Word: jepsen
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...FATHER of Siggi, the narrator, is a policeman by the name of Jens Ole Jepsen. Jepsen honors duty above all things. "I don't ask what good it does a man to do his duty, nor whether it's good for him or not," he remarks. "Where would it get us all if every time we did something we asked ourselves what it was going to lead to?" Jepsen never asks. He turns in his son Klaas as a deserter with the same alacrity and sense of duty that he feels when he spanks naughty Siggi or rescues...
...When Jepsen receives orders from Berlin to stop Max Ludwig Nansen from painting, he feels rather awkward. Nansen is not only a world famous artist, he is also Jepsen's lifelong friend. But the policemen never wavers. Echoing the party line, he informs an incredulous neighbor that their friend Nansen is "a danger to the State and undesirable, simply degenerate, if you see what I mean." Jepsen hesitates in the performance of duty when he finds the wounded body of his traitor son. But the hesitation is momentary. "What has to be done is going to be done," he reassures...
...Jepsen is not out to save his neck. He is a good citizen who enjoys his work. The artist Nansen calls him "a man who only wants to do his duty and makes no other demands on himself." His self-image is a stereotype: he is, as Siggi realizes, the embodiment of "the joys of duty...
...WATCHING JEPSEN we are reminded of Adolf Eichmann, the office worker and patriot who, busily arranging deportation dates and train schedules, had neither the chance nor the inclination to point the finger of death at individual victims. Here was, in Hannah Arendt's words, "a mass murderer who had never killed." But Eichmann, like the fictional Jepsen, was no mindless cog in the Nazi machine. He was an individual who liked his job and did it well. When Himmler ordered Eichmann near the end of the war to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jews, the outraged bureaucrat threatened to appeal...
...curve near the town of Glendale, Utah, a truck carrying 27 tons of steel headed straight at him. The big truck smashed Brown's truck against a rocky hill. Brown, his wife Sandra, 23, his daughters Robin, 4, and Michelle, 4 months, his brother-in-law David Jepsen, 19, all died. Only his third daughter, Sammie Kay, 1½, survived...