The German Lesson

Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, in 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 paintings to keep them safe from his father.