A Family Mirrors Europe’s Disasters : THE TRAINING GROUND, <i> By Siegfried Lenz, Translated by Geoffrey Skelton,</i> Henry Holt, $24.95; 425 pages

When a European novelist is melancholy, when a German turns bleak, when a thinking European begins to dwell on the sorrowful state of the world, the reader really can’t argue: Europe has too much bad news to fall back on; too many wars, too many disappointments, too many broken hearts, too many incompetent bureaucrats, too many pitiful peasants trundling cabbages in splintering wheelbarrows down rutted roads toward destinations that hold no welcome.

Siegfried Lenz, “the last gentleman of German writing,” has here put together a tale of postwar prosperity, beautifully written and beautifully translated by Geoffrey Skelton. This novel might be a useful, thought-provoking treatise, if a few American decision-makers read it and paid attention to what they read. But let’s face it: Many people don’t want to get depressed, to face “reality” and spend time and money to do it.

“The Training Ground” is transcendentally grim. Despite a desperately hopeful jacket blurb claiming that it is about “life’s inherent goodness,” its primary message is: Give it up! Mankind is unregenerate and incorrigible; life is dreary beyond words, and no matter how hard you try or how good one individual might be, you cannot beat the odds! So, forget it!

The story begins just after World War II, when Konrad Zeller escapes from East Germany into a cheerless section of northern West Germany with perhaps a thousand other refugees who are about as welcome as a plague of fleas. Konrad, “The Chief,” has a devoted wife and three children--Max, Joachim and Ina--and also has rescued an orphan boy, Bruno, who has been so physically and emotionally scarred by the war that the Zeller family, and the village, perceive him to be a half-wit.

In fact, Bruno has only been brutally rewired. He can hear plants grow, he can hear other people’s thoughts, and he’s completely aware of the world around him. But he has been devastated by fear and is a natural scapegoat.

The Chief manages to lease a huge of tract of West German land that had been used as a military “training ground.” Full of scrap metal and unquiet souls, it is a dead battlefield, but The Chief, who was raised as a master gardener and is a genius at this calling, sets about turning this wasteland back into a garden of Eden. The work is desperately hard. The family has come to this place with nothing, and the villagers can’t stand them, but the Zellers persevere and, after a decade or so, they have put together a thriving nursery business.

Just when we think that the Zeller family might have the tiniest chance of living a long and harmonious life, however, Siegfried Lenz suggests that we cannot escape our bloody, contentious past so easily. The Zeller family itself becomes a world at war.

Wanting nothing to do with this vast garden his father has put together, Max, the eldest son, is always off somewhere making anti-capitalist speeches. Joachim is a tyrant-in-the-making. Ina, a sweet girl, has terrible luck with her husband. The Chief chooses, as his “real” son, poor Bruno, whose strange ways and frightful appearance make him a social outcast.

The irony is that before this new Paradise is created, there’s nothing to fight over, and the Zeller family gets along reasonably well. But as soon as “something of value” is created or recognized, factions form, thefts occur, discouragement prevails and betrayal is the order of the day.

And, no, this is not a particularly European phenom: Who among us has not participated in a communal dream that has exploded from within because of greed, hatred and natural craziness? But in the New World, hope still competes with experience. In this sensitive, intelligent, melancholy European novel, Experience sits at the kitchen table with its head in its hands, repeating over and over, “Don’t get your hopes up.” Shouldn’t we believe these writers? Don’t they have a wealth of dispiriting experience at their command--and experience that puts our bouncy hopes to shame?

Next: John Wilkes reviews “Prisoner’s Dilemma” by William Poundstone (Doubleday).