’s original identity, in a novel which was received enthusiastically by an entire generation.

For the students in revolt, the publication of the new novel was a sign of renewal of German literature and – finally – an admission of some structural weaknesses of the German model of society, established since the Bismarck time. To cope in a critical way with the theme of “the Joys of Duty” was in reality a general questioning of the attitude of the German society vis-à-vis the firm , but unjust instructions citizens may receive from their authorities.

For the authorities themselves, in Willy Brandt’s Germany, the book became a new source of identity and legitimacy, offering a new reading of the German society and showing that there had been those who resisted within the country. The novel was therefore immediately included by several regional authorities among those to be learnt for the final exams at school. The book also became the ambassador of new Germany, and a best-seller also in Israel, Poland and the Soviet Union, i.e. the countries which had suffered most from Germany in World War II (Willy Brandt asked Lenz – together with Günter Grass - to accompany him to the famous visit to Warsaw, when Brandt kneed in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier).

Emil Nolde’s literary variation invented by Sigfried Lenz was so much superior to the original that a process of mental substitution materialised. As from 1968, when visiting the exhibitions of paintings by Nolde, the German public had the possibility to combine the best of two personalities: EmildNolde as author of splendid art and Max Ludwig Nansen, as the positive hero of the new German society. Literature changed permanently the course of art history.

End of Part One

Go to Part Two 

NOTE

[1] Beschreibungskunst - Kunstbeschreibung: Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Bild und Text), [The art of description, the description of art: The ekphrasis from the antique to present], edited by Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer, Padeborn, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995, 642 pages.

[2] Dethurens, Pascal - Ecrire la peinture: De Diderot à Quignard, Parigi, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2009, 492 pages.

[3] Petersen, Swantje - Korrespondenzen zwischen Literatur und bildender Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Studien am Beispiel von S. Lenz - E. Nolde - A. Andersch - E. Barlach - P. Klee, H. Janssen - E. Jünger und G. Bekker (Corrispondence between literature and fine arts. Studies on the cases of S. Lenz, E. Nolde, A. Andersch, E. Barlach, P. Klee, H. Janssen, E. Jünger e G. Bekker), Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 1995, 314 pages.

[4] Grothmann, Wilhelm H. - Siegfried Lenz‘ Deutschstunde. Eine Würdigung der Kunst Emil Noldes (The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz. A tribute to the art of Emil Nolde), in „Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies“, Volume 15, Number 1 / 1979, University of Toronto Press.

[5] Lenz, Siegfried - Deutschstunde Roman, Hamburg, Hoffmann und Campe, 2008, 462 pages.

[6] Lenz, Siegfried - Deutschstunde Roman, Hamburg, Hoffmann und Campe, 1968, 559 pages.

[7] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, New York, New Directions Publishing, 1986, 470 pages.

[8] Lenz, Siegfried – Lezione di tedesco, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 2006, 506 pages.

[9] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), pp. 11-12.

[10] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p.74.

[11] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 26.

[12] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 64.

[13] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 65 – the English translation by Kaiser and Wilkins is wrong.

[14] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My life), Cologne, Edited by Manfred Reuther, DuMont, 2013, 455 pages, quotation at pages 430-431.

[15] Fehr, Hans – Emil Nolde. Ein Buch der Freundschaft (A Book of Friendship), Munich, Paul List Verlag, 1960, quotation at pages 120-121.

[16] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), pp. 163-165.

[17] Hieber, Jochen - Der Fall Emil Nolde, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 April 2014. See: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/der-fall-emil-nolde-wir-haben-das-falsche-gelernt-12908490.html)

[18] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), pp. 426-427.