Deutschstunde (2019)

Shortly after the end of World War II, Siggi Jepsen is being held in a juvenile detention center on an island in the Elbe and is supposed to write an essay in German class on “The Joys of Duty.” But because he cannot manage it, he has to make up the assignment in a cell the next day. There, he writes down his memories of his father, Jens Jepsen, who had always carried out his duty without mercy as a village policeman in northern Germany. During the Nazi era, his father had been ordered to inform his childhood friend Max Ludwig Nansen—a painter denounced by the Nazis as a “degenerate artist”—of the regime’s ban on his painting, and to ensure that he obeyed it. Nansen does not comply with the professional ban; he keeps painting and relies on the help of the boy, his godson, with whom he has a close friendship. Jepsen, however, orders his son to spy on the painter. Siggi is torn between wanting to please his father and his sense that the painter is suffering a grave injustice. The question of whether to conform or resist the obvious injustice—and thus his own father as well—becomes essential to Siggi. When his father confiscates Nansen’s paintings, Siggi hides them in an empty house. He also arranges for his older brother Klaas, who has deserted from the Wehrmacht, to hide temporarily with Nansen. When Klaas is seriously injured in an air raid, he is taken to his parents’ house. But his father turns him over to the authorities, even though his son faces execution. When rumors arise that the British army is near, Jepsen tries to mobilize the men present for the Volkssturm, but Nansen’s objections prevent him from succeeding. When the British army arrives, the British arrest Jepsen. After Jepsen returns from captivity, he resumes his police duties and refuses to accept that the ban on Nansen’s painting has been lifted. He burns every one of the artist’s paintings he can find. Shortly after he also happens upon the hidden paintings in the abandoned house, it burns down—apparently the policeman set the fire. Siggi, now himself seized by a pathological sense of duty, steals Nansen’s paintings to save them from his father. This strains Siggi’s previously close relationship with Nansen, and Siggi is sent to juvenile prison for art theft. There, after a long time, he finishes his essay and is released.