The German Lesson (the Movie): Scapegoating for Peace

Before getting to the The German Lesson, extensive prefatory remarks are needed. All mythology is sacrificial and originates with a real-life scapegoat; a claim René Girard knew would outrage his critics. This can be seen in the dual nature of the mythical hero – both the worst person who ever lived and also a savior and often a founder figure. Hercules both kills his whole family in a fit of madness and performs heroic feats of strength. Oedipus both saves Thebes from a plague and kills his own father and marries his mother. The scapegoat is blamed for the problems of a community and later celebrated as bringing peace to the community through his death or ostracism.

With the crucifixion of Christ, Christianity revealed the scapegoat mechanism and brought an end to the total dominance of the pro-sacrificial myth. For the first time, a revelatory anti-sacrificial narrative became possible. The central figure of the story is no longer the scapegoat, but someone who the author may initially persecute, only for the apparent victim to renounce what he is doing and to accept his faults. In the process, the author has to forgive the miscreant and can no longer take pleasure in torturing him. If someone says, “You are right. I was wrong” one can hardly continue shouting at him. The author stops blaming his character and instead forgives him. This merciful act takes place when the character himself apologizes for his blindness and stupidity.

Despite the inception of the anti-myth: the revelatory narrative; sacrificial storylines continue. John Wick movies are sacrificial. This fact is slightly disguised by turning the war of all against one, found in scapegoating, to a war of one against all. Impossibly, the hero/victim turns each member of the mob into his victim. The victim kills the mob, instead of the mob killing the victim. The joy of this for the audience is that the victim can be killed over and over again. Its bloodlust has a hundred opportunities to be slaked instead of just one.

The first Matrix movie has an apparent Manichean division into good and evil. Neo is the wholly good self-sacrificial hero. Agent Smith is apparently destroyed at the end and the other agents flee in terror. The following two movies, however, reveal that Neo is in fact part of the larger scheme of control in the Matrix. The Matrix inhabitants need to be able to subliminally reject or accept their computer-generated reality and Neo exists as a way to contain those who reject it. Academic Agent, Neema Parvini, sees many right-wing media figures as a similar circus of containment for the right; distracting them with transgender bathrooms from mass illegal immigration; an even worse problem in his native England than in the U.S. Those with really threatening or regime-challenging things to say are sidelined and not promoted by the algorithms on X or YouTube, while those producing distracting “slop” are boosted. Accounts like End Wokeness or Libs of TikTok find isolated crazy people, the revealing of whom means nothing. Individual pink-haired lunatics are not evidence of trends of wider significance just as one cannot generalize from a single traffic stop of a black motorist.

The Matrix was always intended to be a trilogy. Matrix 2 and 3 are not sequels. What is actually going on is that there is a war between Zion, the Matrix, and the Machine World. They represent body, mind, and spirit. The war is thus internal and internecine. “Victory” and “defeat” have no clear meaning in that context. Subjugation of one element by the other would not mean success. They must reconcile in order to function properly. Neo does not beat the Matrix and the Machine World into submission, but offers himself as a sacrifice which the Machine World accepts. As part of that process he allows Agent Smith to assimilate him, which permits the Machine World to eradicate Smith and all his copies which had become a cancerous virus in the Matrix. As an act of reciprocity, the sentinels of the Machine World stop attacking Zion. The Architect and the Oracle have a truce and reluctantly accept limits to their own domains. Attempts to dominate turn to cooperation.

The fact that the most satisfying narratives involve recognizing and confessing one’s sins, forgiveness, atonement, and redemption is surely one of the most philosophically and theologically significant revelations worthy of the Girard title drawn from a Biblical quotation, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. We must stop projecting our moral failings onto others and thus stop scapegoating. We are the stumbling block, the scandal and the outrage, as René Girard puts it, quoting the New Testament’s “skandalon,” also meaning “offense.” The obstacle that repels and attracts. Remove the beam from your own eye and cease looking for the mote in others. The scapegoating storyline found in mythology leaves us blind; literally in the case of Oedipus Rex.

Anti-sacrificial stories provide insight. In Blade Runner, Roy Baty gives up trying to get revenge on Deckard for killing his friends. They were “retired” for violating the no-replicant-on-earth law. He acknowledges in his final moments that though his life is short, he has seen and done things no normal human could. As his life is coming to an end, he realizes life’s preciousness in all its forms, and he saves Deckard instead of killing him. Baty has been murdering people in his quest for the secret of extending his life span and is not the innocent victim to Deckard’s killer. He can continue killing or change.

Before focusing on the scapegoating dynamic, René Girard wrote about his realization that all great stories are conversion stories. Not religious conversion per se, like converting to Christianity, but a quasi-religious, spiritual conversion, nevertheless. This is a conversion of outlook. My favorite occurs in the movie Solaris, by Andrei Tarkovsky. A man has become emotionally shutdown, cynical and skeptical of anything beyond the banal because his wife had committed suicide when he left her and he feels responsible and guilty. A family friend accuses him of having the emotional range and imagination of an accountant. “He reminds me of a bookkeeper, preparing his accounts.” Over the course of the movie Kris Kelvin is confronted by a facsimile of his wife recreated and resurrected by the planet Solaris. He comes to accept her as essentially human (she actually being more human than the scientists surrounding her) and to love her, while the other scientists remain skeptical and repulsed by her alien origins. He even reconciles with his estranged father or an at least similarly contrived version of him.

The emotional arc of the movie reflects Tarkovsky’s aim for his movies in general – to open his audiences to the numinous and the sacred and to the infinite possibilities and wonder of the human condition and God. If you are feeling stale and bored and alienated, he hopes to transform you, at least for the length of the film, but also beyond, into the opposite. All good art is a prayer to God, he thought, and a meditation on the meaning and significance of human existence. Stalker, Groundhog Day, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Possessed, Don Quixote, The Red and the Black, Madam Bovary, Remembrance of Things Past, The Divine Comedy, all follow this arc.

The cinematography of Solaris is beautiful and the actress playing Hari, the dead wife, Natalia Bondarchuk, is absolutely riveting, like a Botticelli painting brought to life.

The movie, The German Lesson, based on the novel by Siegfried Lenz, by contrast, is, like the book, an artistic and moral failure. Morally, it can be considered pre or post-Christian in its firm embrace of the sacrificial modus operandi of myth. There is no hint that Lenz, or the director Christian Schwochow, are inclined to recognize the moral failings of their anti-hero as their own. There is to be no forgiveness nor understanding. Set during WWII, they will scapegoat the policeman father Jens Ole Jepsen in as blind a manner as the Germans scapegoated the Jews. In doing so, Lenz finds the wrong target for his criticism and doubles down on the key moral failing of the Nazis.

No critic has come forward to comment on this aspect of the book or film, perhaps because to defend the scapegoat is to invite his attackers to in turn attack you. (Are you some kind of Nazi -lover?) And because the victim is male, right-wing and because he is a Nazi.

Neema Parvini has coined the phrase “the Boomer truth regime” which is the idea that the Holocaust was the worst event in history and that right-wing politics must forever be associated with fascism which is the ultimate evil and is thus banned in the West. The downside of this is that those on the side of left-wing politics are dealt the winning rhetorical hand before any discussion has even begun and anyone who objects to whatever proposal they have is a “fascist” or a “racist.” Worrying about population decline or promoting two parent households consisting of a mother and a father becomes, somehow, unacceptable, as is any defense of tradition and cultural heritage, social and moral norms, or restrictions on mass immigration into Europe. The William Buckley “right” was still organized around being anti-fascist resulting in a choice between Left and Lefter. So, while bringing up the Holocaust is a key feature of the Boomer truth regime, criticizing an attack on a fictional Nazi is not.

The other side of this is that “individual self-expression freed from social constraints is the ultimate good.” Max, the persecuted victim in the movie, represents just this paradigm. Returning U.S. soldiers, having been drafted and killed in large numbers, were, in compensation, provided with tuition to university, cookie-cutter suburban homes, Coca Cola conformism and consumer culture. The women who had been dragooned into factories were now told to stay at home. This artificial situation was then supplanted by a new fake rebellion in the 1960s that was as much a top-down implementation as the 1950s. Corporations and record companies, music festivals, and tie-in movies, made as much money from “rebellion” as from the fake 1950s conformism. The regime is happy for individuals or generations to oscillate between 1950s-style containment and 1960s-style containment. The “conservative” dad has an OnlyFans daughter.

Siegfried Lenz was a member of the Social Democratic Party and supported progressive causes. His attempts to de-Nazify Germany and to reconcile East and West Germany and Poland were admirable. However, no communist supporter would get such a treatment, despite all the evils of communism. If they did, critics would not be blind to what is going on. The movie Rosa Luxembourg directed by Margarethe von Trotta in 1986 is about a Marxist theorist, activist and communist supporter who was executed after an uprising in 1919. The movie is entirely sympathetic to this wretched person. Communists, who engage in the same ruthless suppression of opponents and mass murder as Nazis, are often claimed to be merely misguided idealists – cold comfort for their victims. On the other hand, everyone gets a free-pass in attacking Nazis, even when the manner of the criticism is artistically and morally corrupt – where the accusers are doing that for which they are criticizing other people. This is the rationale for news outlets allowing themselves to lie about Donald Trump, continually framed as another Hitler and, ironically, as a liar.

Artistically, drama requires setbacks, obstacles and conflict. “The prince married a princess and they lived happily ever after” is not a story. It is too uneventful. Nor is a story of unremitting goodness or unalleviated badness adequate.

The German Lesson is essentially, “There once was a very bad and unsympathetic man who the author of the book and director of the film clearly hates and who the audience is made sure to hate, too. He then did lots of bad things to people who are presented in a sympathetic light. And then he does some more. And then some more again. And then after an absence, he announces that, “A person must stay true to himself. He must do his duty even when times change,” and double downs on all his previous badness and does even more bad things. The End. You, the audience, are left sitting there wishing you had not just watched this fiasco and vowing never to watch it again under any circumstances. It could be considered post-Christian in its barbarism and moral obtuseness.

In The German Lesson, a noticeably puny low-testosterone-looking undoubtedly left-wing “hero” Siggi, is in a detention center and is asked to write an essay on the joy of duty. (People are surprisingly good at telling gay from straight and conservative from liberal just by looking at photographs of faces.) He initially seemingly has writer’s block and is put in solitary confinement as punishment for failing to write anything, alone among his classmates. It turns out that he has too much to write; not too little. The events of the film are his memories of his father’s misguided sense of duty to the Fatherland. As the local policeman, Jens Ole Jepsen, in an unnamed far northern German village by the sea, is charged with countering the local artist’s, Max Ludwig Nansen, Entartete Kunst: degenerate art. Jens is perfectly willing to ban Max’s further output and to confiscate the last five years of his work. Max, the artist, has badly combed slightly wild hair to indicate his bohemian nature and he is supposed to have been, in fact, the childhood best friend of the policeman.

My own childhood best friend was someone with whom I made bows and arrows, kicked a soccer ball around, went skateboarding and improvised activities. We were essentially inseparable and relied on each other for company. We talked a bit, but mostly we did boyish outdoor things. It was not until I got to know him as an adult, that I discovered that there was something congenial about the way his mind worked – despite the two of us having many outward differences. It is that, it seems, that drew us together. In the movie, this boorish policeman and the bohemian artist have no such meeting of the minds. This renders the betrayal of friendship aspect unbelievable. Here is where the novel is superior to the movie. In the novel, Max had been an enthusiastic and early member of the Nazi Party, only abandoning it when they disapproved of his style of art and sought to suppress it, not due to its euthanasia of the mentally or physically defective, murder of Jews, or ambitions for world domination and “living space.” One would never be able to guess this from the movie. Without this backstory, it is impossible to say what Jens and Max could ever have had in common or to believe that they were ever close, crippling the movie on that front.

The character of Max is based on the real-life Expressionist artist Emil Nolde who was antisemitic and planned to work for Hitler. Nolde’s work was indeed suppressed by the Nazis, but was mostly attractive and beautiful. Very few of his paintings are grotesque. One imagines they were too “primitive” and minimalist to win Nazi approval.

Some of Max’s paintings in the movie are attractive. Some of them do, in fact, look degenerate. At one point, Siggi as a young boy who had been drawn to the painter who was more or less a godfather to him, admits to his father that he has been having lessons from Max who has taught him to convey pain. Since pain is just one facet of the range of human experiences, maybe most fathers would be similarly disapproving if they found out that an art teacher for his son had focused exclusively on that. To include it, would be acceptable.

Like Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, had actually been a member of the Hitler Youth and was even a member of the Nazi Party, though he later claimed that he had been signed up without his knowledge. He had been drafted into the German navy and towards the end of the war he ran away after the Germans in Denmark and the Netherlands had surrendered, was briefly a prisoner of war, and then acted as an interpreter for the British army.

It is claimed that Lenz wrote The German Lesson in order to challenge unquestioning obedience to the state and to stop something like the German role in WWII from happening again. This puts The German Lesson in the category of a polemic; propaganda and a tendentious exercise. This would explain why it is not a good book or film. Characters have to plausibly express themselves and take on a life of their own. The character, in turn, reveals to the novelist what he will say or do. Once the novelist becomes the string puller, determining the actions of the character to make a point, the reader feels as manipulated as the character. Real people have internal motivations, or copy other people. What they do not have is a Svengali orchestrating their behavior.

Siegfried Lenz just is not a great writer. I read his An Exemplary Life (Das Vorbild) as a 13-year-old and, at that age, thought it was excellent. The novel is about a committee that is supposed to create a compendium of stories demonstrating moral excellence to inspire high school students. Each committee member proposes an edifying story and the other members vote whether to include it or not. But, the point of each story is opaque to everyone other than the person who proposed it and to the reader of the novel. Each member is put in the position of having to explain his or her rationale for his choice and to explain what he or she thinks is the moral of the story. Now, that is a tall order. Lenz has to write each supposedly edifying story and to make it a puzzle to everyone other than the character who is advocating its inclusion. And then his or her defense of the story has to be plausible. Unfortunately, rereading it a few years ago, I realized that the execution of the interesting idea was lacking. There was something stilted and even dated about it. It made me wish that the book could be rewritten by someone better because its underlying premise is intriguing.

The German Lesson is supposed to be about a man obsessed with duty. But, for some reason, Jens does his duty only with regard to orders from Berlin. We have a duty to friends and family, to those closest to us, first. Some people want us to act neutrally – the same to all – friend or foe – stranger or spouse – co-religionist or not – fellow citizen or alien – but they are wrong. We must be hostile to those who try to destroy our culture and community, or we will cease to exist or will be subjugated to foreign domination. In our development from egocentrism to ethnocentrism, egocentrism is transcended, but included. It is not discarded. Someone had better have your best interests at heart, and it might as well be you. You have a special duty to yourself, to siblings, parents, children, and the local community. Children do not need a general benevolence from the adults in a city. They need biased parents who love them unconditionally and who try to look out for their best interests in particular. Children get to be a special someone, not one among many.

The German Lesson is thus in many regards about the failure of duty. The father fails in his duties to his family and his friend. These duties are not obscure or unknown to anyone. He actively betrays his putative friendship to the artist. Later in the story, his other son, Klaus, seeks refuge as a deserter. He has shot himself in the arm and has come home to escape imprisonment. Both the people searching for him and the family foresee that he will turn up at home because he has nowhere else to go. Klaus first appeals to his brother Siggi and then to the artist, Max, and his wife, to save him. But, Jens guesses what is going on and goes to search for him at Max’s house. He does not find him because Klaus has hidden in the sand dunes where he gets shot in the abdomen by a random British fighter plane. Siggi runs to his father appealing for help who then takes Klaus home in a wheelbarrow and Klaus ends up at the family home in pain and bleeding from his wound. After Max arrives and sees the stricken Klaus, Jens comments that “now there is a witness” and calls the police, who at least show up with an ambulance, to have Klaus taken away. Jens has failed in his duties as a father. Later in the movie, after the father comes home after being detained by the Allies, he tears up the only photo of Klaus and announces that, as a deserter, his name will never be uttered again.

We know, however, that all this has caused Jens pain. He cries when he sees evidence that Klaus had been sleeping in Max’s basement and he attempts to clean the blood out of the wheelbarrow he used to transport Klaus. Rinsing the wheelbarrow seems symbolic; more about avoiding being frequently confronted with Klaus’ death than cleanliness as such.

At one point, Max comes into the local pub to drink with a leather art portfolio. Jens is already there and he demands to examine the portfolio in his role as a policeman. Max complies. At first Jens is dismayed to find only blank art paper but then he is delighted to find a picture of a sunset. Max is arrested as a consequence but later released. Jens cannot understand why, but then finds out that Max was released because the painting was actually done by Siggi. Jens is incensed that Siggi has unintentionally turned Jens into a laughing stock and figure of fun. As punishment, he takes Siggi’s hand and burns it by holding it to the hotplate of a woodburning stove. This act of revenge has nothing to do with duty, but with wounded pride and vanity. Jens sees it as having his “good name” tarnished, though there really is no reputation to be besmirched because everyone in the film hates him already and disapproves of his officiousness.

There are, strangely enough, given the biographical similarities between Lenz and Günter Grass, some echoes of the movie The Tin Drum, based on the Grass novel. In The Tin Drum, Oskar is a boy who has decided never to grow up, which means he has the sexual desires of an adolescent, but the body of a prepubescent. When his father hires an attractive young woman, Oskar and his father are in sexual rivalry for her. In The German Lesson, Siggi’s sister Hilke returns home after an absence. Siggi ambushes her from behind and they fall giggling to the ground, more in the manner of lovers than siblings. Siggi is the size of Oskar and Hilke resembles Oskar’s father’s lover. Two other scenes have more overt sexual overtones between Siggi and Hilke. One is where Siggi cuts himself and Hilke sucks his bleeding finger while looking him in the eyes and giggling. The other is when Siggi spies on his half-naked sister as she cavorts with Max who is using her as a model. She catches him looking at her through a window and wags her finger in mock disapproval before closing the curtain. The modeling becomes another source of outrage for Jens and Siggi’s mother when the drawing called “The Dancer on the Waves” appears featuring the topless Hilke.

There is also a sequence of events in The Tin Drum where Oskar’s mother refuses to eat the eels her husband has cooked. Oskar’s father tries to convince her to eat, but she retreats to the bedroom. She had seen the use of a horse’s head to catch eels, with the eels reeling inside the hollowed out neck and had vomited. Over the next few days, her husband is initially happy to see her eating again, but she does not stop and binge eats copious amounts of fish to the point of death. Max’s wife, Ditte, does something similar when Max is taken away for continuing to paint his forbidden art. She starts to drink all available fluids including, oddly, specifically asking Siggi to fetch the broth from cooked fish for her. Death by overdrinking, rather than overeating. She drinks wine, though Siggi tells her that this will just make her thirstier. She does not disagree. Somehow, this results in her getting pneumonia. She has sewn her own funeral shroud in preparation for death and tells Siggi to keep Max company when she is gone.

Lenz wants to prevent another WWII and for Germans not to participate in it through misguided or fanatical duty. However, there is no evidence that Wehrmacht soldiers put devotion to the Fatherland over duty to friends and family. That was not the issue. Those devoted to duty are likely to be a dutiful son, a dutiful father, a dutiful spouse, and a dutiful friend. We actually do not want people to cease being dutiful. German soldiers did not betray friends and family. They did fight for their country and prioritized the interests of their nation over other nations. That is normal and necessary. However, morally, it is only defensive wars that can be justified.

Instead of attacking duty and blaming duty for German participation in WWII, Lenz should note that in this particular case, Germans carrying out the policies of the German government was a bad thing. Also, fanaticism in general is bad, so Jens’ obsession with doing his duty towards the state is at the expense of duty to friends and family.

By analogy, it is not wrong for parents to love their children. Love for a child might motivate a parent to try to cover up a crime the child had committed. The solution is not to say that parents should be worried about excessive love for their children, but to point out that this particular expression of love is misguided.

A philosophy professor colleague made a similar mistake to Lenz. He argued repeatedly over a period of at least 15 years that pharmacists should follow the law and not their consciences when it comes to filling out prescriptions. The case he had in mind was Christian pharmacists who did not want to fill prescriptions for the “morning after pill” (such as Plan B One-Step) because they considered it abortion. But, what if the prescription was for a poison because the state had insisted that people with mental or physical handicaps should be euthanized? Clearly, we want pharmacists following their consciences and not the law in that case. His mistake, based on his own pro-abortion leanings, was so clear that a whole book was written with different contributors all taking a turn at shooting his position down. Morally, everyone needs to follow his conscience and not the law and abide by the consequences. You might ask, “But if what if he’s wrong?” Well, then do not be wrong! There is no logical moral alternative to doing what you consider to be right.

If, instead of enforcing a ban on Entartete Kunst, Jens was trying to stop the locals from persecuting Jews by order of the state, there would be no complaints about an excessive love of duty, or if a doctor worked excessively trying to save patients.

The German Lesson is one long scapegoating of Jens. Jens is the scapegoat of the movie, while Max, his wife, Klaus, Siggi, Hilke, and Siggi’s mother are the scapegoats in the movie. Viewers are whipped into opposition to Jens, bonding in shared hatred against him. There is no forgiveness or redemption for him. In fact, Jens’ inability to change or to see the error of his ways makes Lenz’s polemic pointless. If fanatical duty to the Fatherland followers cannot be convinced to behave in another way, what is the point of this novel and movie? Worse, with no atonement for Jens, the audience who are not encouraged to see themselves in the hated behavior remains smug and complacent in its vengeful resentment against him. They can sacrifice Jens in good faith. As such, the movie is pernicious. One kind of sin (fanaticism) is criticized by engaging in another (scapegoating).

In order for Lenz to promote not fanatically doing your duty regardless of what you are asked to do, Lenz’s readers or the viewers of the film must see the capacity to do this within themselves. But, the whole point of scapegoating is that the mob denies any responsibility for its behavior and blames it all on a victim. The mob does not say, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” But, “Look at that total bastard. We hereby condemn him, renounce him, and sentence him to death or ostracism. It’s all his fault.” Lenz the polemicist, in order to achieve his goal, must convince readers and viewers that they might be capable of doing immoral things. Instead, he is getting them to point the finger at someone else. In fact, a specific someone who must accept all the blame. This leaves everyone else free to behave in the condemned way with a clear conscience.

I remember a friend, in youth, saying, in regard to the Milgram experiment, that showed that most people were willing to torture even unto death innocent strangers if someone in a white coat told them to and guilt-tripped them into thinking that years of experiments would be undermined if they refused, that he would never do that. Since the majority of men and women did go along with it, there is excellent chance that so would he. The point being that if you think you are immune to a certain moral failure you will probably deny it even if you are in fact guilty of it. You will not be on the look out for it because you are convinced it does not apply to you.

Why worry about people blindly following their duty if it is the pathology of a single individual and not something anyone else in the community has any predilection to do? Either this tendency is widespread, or it is not. If it is rare, no need to worry about it. Only if it is something that we could all be guilty of does it make sense to get schoolchildren to read The German Lesson (Deutschstunde) as apparently they do. But, singling out one individual to take all the blame runs counter to this aim.

Scapegoating is immoral. So, for Lenz, “Do not blindly follow your duty,” becomes in his book “Scapegoat the innocent victim.” (Jens is innocent of being the sole instance of the phenomenon. If he is instead the sole instance, there is no wider problem to worry about. You choose.) Scapegoating is a bigger problem than being dutiful. We are more outraged about the scapegoating of Jews than German soldiers volunteering and being conscripted to fight. The latter did not have much choice in the matter, especially if a firing squad was the alternative. The same followed for those who refused a legal order. Fanaticism did not have much to do with it.

Lenz attacks a fanciful target; a German Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine filled with duty fanatics, rather than young men sent to die by their elders, at the point of a gun if necessary, while engaging in the very moral crime for which WWII Germans are most criticized. If Lenz learned any lesson from his participation in the war, it was the wrong one. He remains a sacrificial scapegoater.

The flashback scenes finish on an unconvincing note. At one point, when Jens has returned from his detention, Siggi finds him burning Max’s paintings again, even though the war is over and the Nazi’s defeated. That is when Jens says, “A person must stay true to himself. He must do his duty even when times change.” Why it is still his duty to burn the paintings, it is impossible to say. He is no longer obeying orders and, in fact, the new administration has banned this behavior as Siggi tells him – to which Jens responds, “Well, aren’t you well-informed.” When Siggi tries to stop his father, Jens, after pretending to be sympathetic to Siggi’s entreaties, brutally punches him in the face with full force, easily beating Siggi to the ground. Jens is much more robust and ruthless than the weakling Siggi.

