Siegfried Lenz

There was widespread consensus among post-war German authors that following the collapse of the Third Reich they had a moral obligation to help pay off the enormous debt with which the Germans together with their honoured Führer had burdened themselves, and at the same time to take preventative action against any danger of a reoccurrence. The lesson in being German which Siegfried Lenz teaches his readers in his novel of 1968 is very much part of this kind of preventative work of enlightenment: the spirit of subordination and the overzealous devotion to duty displayed by the civil servant Jepsen, the "most northerly police officer in Germany" during the Nazi era, are exposed as dangerous secondary virtues.

When Jepsen's childhood friend Nansen, a painter disliked by the Nazi big- wigs in Berlin, is told he has been debarred from his profession, he cannot count on Jepsen turning a blind eye or standing by him in any other way against the injustice which threatens him, even though he once saved Jepsen's life. Jepsen doggedly does 'his duty' - with such eagerness that he doesn't notice how he is unintentionally becoming personally more and more identified with his task. He considers the professional debarment perfectly reasonable: in any case, Nansen only paints morbid stuff, "the green faces, the Mongol eyes, these deformed bodies ... " The more fanatically he pursues Nansen (whom Lenz based on the expressionist painter Emil Nolde), the more Jepsen's son feels compelled to keep Nansen's works of art safe - so he is forced to steal them.

According to the story itself, the novel The German Lesson grew out of an essay with the terribly clever title "The joys of duty" which Siggi was lumbered with by his teacher in the juvenile correction centre. After 1945 his father Jens Ole was interned briefly, and then reinstated to his previous office without a problem.