This appears at first to be a political parable which, in spite of
its sophisticated narrative procedures, rests on a banally
simplified vision of German social psychology during the Third
Reich. The dourly, uncritically dutiful Ole Jepsen, a rural
constable, has been ordered to enforce a ban on painting against
his childhood friend Max Ludwig Nansen, an expressionist whose
works have been deemed subversive. Their confrontation is the
stubborn, bitter stalemate of two philosophies, perhaps two
obsessions, and young Siggi Jepsen, caught between them, develops a
fixed idea of his own. He begins stealing Nansen's paintings in
order to protect them from his father, a crime which alienates both
men and lands him in the reformatory where we meet him years later
- entering solitary confinement for failing, understandably, to
produce a routine classroom essay on "The Joys of Duty." Siggi
confounds his keepers, however, by refusing to stop writing until
the whole story is told, his many copybooks constituting the main
body of the novel; officials and attending psychologists interpret
his behavior according to their administrative and clinical
preconceptions, as everything but a further variation on the
assigned theme. The point seems more obscure in Lenz's landscaped,
populous, dauntlessly unhurried telling; but it is after all a
point worth a trip through the bush, and for all its regionalism
the relevance is broad. (Kirkus Reviews)
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 keep them safe from
his father. Against the great brooding northern landscape. Siggi
recounts the clash of father and son, of duty and personal loyalty,
in wartime Germany. I was trying to find out, Lenz says, "where the
joys of duty could lead a people"
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