Wolfgang Koeppen, Youth: Autobiographical Writings. Trans. by Michael Hofmann. Dalkey Archive Press, 2014.
Wolfgang Koeppen, A Sad Affair, Trans. by Michael Hofmann. W. W. Norton, 2003.
A romantic roman a clef that tells the story of Sibylle, one of the greatest literary femmes fatales since Salomé.
Banned by the Nazis in 1936 for its frank sexual themes, Wolfgang Koeppen's first novel is at last appearing in English. A romance that anticipated Beat literature by nearly twenty years through its dizzying language and exploration of casual love, this is Koeppen's most hilarious work, one that evokes Mann's Tonio Kruger. Set during the heady, pre-World War II days of cabaret-era Germany, the novel centers around Sibylle—a stunning seductress who balances her love affairs with five men at once—and Friedrich, the callow, melancholic youth who obsessively pursues her.
In a stranger-than-fiction turn, Sibylle Scholoss, on whom the character of Sibylle is (very) loosely based, is now in her nineties and living in Manhattan. This publication enables us to celebrate not only the extraordinary renaissance of one of Germany's greatest twentieth-century writers but also the meteoric stage career of a German actress whose career was thwarted in its prime.
It was not the best of times to embark on a career as a literary modernist, an admirer of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Musil and Gertrude Stein, or indeed to have one’s books issued by the Jewish publisher Bruno Cassirer. A Sad Affair, a strongly autobiographical work inspired by Koeppen’s infatuation with the actress Sibylle Schloss, was treated with almost unanimous contempt by critics and reviewers towing the official Nazi line. “There’s only one prescription I have to offer,” one reviewer proclaimed, “labour camp!” – though it is unclear from the fragment of the review quoted by Hofmann whether the prescription was intended for the author, his “decadent” characters or for both.
Not long afterwards Koeppen fled to Holland. By the beginning of the war he was back in Germany however, writing film scripts, lying low and keeping out of trouble. He started writing again a few years after the end of hostilities. Three remarkable novels followed in quick succession. - www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/prj/bkm/rev/aut/koe/enindex.htm
Koeppen examines the obsessive side of young love in his first novel, a sly romantic satire that was banned in Nazi Germany in 1936 for its candid depiction of a decidedly one-sided, non-Aryan relationship in which the woman calls most of the shots. The story picks up the enthralled narrator, Friederich, as he meets the woman of his dreams, Sybille Schloss, an actress in a theater troupe. The would-be lovers unite during Sybille's theatrical run after Friederich pursues her in Zurich, but Friederich's desire for romantic and sexual perfection prevents him from making love with her. Sybille's flightiness is part of the problem, as she conducts affairs with several other men, including Bosporus, an officer in the German army; the theater owner, Dr. Magnus; and Walter, a famous critic. Friederich thinks a trip to Tuscany will help his lady love focus on him, but their muddled relationship finally ends in a sequence in which the tortured, angst-ridden Friederich gives Sybille a gun and begs her to put him out of his emotional misery. The one-dimensional plot helps the satire work as a commentary on the romantic straightjacket of Nazism, and Koeppen's ruminations on love are occasionally provocative, especially when he delves into its effects on our freedom and the ways in which it falls short of expectations. In addition, the group portrait of the theater troupe is incisive, and in spite of their indecisiveness both Friederich and Sybille are well-drawn characters. A perceptive introduction by translator Hofmann sheds light on Koeppen's literary legacy. - Publishers Weekly
Friedrich leaves Germany for the first time to seek out his beloved Sibylle, in "a foreign city" where he spends an infatuated day and night before continuing to Italy. Interspersed with flashbacks to the earlier stages of their relationship, the narrative in A Sad Affair describes Friedrich's doomed attempts not just to fulfil his passion but to do so in the right way. It follows his stream of consciousness, with occasional narratorial commentary in square brackets.
