Deutschstunde

About “Deutschstunde”

Siggi Jepsen, a teenager in a juvenile detention center near Hamburg, is required to write an essay titled "The Joy of Duty." In the essay, he recounts his childhood in Nazi Germany, where his father, a police officer stationed in the north of Germany, carried out his duties without question. This included banning the expressionist painter Max Nansen from his profession, as the Nazis labeled expressionism as "degenerate art." Siggi was drawn to Nansen's work and secretly hid some of the confiscated paintings. After the war, his father was briefly interned but later returned to his job as a policeman in rural Schleswig-Holstein. He continued to follow orders rigidly, prompting Siggi to secretly move Nansen's paintings to safety. When his father discovered the act, he reported Siggi for art theft. While writing the required essay, Siggi expanded it into multiple notebooks, reflecting on the complex and painful lessons of duty.