The German Lesson

Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is one day assigned to write a routine German lesson on the The Joys of Duty. Overfamiliar with these "joys," Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, constable of the northernmost police station in Germany, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist, their neighbor, from painting and to seize all his "degenerate work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to ...