The German Lesson

The German Lesson (Deutschstunde, 2019) is a German drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Christian Schwochow and adapted from Siegfried Lenz's 1968 novel — a book that has stayed on the German school curriculum ever since.

Siggi Jepsen, locked in a Hamburg juvenile detention facility, refuses to write an assigned essay on "the joys of duty fulfilled" — and is put in solitary until he complies. What surfaces in that silence is a childhood spent in occupied northern Germany: a policeman father who spent years hounding painter Max Ludwig Nansen for work banned by the regime; a boyhood friendship pulled apart by it; and the slow erosion of a family that mistook obedience for decency. Ulrich Noethen and Tobias Moretti play the two men fixed on opposite sides of the conflict.

Louis Hofmann takes on the teenage Siggi. Schwochow's approach is deliberate and unadorned — the film is less concerned with villains than with the ordinary machinery by which decent people enforce unjust rules. Stream The German Lesson online on iFILM.