Though he is an awkward figure, afflicted by romantic sensibilities about love, not particularly adept at anything practical, and subject to rapidly changing moods, Friedrich remains someone we can sympathise with, clinging to rationality and gentle despite the violence of his obsession. And Sibylle, worldly and promiscuous but at the same time child-like, is a surprisingly sympathetic femme fatale, so there is no jar when the narrative switches to her perspective several times towards the end. (Her character is based on a real actress of the same name, and Friedrich's story has significant autobiographical elements.) A Sad Affair (Eine unglückliche Liebe, 1934) begins with a boundary crossing and a passing vision of the flames of war and the lure of the high seas, but otherwise offers no hint of the political events of the early 1930s. Koeppen does, however, describe the more immediate setting to his intimate drama: the hotels and streets and night-life of the unnamed city that is clearly Zurich, the bohemian drama troupe Sibylle is working with, and so forth. The "decadence" here was enough to make A Sad Affair unpopular with the Nazis. Koeppen's first novel is overshadowed by his three novels from the 1950s, dealing with the corruptions and compromises of post-war Germany, but the more personal A Sad Affair has a charm all of its own. - Danny Yee
An engagingly callow swain pursues the “actress” of his dreams in this previously untranslated 1934 fiction, the first by the great, underrated German author (1902–96).
Banned in Germany in 1936, Koeppen’s tale is an exuberant satire on romantic hyperbole and carnal imbecility, possibly a partial takeoff on Heinrich Mann’s famous novel of obsession, The Blue Angel. Koeppen’s protagonists are Friedrich, a sometime student of literature who works part-time as a tester in a lightbulb factory (lovely irony), and Sibylle, the gorgeous cabaret performer and would-be serious thespian who intoxicates, ensnares, enrages, and delights the tormented—and self-tormenting—Friedrich. He follows her to an unnamed “foreign city” (identified as Zurich in translator Hofmann’s lucid introduction) where she’s performing at a “variety theater,” and endures disillusioning introductions to the several other men with whom Sibylle disports herself: among them a bilious drama critic, a wounded war hero (amusingly named Bosporus), and a charismatic “young Russian who . . . [sings] songs about hunger and revolution.” The story moves from Zurich to Italy, whence Friedrich had invited Sibylle, who sends another woman in her place; and where she eventually does join him, for a frustratingly chaste idyll. Afterward, “Sibylle remained destined for him; Friedrich was the human being who belonged to her. Nothing had changed.” This potentially hermetic and conventional tale is instead a work of extraordinary freshness: Koeppen’s brisk prose (beautifully translated here) renders operatic emotion with urbane precision (Sibylle’s lovers “craved to lie at the foot of her bed like dogs,” etc.), and he brings real intensity and depth to Friedrich’s slavish deference and Sibylle’s determination to become something more than an object of adoration.
Koeppen (The Hothouse, 2001, etc.), who’s unlike any other writer, produced only five novels in a 60-year career span. But they’re all gems, and A Sad Affair is one of the brightest. - Kirkus Reviews
For all the pointed social criticism in his fiction, Wolfgang Koeppen's silences have spoken louder than his words. Silence is a freighted subject for any German who witnessed the rise and fall of the Third Reich without speaking out at the time, particularly so for an important German writer. Koeppen was certainly outspoken in the 1950s when his postwar trilogy—Pigeons on the Grass (1951), The Hothouse (1953), and Death in Rome (1954)—called his countrymen to task for a multitude of sins and weaknesses including their refusal to take responsibility for the rise of Nazism or to learn from their recent past, their rampant materialism, and their push toward rearmament. The critical reception of these novels ranged from grudging respect through indifference to outright hostility, surely contributing to Koeppen's inability to finish any of the several novels his publisher announced as forthcoming over the subsequent four decades. Koeppen filled that fictional void with travel writing, essays, newspaper articles, some short stories, and repeated interviews in which he carefully evaded any questions about his novels in progress. Yet most damaging of all was his silence about a book he had published anonymously in 1948, Jakob Littner: Notes From a Hole in the Ground.
