Protagonist Siggi sits hunched at a desk downstage, facing us. Behind him, facing away, ranks of classmates scratch their pens in unison. The opening image of Philip Tiedemann’s production (which has now transferred from the Berliner Ensemble’s try-out space to its main house) is an apt emblem for both the staging and the themes of Siegfried Lenz’s 1968 novel.

Lenz, along with contemporaries such as Günter Grass, was concerned with dealing with the acts and also the attitudes, both collective and individual, of his countrymen during the 1933-45 period. Siggi, tasked with writing an essay on “The Joys of Duty”, responds obsessively, recalling his childhood in the final years of WW2. His father, a police officer in the extreme north of Germany, is a compulsively “good German”, obeying orders because orders must be obeyed. He does not allow friendship to divert him from suppressing the work of a painter whose work has been classified “degenerate”; even when Nansen the painter begins to produce blank canvases in protest, claiming they are “invisible paintings”, Officer Jepsen destroys them nonetheless. With the change in the fortunes of war, Jepsen’s orderliness grows more rigorous and desperate, impacting on his own family and neighbours. Meanwhile, Siggi hears the call of a duty of his own: to art, to memory, to history.

Tiedemann’s production is spare yet elegant. The all-male cast of eleven change costumes onstage and provide sound effects themselves. The back of a wooden chair becomes a window through which Peter Miklusz as Siggi crawls to meet his deserter brother; a street barricade is built onstage, to the height of around a foot. The staging is very much an ensemble work, with Siggi semi-detached. (I wondered briefly at the beginning of the 85-minute piece whether he would ever cease to be simply a narrator and join the story himself.) The latter phase of the book – post-war developments, perfunctory de-nazification and the rise of Siggi as an agent of events in his own right – is only sketchily dealt with: it is easier to examine unflinchingly our distant selves than our immediate ones. But Lenz’s combination of simplicity and poetry comes through in the company’s characteristic staging.

Written for the Financial Times.