Deutschstunde

This is a historical fiction book following Siggi Jepsen, the son of a local policeman in a fictional town in the north of Germany. We first see him in a youth detention center near Hamburg being forced to write an essay on the topic “the joy of duty“. He struggles at first to write about this topic but during the rest of the book we hear about his childhood and the conflict between his father and a local artist he was tasked to oversee. Siggi is forced to decide between the two and their moral and official duties in a time of surveillance and repression during the Second World War.

The book gives an insight into a very difficult and tumultuous time in German history and shows how the official acts actually effect the people forced to live in these conditions but not in the standpoint of the actual people being repressed but the “average person”. It shows the inner conflict of these people between their safety and moral duty.

Even though it is not the most cheerful of books, I think it is still worth a read as part of the effort to remember this part of history and to try and avoid something similar in the future.