The German Lesson

Lenz, Siegfried; Translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

ISBN 10: 0356036391 / ISBN 13: 9780356036397

Published by Macdonald, London, UK, 1971

About this Item

471 pages. Translated into English by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. Very clean brown fabric-patterned background dustjacket which has large white titles to spine and front. Very clean brown hardback binding. Light yellowing to page-edges o/w very clean pages.

Seller Inventory # 726453

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The German Lesson
• Publisher: Macdonald, London, UK
• Publication Date: 1971
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0356036391
• ISBN 13: 9780356036397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First British Edition
• Condition: Very Good +
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dustjacket Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

This novel begins in 1954. In a penal institution for deliquent boys on an island in the river Elbe, Siggi Jepson, who has a mania for stealing pictures, is set an essay on 'The Joys of Duty' for his German lesson. The subject of the essay takes him back to 1943, when his father, a country policeman, carried out his duties in Nazi Germany.

From the Back Cover

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.