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"
- ISBN10 0811209822
- ISBN13 9780811209823
- Publish Date 14 May 1986 (first published 21 October 1971)
- Publish Status Inactive
- Out of Print 10 July 2016
- Publish Country US
- Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Format Paperback
- Language English