Deutschstunde (1971)

Siggi Jepsen, an inmate at a reform institution for troubled young people, is given the essay topic “The Joys of Duty” in a German lesson and fails to write it: he hands in a blank notebook. The reason for his failure, however, is that he has too much to say on the subject. In detention, which he voluntarily keeps extending, Siggi now writes about his childhood and youth, which were marked precisely by “duty.” Siggi Jepsen’s father was the “northernmost police officer in Germany” in the Schleswig-Holstein village of Rugbüll. In 1943, Jens Ole Jepsen is ordered by the Nazi authorities to impose a ban on painting on the Expressionist painter Max Ludwig Nansen and enforce it. Although Jepsen has been friends with Nansen since his youth, and Nansen once even saved his life, Jepsen has no doubts whatsoever about his duty to obey these orders rigorously. When he tries to enlist his ten-year-old son Siggi to spy on the painter, he puts him in a moral dilemma, because Nansen’s studio is like a second home to Siggi. Siggi decides not to obey his father and instead helps Nansen hide paintings. Siggi’s father is driven by fanatical devotion to duty, rather than by Nazi ideology, unlike his wife, who is completely convinced by National Socialism. When Siggi’s brother Klaas mutilates himself so that he will no longer have to serve in the military, his parents disown him—only with luck and Nansen’s help does he survive the war. Even after the war ends, Jepsen has no doubts; on the contrary, he insists that it is still his duty to destroy Nansen’s paintings. Occasional flashes of “second sight” help him do so: they enable him to discover the hiding place in the old mill where Siggi had stored some of Nansen’s paintings, and set it on fire. Siggi now becomes obsessed with having to “save” Nansen’s paintings from his father. He thus becomes an art thief, which eventually leads to his arrest and admission to the reform institution.