This book, which Koeppen had been commissioned to ghostwrite, is a harrowing account of the experiences of Jakob Littner, a completely assimilated and highly respected Jewish stamp dealer who fled Munich in 1939 for the east. He barely survived increasingly precarious stays in several ghettos in Poland and then was hidden for almost a year in the cellar of an avaricious, impoverished Polish nobleman. Littner paid dearly for his hideout. At one point he even extracted the gold from his bridgework as payment.
On his return to Munich in 1946, Littner asked a publisher to find a writer to rework the manuscript of his memoirs. Koeppen, whose first two novels had met with only relative success before they were banned by the Nazis and who had no prospects of employment, signed on for a fee of two care packages a month. In 1947, Littner emigrated to the United States, where he died a few years later.
Koeppen adhered quite closely to Littner's manuscript, yet his improvements, primarily stylistic, were marked. Nonetheless, in 1948, few were ready for the sorts of truths the book told, however artfully. So it languished for forty-four years. In 1992, Koeppen's best work lay four decades behind him. He decided to republish the text, but this time as Jakob Littner's Notes from a Hole in the Ground: a Novel by Wolfgang Koeppen.
In his foreword to this second edition of Littner's story, Koeppen offers a carefully formulated disclaimer: "I was not one of those who knew nothing. Hell was all around. I was aware of my own helplessness. After all, who would go out and scream in the marketplace? In those years, death stalked each one of us." And he concludes ambiguously, "I ate American rations and wrote the story of the suffering of a German Jew. And so it became my story."
In 1993, Littner's relatives came forward with the original manuscript, threatening to sue for plagiarism. A paperback edition of Koeppen's version was published in 1994, without the words "a novel," but Koeppen remained as evasive on this subject as ever. He died in 1996 without ever having made a public pronouncement about Littner's story 'becoming' his own. The gifted translator, Michael Hofmann, has been waging an enthusiastic campaign in English-speaking lands to get Koeppen the recognition he deserves for the stories that truly were his own. Hofmann has translated The Hothouse, Death in Rome, and Koeppen's first novel, A Sad Affair. This was no easy task given the dense, lyrical rush of Koeppen's prose or his vast range of allusions from classical Greek and Roman literatures, Wagnerian opera, French Symbolism, to advertisements and song lyrics from the beer halls. Hofmann's translations seem as true to the spirit and sensuousness of the original as it is possible to be.
Wolfgang Koeppen, born in 1906, was not one of the "inner émigré©s" who couched their decision to stay and write in the Third Reich as a subversive defense of the other, "true" Germany. Instead, he spent most of the war years writing purposefully innocuous and impractical filmscripts, before using the bombing of his Munich apartment in 1944 as an opportunity to ``disappear' underground until the war's end. In 1931, Koeppen had moved to Berlin to be a journalist, and there he wrote his first two novels, A Sad Affair (1934) and The Tottering Wall (1935). In the mid-Thirties, he moved to Holland after the newspaper he wrote for folded and he stayed there until his visa ran out in 1939. Even the Nazis' ban on his books in 1936 because of their decadent themes and their Jewish publisher did not dissuade him from returning home.
Koeppen's first publisher, Ernst Cassirer, had noticed his articles and commissioned a novel. When Koeppen repeatedly failed to deliver the promised manuscript, Hofmann writes in his engaging introduction, Cassirer locked the writer up with a typewriter and a stack of paper. Koeppen delivered A Sad Affair. It is tempting to see traces of that confinement in this claustrophobic roman &aaccute; clef of obsessive, unrequited love. Set in the prewar demi-monde of cabarets and procurers, the novel follows the student Friedrich's attempts—some earnest, some bathetic, others ridiculous, but all of them doomed—to capture the heart of the ravishing, promiscuous, and childlike actress Sibylle. She is serially unfaithful to the drama critic with whom she lives, sleeping with almost anyone she meets except for Friedrich and his equally smitten friend Beck. She keeps these two men on a string, and as a threesome they romp around Zürich playing jokes on the staid bourgeois, their hilarity barely concealing profound despair.
