In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is 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, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his degenerate work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. I was trying to find out, Lenz says, where the joys of duty could lead a people.

Translated from the German by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins