Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is 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 painting and to seize all his -degenerate- work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. Against the great brooding northern landscape. Siggi recounts the...