Ingo Schulze’s ‘The Water in August’: Ah, Was It All Beautiful Once

Ingo Schulze’s new novel reaches back to a summer in 1979, when the future writer was 15 and spent time with the painter Gerda Lepke and her colleague Max Uhlig in the Mecklenburg village of Krukow, near Neubrandenburg. The result, “The Water in August,” is a nostalgic story of first love and artistic awakening in the German Democratic Republic.

The novel grows out of a text Schulze published 23 years ago about his friendship with Lepke, who was 23 years older than him. As a teenager in Dresden, he had sat for her as a model. In Krukow, she and Uhlig tried to initiate him into the artistic way of seeing.

Each morning, the painters loaded canvases onto their bicycles and pushed them into the fields, where they painted with sometimes stormy energy. Schulze initially stayed in the house, unable to produce much. His hosts then took him outside, placed him on a chair, gave him a so-called poet’s board to rest on his knees, and taught him how to look.

The review presents the book as an affectionate return to youth and to a formative artistic encounter. But it also finds the novel limited. Schulze evokes a past that once seemed beautiful, yet the reviewer argues that he does not ask the difficult questions that the book leaves its readers to confront.