Like Friedrich, Koeppen had once been deeply and unhappily infatuated with the cabaret singer Sybille Schloss, and his novel's fictional veil appears thin indeed. In the novel, no amount of rejection or humiliation can persuade Friedrich that Sybille is not fated to be his. A Sad Affair is the intimate emotional diary of an otherwise rational man caught in the throes of an overwhelming passion. Koeppen charts Friedrich's elaborate emotional journey with delicacy and precision, from his euphoria at the slightest signs of hope, through studied indifference, abject suffering, despair, rage, and finally to his embrace of a fragile resignation that depends as much on his clearsightedness as it does on his illusions. "[T]he wall of glass was still between them, sheer as air and acutely reflecting the image of the other. It was a frontier that they now respected. Sibylle remained destined for him; Friedrich was the human being who belonged to her. Nothing had changed."
Koeppen's later books are also emotionally charged, but less introverted. They seethe with despair, disgust, and loathing only somewhat relieved by dark humor. In an interview he referred to his writing as an "attempt at a monologue against the world." In his 1950s novels, the monologue becomes a diatribe, and an eloquent one at that. Koeppen's satiric trilogy was not quite a scream in the marketplace, yet it was a decidedly provocative challenge to the German public.
Pigeons on the Grass is a montage of shifting scenes from the course of a single day in Munich in 1951. Under the recurrent threatening drone of Allied planes flying overhead, German civilians and American soldiers meet, their encounters pointing up the flaws of both sides. The Americans are shown as well-meaning but limited idealists whose fight for justice in the world does not mask the racial injustices at home. The Germans more damningly appear as opportunists, predators, or moral amnesiacs.
In Koeppen's central novel, Bonn is the stifling hothouse of the title. Keetenheuve, a poet who spent the war years in exile in Canada, has returned to Bonn as a member of the opposition party in the Bundestag. The idealism that brought him back to Germany is short-lived. Dispirited by the foreign powers' machinations to perpetuate the division of Germany and his own government's rush to rearm, he realizes that he is "crusading against power that was so entwined with all the old power, that it could afford to laugh at the knight who sallied out to challenge her, and sometimes, in a spirit almost of kindness to offer a target for his zeal, she tossed a windmill his way."
Some ministers attempt to gain his support for their plans with futile quid pro quos. Keetenheuve is also offered the bribe of an ambassadorship to Guatemala, where he would be safely out of the way. More subtly, Keetenheuve is pressured through an invitation to the government canteen, "a fearsome great barn of a place, reeking of rancid fat, stinking of burnt flour," where he can choose between several gray meat and gravy dishes "on a Bed of Mashed Potatoes." It is an inexpensive reminder to Keetenheuve of his nation's lowest common denominator and "the mean fate to which it was possible to be reduced." Keetenheuve cannot escape the conclusion that "people had naturally remained the same, it didn't even occur to them to change, merely because the form of government had changed, because the uniforms thronging the streets and making babies were now olive-green instead of brown, black, and field gray." His only way out is suicide.
Koeppen even ratchets up his criticism of Adenauer Germany several notches higher in the third novel, Death in Rome. It is a tour de force, part thriller, part commentary on Thomas Mann's masterpieces Death in Venice and Doktor Faustus. An estranged German family meets in Rome. The alpha-male, Gottlieb Judejahn, is a former SS general condemned at Nuremburg and now an arms merchant for an unnamed Arabian kingdom. His brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, a political chameleon who has rehabilitated himself from his Nazi past, now serves as a mayor and desperately wants to have Judejahn rehabilitated as well. Pfaffrath's son Siegfried, an avant-garde composer, is in Rome for the premiere of his new symphony. Like Adrian Leverkühn, Siegfried has been searching for a new musical idiom, one that "might sound horrible to the generality which lagged behind the times; but it would carry a new message." He does not sign a pact with demonic forces, however, as he has already narrowly escaped them. Judejahn's son Adolf has joined the priesthood, but agonizes over the authenticity of his calling.
