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Siegfried Lenz
Fundbüro
(The Lost Property Office)
Hoffmann und Campe, July 2003. 336 pp. Henry Neff is twenty-four years old. His family are wealthy, but Henry is not interested in money -- he just wants to do a job that he enjoys. Instead of joining the family business, Henry takes a dead-end post in the lost property office of a mainline railway station. He likes his colleagues, and they like him -- not least for his unconventionality. One day, Harms, Henry's boss, walks into the office to find Henry pressed up against the door with a man throwing knives at him. When Harms demands to know what is going on, Henry replies that he is simply getting the claimant to prove that he is the rightful owner of the item in question -- a set of circus knives. Henry respects Harms, and also takes a fancy to Paula, whose husband is often away from home. This existence is idyllic, but of course it cannot last. Through his work at the office, Henry meets Fedor, a shy, sensitive academic from Bashkiria, and introduces him to his sister Barbara. The three spend many happy hours together, and Barbara's feelings for the young academic grow. But this is a romance wrecked by racism. Fedor has already been beaten up by a gang of motorbikers on Henry's estate. Now he overhears the scathing words of two fellow academics and immediately leaves for home. Henry realises he can no longer stand aside and let this sort of thing happen without protest.
The originality of the book lies primarily in its portrayal of everyday reality as experienced by one individual. Incidents do not always have the consequences that the reader would expect -- and some have no consequences at all. Henry's feelings for Paula stop well short of an affair. And when a lost doll is found to contain thousands of Deutschmarks, the book does not become a mini detective story. This is a novel about a simple man called Henry Neff, and about life as he encounters it. That is all, but it is enough.
‘Siegfried Lenz’s Fundbüro is a concise work of great literature’ Berliner Morgenpost
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