The Training Ground

The innocent Bruno tells the saga of the Zeller family who fled East Germany and nurtured a military practice field into a blossoming tree nursery, only to destroy their success with greed and jealousy

Bruno Messmer, guileless narrator of this study of emotional death and nationalist tensions in postwar Germany, was saved from drowning at WW II's end by the Zeller family. Now, more than 30 years later, he stands to inherit the most valuable tracts of Herr Konrad Zeller's vast tree nursery in the German region of Schleswig. Bruno and his rescuers, Sudeten Germans who lost everything in the war, are treated as outcasts by their Danish-descended neighbors in the bleak coastal community. Max Zeller, one of the sons of "the chief,"preaches a communitarian gospel against private possessions but attempts to deprive Bruno of his inheritance, as do the others, while Dorothea, Konrad's long-suffering wife, looks on. When the German authorities pass regulations, reminiscent of the Nazi racial laws, stipulating that all trees must have a proper pedigree, the strains in the Zeller household become intolerable. Lenz's ( The German Lesson ) brooding portrayal of a family's slow disintegration resonates with symbols of a postwar Germany unable to resuscitate itself spiritually.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A strange, long, but unfortunately unhypnotic novel by Lenz (The German Lesson, 1972; The Heritage, 1981, etc.) that follows the life of a dullish, somewhat retarded boy named Bruno into manhood on a remarkable tree nursery near Schleswig. The nursery is owned by a man named Zeller, called by Bruno simply ``the chief,'' who reclaimed the barren land from its former use as a military training ground and made it into a lush and fecund natural paradise. The town has never sanctioned the Zellers' presence, for all their success: the Zellers were refugees from East Germany (and Bruno their ward ever since the boat he and his parents and the Zellers were on sunk), and their foreignness is a barrier, as are the chief's utterly consistent moral scruples. When the chief approaches his death, he deeds over much of the nursery to Bruno- -and frantic, gross attempts inside the family and the town to circumvent the legacy provide what little plot there is here. A Dostoevskyian section near story's end about the bad conscience of a local man--``the shiverer''--sharpens the air of allegory that the novel already largely presaged: the idiot, the garden, war, etc. Still, at least in translation, this is a slow, textureless book--about as narratively exciting as watching one of Zeller's conifers grow. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this allegorical novel, a plot of land that has long served as a training ground for soldiers becomes an apt metaphor for Germany. The land has been dramatically transformed into a prosperous, internationally respected plantation for the cultivation of young trees by its current owner, Herr Zeller, but its future is clouded as he grows old and attempts to protect his work from his not-always-sympathetic heirs. The Zellers are originally from the Eastern provinces lost after World War II, and their rise to prominence and struggle to become accepted by their grudging North German neighbors is described by Bruno, a narrator with a limited perspective, who in his goodness and simplicity understands the flora and the fauna of the plantation more clearly than he does the conflict within the family that he has observed for so long. Highly recommended.
- Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.