Their encounter is, predictably, disastrous. But in leading up, slowly, inexorably to the final catastrophe, Koeppen plays variations on a number of historically uncomfortable themes: the contaminating ties between Church and State, the coexistence of high culture and a cult of murder, the German longing for a romantically idealized Italy and their attempts to invade it.
If Koeppen's characterizations strike one as excessive, it is instructive to recall, as Douglas Porch and George Cornewall Lewis do in a recent article in The National Interest, that surveys taken in the mid-1950s showed a majority of Germans believed that "Germany's best time in recent history had been during the first years of the Nazis," and a significant minority felt "Nazism was a good idea badly carried out."
By the 1960s, Koeppen's writing finally began to gain widespread recognition. His portrayals of the Wirtschaftswunder's darker side and the hidden costs of his country's rise from defeat and utter devastation were no longer as threatening. In 1962, he was awarded the Büchner Prize, but such encouragement was not enough to overcome his difficulties in finishing various novels, the openings of which he published in journals before abandoning them.
In I Laid Low, I Made Myself Small . . . , a recent, untranslated biography of Koeppen, the German academic Jörg Döring takes as his title an answer Koeppen gave to an interviewer who asked what exactly he had done during the War. Döring's attempt to clarify Koeppen's evasiveness yields intriguing bits of information, such as evidence that Koeppen's stay in Holland from 1934 to 1938 had as much to do with political objections as with an increasingly dangerous affair with an SS officer's wife in Berlin. Koeppen is an intriguing literary figure, unable or unwilling to bring the same ruthless clarity to his life that so devastatingly illuminates his fiction. - Tess Lewis
Wolfgang Koeppen, Pigeons on the Grass, Holmes & Meier Pub., 1991. [1951.]
Here is an English translation of a post-war German classic. The events of the novel take place during the course of a single day in an unnamed city in occupied Germany where the endless drone of allied planes overhead increases the already heightened tension. Throughout this powerful narrative, the characters' experiences ultimately reveal how and at what cost Germans in the 1950s, by failing to confront their recent past, blinded themselves to its after effects.
Pigeons on the Grass (Tauben im Gras) was released in 1951and greeted with incomprehension and hostility. This nightmarish, Joycean vision of twenty-four hours in a destroyed city – Munich, where Koeppen spent the remainder of his life – was written, apparently, within the space of a few weeks. Yet there is nothing perfunctory or careless about its passionate indictment of the new Germany and of the way the Nazi old guard was reinventing itself and was about the reap the rewards of the economic miracle waiting just around the corner.
No wonder then that Koeppen’s new voice proved unpalatable to many of his fellow citizens. It is obvious however that the novel gave offence on aesthetic as much as on political grounds, though the two are never distinguishable in Koeppen’s postwar fiction. Pigeons on the Grass (the title comes from a remark of Gertrude Stein about those filthy urban pests) is a modernist tour-de-force in which a large cast of characters – Germans and Americans – float in and out of focus and where Koeppen’s style runs the gamut from rapid, machine-gun sentences to monstrous Proustian constructions spilling over several pages and replete with recondite literary, cultural, philosophical and musical allusions. - www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/prj/bkm/rev/aut/koe/enindex.htm
‘Pigeons on the Grass’ is Wolfgang Koeppen’s 1951 novel about Germany emerging from the chaos of WWII and is probably set in Munich in 1948 during one twenty-four hour period of the American-occupation, and includes among its host of characters two US GIs, a writer and a celebrated author. Koeppen was scathing of the German people’s failure to confront their recent past.
In his introduction to the book David Ward appears to contradict himself about Koeppen on the role or the responsibility of the writer in and towards society. Ward says, ‘He did not share the conservative, inner-emigration view that granted the writer a privileged status. In his speech accepting the 1962 George Büchner Prize, the Federal Republic’s most prestigious literary award, Koeppen discussed the sense of intense moral commitment he had always associated with the writing vocation: “I saw the writer among society’s outsiders, I saw him as a sufferer, as a sympathizer,… The writer is committed to oppose authority, power, the constraints of the majority, the mass, the great numbers, to oppose convention grown rigid and rotten; he belongs to the persecuted, the expelled…”’
In the wake of defeat and death few can find any purchase or meaning: “The official world was still striving to think in hollow phrases, in slogans long since devoid of any conceptual basis. They saw fixed, immutable fronts, staked off plots of earth, boundaries, territories, sovereignties, they saw in man a member of a soccer team who was supposed to play his life long for the team that he had joined by birth. They were mistaken: the front was not here and not there and not only at the boundary stake over there. The front was omnipresent, whether visible or invisible, and life was constantly changing its position relative to the billion points of the front. The front cut through the countries, it divided families, it ran through the individual: two souls, yes, two souls dwelt within each breast, and sometimes the heart beat with the one and sometimes with the other soul.”
Here is a wonderful description of the coming of evening: “It was that moment, that hour of the evening, when cyclists whisk through the streets and defy death. It was the time when twilight falls, the time when shifts change, when shops close, the hour when workers return home, the hour when night workers swarm into place. The police sirens shrieked. The squad cars rushed through the traffic. The blue lights lent their racing a ghostly glow: danger-boding St. Elmo’s fire of the city. Phillip loved this hour. In Paris, it was the heure bleue, the hour of reverie, a span of relative freedom, the moment of being free from day and night. The people had been released from their workshops and businesses, and they were not yet captive to the demands of habit and obligations to the family. The world hung suspended. Everything appeared possible. For a while everything appeared possible.” - Danny Morrison
Wolfgang Koeppen, Death in Rome, Trans. by Michael Hofmann. W. W. Norton, 2001. [1954.]
A prophetic novel that ranks with The Tin Drum and W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants as one of the essential works of contemporary European fiction.
Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome, in the words of translator Michael Hofmann, "is a comprehensive and brilliant provocation of an entire nation." First published in 1954 to great controversy, it is only now being recognized as a classic. A tragic portrait of Germany after World War II, Death in Rome completes the trilogy that earned Koeppen praise from Günter Grass in his lifetime as "the greatest living German writer." Mirroring the social and political upheaval following the fall of Nazism, Koeppen here offers the story of four members of a Germany family—a former SS officer, a young man preparing for the priesthood, a composer, and a government administrator—reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome. Koeppen re-creates the soul of a nation at a significant juncture of history in this devastating work of literary genius.
Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome, in the words of translator Michael Hofmann, "is a comprehensive and brilliant provocation of an entire nation." First published in 1954 to great controversy, it is only now being recognized as a classic. A tragic portrait of Germany after World War II, Death in Rome completes the trilogy that earned Koeppen praise from Günter Grass in his lifetime as "the greatest living German writer." Mirroring the social and political upheaval following the fall of Nazism, Koeppen here offers the story of four members of a Germany family—a former SS officer, a young man preparing for the priesthood, a composer, and a government administrator—reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome. Koeppen re-creates the soul of a nation at a significant juncture of history in this devastating work of literary genius.
