Friday Film Fest: Deutschstunde (2019)

When Siegfried Lenz published his novel Deutschstunde in 1968, it instantly became one of the most successful works of the German Nachkriegsliteratur. It was quickly turned into a film for television in 1971. This is the latest adaptation of the Lenz classic. It starts with the German class assignment “Die Freuden der Pflicht” for the inmates of a juvenile detention center in the 1950s. Siggi Jepsen, unable to start the essay during class, is forced into solitary confinement, where he begins to write down his memories of his father who, as a local policeman in a small village along the Northern German coast during the Third Reich, was assigned to enforce a “Malverbot” of the painter Max Ludwig Nansen. The execution of this duty is the central theme of the novel and the movie.

German with German Subtitles

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