The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz
The dust jacket of this book offers this summary: "Siggi Jepsen . . . is required to write an essay for his German lesson on 'The Joys of Duty.' Once he starts writing, Siggi cannot stop until he has set down the story of his life since 1943, ten years earlier, when he was a young boy in wartime Germany. His father, Jens Jepsen (a policeman), receives orders from Berlin decreeing that his lifelong friend, Max Ludwig Nansen, a painter of international reputation, may no longer paint. Acting in obedience to these and later orders, the policeman confiscates all of Nansen's work from the preceding two years and keeps dogged watch over the artist to prevent him from painting any more. Meanwhile, Jepsen's son, Siggi, revolted by his father's unreasoning devotion to duty and increasingly attracted to the independent Nansen, helps the painter to go on working in defiance of the ban."
Clearly there are a number of themes here: the conflict between the artist and a totalitarian government, and that between a son and a father whose narrowly conceived sense of duty takes precedence over every consideration of personal loyalty. But there is more in the book than that. There is also the conflict between the policeman and his wife, on the one hand, and their three children (Siggi has an older brother and an older sister); here, too, the policeman's conception of duty, in this case the duty owed by children to their parents, erases any other kind of feeling.
The story is set in northern Germany, near the North Sea, and the book is full of beautiful evocations of the bleak, stormy, but beautiful landscape. Though most of the action occurs during the last years of WWII, there is little overt treatment of the war or of politics. The political context is important, but it is up to the reader to fill it in. What then emerges is a conflict--or at any rate contrast--between the war and the Holocaust and the Nazi regime (the word "Nazi" does not appear in the book), on the one hand, and on the other, the daily life of rural Germany, where the war is (mostly) at a distance. The local citizens are law-abiding but not thoughtful, and the policeman zealously follows instructions out of a belief in "duty." He gives no thought to the authority, much less the morality, of his instructions; were he given other instructions he would follow them with the same rigidity.
The German Lesson is a fine book. I recommend it highly.
Clearly there are a number of themes here: the conflict between the artist and a totalitarian government, and that between a son and a father whose narrowly conceived sense of duty takes precedence over every consideration of personal loyalty. But there is more in the book than that. There is also the conflict between the policeman and his wife, on the one hand, and their three children (Siggi has an older brother and an older sister); here, too, the policeman's conception of duty, in this case the duty owed by children to their parents, erases any other kind of feeling.
The story is set in northern Germany, near the North Sea, and the book is full of beautiful evocations of the bleak, stormy, but beautiful landscape. Though most of the action occurs during the last years of WWII, there is little overt treatment of the war or of politics. The political context is important, but it is up to the reader to fill it in. What then emerges is a conflict--or at any rate contrast--between the war and the Holocaust and the Nazi regime (the word "Nazi" does not appear in the book), on the one hand, and on the other, the daily life of rural Germany, where the war is (mostly) at a distance. The local citizens are law-abiding but not thoughtful, and the policeman zealously follows instructions out of a belief in "duty." He gives no thought to the authority, much less the morality, of his instructions; were he given other instructions he would follow them with the same rigidity.
The German Lesson is a fine book. I recommend it highly.