First published in 1954, Koeppen's novel is a genuine lost classic, a penetrating examination of the angst, anguish and anger that infected Germany after WWII. The novel's vehicle for exploration is a clan living in postwar exile in Rome that pushes the definition of an extended family to its limits. The group consists of elder statesman Gottlieb Judejahn, a former high-ranking SS officer; his brother-in-law Friedrich Pfaffrath, who also held Nazi office; and their respective sons, Adolf Judejahn, a Catholic priest, and Siegfried Pfaffrath, a composer of serial music. According to Hofmann's excellent introduction, "these four represent the four principal areas of German achievement, or the four quarters of the riven German soul: murder, bureaucracy, theology and music." As both archetypes and individuals, they provide Koeppen with fertile ground for his extended meditations on war, art, religion and the transformations that affected both German society and the world immediately before and during WWII. The family members rarely interact with one another, but there are several significant scenes when their paths cross, most notably during a concert featuring Siegfried's work and when both Gottlieb and Adolph Judejahn pursue a Jewish barmaid named Laura who works in a gay Roman bar. The rich reservoir of Roman history (in which Germans have had a presence since Alaric the Goth) serves as a perfect backdrop for Koeppen's observations, and the fate of Gottlieb Judejahn as he pursues the barmaid is perhaps the ultimate metaphor for the postwar fate of the Nazis. This startling title shows Koeppen to be every inch Gunter Grass's equal in analyzing the intellectual side of Germany's rise and fall, and richly deserves a new level of visibility. (June)Forecast: Advance buzz is proclaiming this a dark horse stunner. NYRB readers are the core audience, but look for broader popularity and strong sales and a long backlist life if reviewers anoint it a classic of modern German literature. - Publishers Weekly
And then in 1954 came what proved to be his most disturbing, perhaps greatest achievement: Death in Rome (Der Tod in Rom), a dark, sardonic reworking of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Koeppen’s novel brings to the Eternal City a collection of emblematic German figures: the former Nazi gauleiter, now an arms-dealer for an African dictator; his brother-in-law, the civil servant who had only “followed orders”; the younger generation: a priest, a composer, an up-and-coming lawyer. All of these characters perform a dance of death among the ruins of an empire that had managed to last somewhat longer than the shortlived Thousand-Year Reich. - www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/prj/bkm/rev/aut/koe/enindex.htm
I usually say something here about (a) what I know about the author, and (b) how I came to read the book. Well in this case, the answer to (a) is easy: absolutely nothing. And (b) is split in two: I picked up the book some months ago because it was in the ‘booksellers’ recommendations’ shelves of my local Waterstone’s (stand up Susan Salters); but it would have lain unread in my pile if not for Andrew’s comments on Koeppen after my post on W.F. Hermans’ Beyond Sleep. So thank you Andrew. And now we can proceed.
Death in Rome (1954) was Koeppen’s fifth and final novel: he published two in the 1930s, and three in as many years in the 1950s, after which he published no more fiction until his death in 1996. OK, so I do know something about him, but I’m getting all this from the introduction by translator Michael Hofmann (whose name attached to a work in translation is almost a guarantor of quality). In fact the introduction was written when this English version was first published, in 1992; as a result Hofmann’s words have a touching quality to them: Koeppen is still alive as he writes, and Hofmann seems to hope for a break in his four-decade silence yet.
The novel describes the meeting of four members of the same family in Rome, and switches deftly between points of view in two long chapterless parts. It is dense but engrossing, and the changes in character which at first seem disorienting soon become invigorating. The only first person narrator is Siegfried Pfaffrath (“an absurd name, I know”), a composer who is waiting to attend the performance of his first major work. But this event in the near future vies for attention in Siegfried’s mind with his past: “Why don’t I use a pseudonym? I have no idea. Is it the hated name clinging to me, or do I cling to it? Will my family not let go of me?”