Near the conclusion of the flashback sequences, Jens yells at Hilke for posing for “The Dancer of the Waves,” saying Max has made a fool of him, and the mother accuses her of having given herself to him. When Hilke says that she is not responsible for her mother’s misery, the mother starts to strangle her, but Hilke pushes her off. Jens then slaps her.  Finally, Siggi is spurred to action and attacks his father, pushing him to the ground, punching him, and even kicking him. Except, Jens is too robust and Siggi to pathetic-looking for this to be particularly believable.

After this, Siggi starts stealing paintings and a sculpture by Max, and burying them in the ground, apparently in an effort to stop them from being targeted for destruction by Jens. Max has regained his acclaim as an artist and is shown having a big successful exhibition of his work. At this point, even Jens wants to stop Siggi’s behavior. Jens is later shown tentatively trying to help Max retrieve the paintings from the ground once they have been found; an offer of assistance that is understandably rejected by Max. It is for this behavior that Siggi has been sent to his detention center.

The movie ends with Siggi carrying his completed pile of notebooks tied up with twine, exiting his jail cell and disappearing around the corner out of view. The viewer is left feeling terrible. If this polemic against duty was to have worked, then a sense of hope for something different would be necessary in the audience. No such feeling remains.

A very strange aspect of the film is that Jens seems to be the only Nazi-supporter within a hundred-mile radius. At key points, representatives from the Nazi regime show up like the Angel of Death, but they are not depicted as members of this far-flung spot nor supporters of Jens. (As mentioned, the book is different because Max had supported the regime until it rejected him.) It is a fact of human psychology that most people require moral support in the form of a micro-community, if they are to deviate from the consensus. Human beings are natural conformists because they are naturally mimetic. We copy the opinions of other people and this has the benefit that we remain a member of the tribe in good standing. We will even question our own eyes if everyone disagrees with us. There is also the phenomenon of high-class and low-class beliefs. The beliefs of the governing elite are high class, i.e., whatever nonsense comes out of Ivy League universities. Followers of “populists” are considered low-class because populism means deviating from the elite consensus and this is why elites hate populism so much. Even those of us who are intensely disagreeable need friends or family who confirm that we are, according to them, correct. And yet Jens is all alone. His wife clearly hates him and intensely disagrees with the witch hunt against Entartete Kunst. Obviously, his supposed best friend Max does not support him. Jens tries to recruit his son Siggi as a supporter, but he immediately becomes a turncoat and mostly sticks up for Max instead.

Scapegoats as individuals have to be separated out from the flock. Something has to set them apart. Perhaps they walk with a limp, maybe they are a foreigner, a prisoner of war, or have a giant strawberry birthmark on their forehead. The victim must be isolated. If he has a group of defenders, then the mob cannot immolate him. Instead of curing violence through the war of all against all, one is instead generating violence by one large group attacking another.

Somehow, Jens is a man alone. In such circumstances, it is hard to sustain the idea that he is following his duty. A one-man-band duty follower? What sets him apart is precisely his following a group-identity, duty to the Fatherland, among a bunch of individualists and free thinkers. It does not really make sense. Jens is in a group of one for being a collectivist. This kind of narrative failing is overlooked because the film has a score to settle and a point to make.

The fact that Jens is not killed or banished from his village at the end – even his wife stays – does not give the usual satisfaction of bloodlust directed at the hated victim. What a tease! Some critics have complained that the movie has no real resolution as a consequence, which it does not. The fanatical duty follower lives on to fight another day. Fortunately, it will apparently always be someone else doing that, not us.

Chaucer has a character called “Chaucer” in Canterbury Tales who is given what is considered the worst story to tell. The figure is comedic and making fun of yourself is generally endearing. His story is so bad, another character stops him from finishing and he tells another bad meandering story instead. Marcel Proust initially has Monsieur Swann as the central figure and romantic idiot, but after the first volume or so of Remembrance of Things Past, Swann’s role recedes, and Proust names the new delusional and self-sabotaging character after himself, Marcel. But, in The German Lesson, Siegfried Lenz has the sympathetic narrator named, Siggi, short for “Siegfried,” not his antagonist. Lenz is the hero of his own story. Lenz and Grass had both been in the Hitler Youth and fought for the Nazis. Lenz could have owned his contribution to the German war effort, but instead he remains in the state of projecting his sins onto others.

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