No, they won’t: his father, Friedrich, is also in Rome; he held office under the Nazi regime but is now a democratically elected official. His wife Anna and her sister Eva are there too, and Eva’s husband Judejahn. Judejahn is the monster of the novel, an unrepentant Nazi, who has nothing but contempt for his brother-in-law Friedrich, “who in his opinion was an asshole.” Central to understanding Judejahn is that “in Hitler’s service [he] became respectable, he made it, he put on weight, he got fancy-sounding titles,” and so his attachment to the regime is as much personal as political. Judejahn cannot bear to recall the boy he was before, and his forename Gottlieb (“a ridiculous, unmanly name … priestly slime left on him by the schoolmaster his father, and he didn’t want to love God”) is used as a marker of his past haunting him. The present isn’t looking as good as it used to either:
He crossed the square and reached the Via Condotti, panting. The pavement was narrow. People squeezed together in the busy shopping street, squeezed in front of the shop windows, squeezed past each other. Judejahn jostled and was jostled back. He didn’t understand. He was surprised that no one made way for him, that no one got out of his road.
Koeppen, a critic of postwar German complacency, expends much of his energy on the character of Judejahn, sometimes to the detriment of Friedrich and the female characters who are occasionally voiced. He leaves no aspect of Judejahn’s character unexplored, revealing that the child in him, the Gottlieb, remains still as he reflects that he “had tasted power, but in order to enjoy it, he required it to be limited, he required the Führer as an embodiment and visible god of power … He was afraid it might be discovered that he was just little Gottlieb going around in boots too big for him.”
The fourth character in the square is Judejahn’s son, named of course Adolf, who has betrayed his father by becoming a priest. He has concerns about his Church’s past association with the Nazi regime.
Did salvation lie in renunciation, in flight, in solitude, was the hermit the only prototype of survival? But the solitary man always seemed a figure of weakness to Adolf, because Adolf needed support, because he was afraid of himself; he required community, even though he doubted its worth.
Like father, like son. The characters together provide a convincing dialogue on the direction of post-war Germany, which is all the more impressive when we consider that the book was written when the marks of war were still fresh in all memories. There are personal considerations too which come to light; the scene is set for surprising revelations and a dramatic, if not so surprising, conclusion.
Death in Rome delights not just in its psychology but its fine writing too – family conversation is “twittering swallows of small talk” – and in its occasionally unconventional narrative conceits, from stream-of-consciousness to switching viewpoint in mid-sentence. It’s one of those rare books where every line seems weighted with significance. The title has a conscious nod to Thomas Mann (the last line of Death in Venice is its epigraph), and seems like a touch of attention-grabbing dramatics that this fantastic book really doesn’t need. - John Self
GERMANY in the Nineties has a surfeit of rampant ghosts from the past to deal with, and its people might well feel nostalgic for the Fifties. Those were the years not only of the Economic Miracle in the fledgling Federal Republic but also - according to Michael Hofmann, the translator of this remarkable Fifties novel - a time when the war-haunted Germans adopted an attitude of 'severance and disavowal' towards the past.
And then in 1954 came what proved to be his most disturbing, perhaps greatest achievement: Death in Rome (Der Tod in Rom), a dark, sardonic reworking of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Koeppen’s novel brings to the Eternal City a collection of emblematic German figures: the former Nazi gauleiter, now an arms-dealer for an African dictator; his brother-in-law, the civil servant who had only “followed orders”; the younger generation: a priest, a composer, an up-and-coming lawyer. All of these characters perform a dance of death among the ruins of an empire that had managed to last somewhat longer than the shortlived Thousand-Year Reich. - www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/prj/bkm/rev/aut/koe/enindex.htm
I usually say something here about (a) what I know about the author, and (b) how I came to read the book. Well in this case, the answer to (a) is easy: absolutely nothing. And (b) is split in two: I picked up the book some months ago because it was in the ‘booksellers’ recommendations’ shelves of my local Waterstone’s (stand up Susan Salters); but it would have lain unread in my pile if not for Andrew’s comments on Koeppen after my post on W.F. Hermans’ Beyond Sleep. So thank you Andrew. And now we can proceed.
Death in Rome (1954) was Koeppen’s fifth and final novel: he published two in the 1930s, and three in as many years in the 1950s, after which he published no more fiction until his death in 1996. OK, so I do know something about him, but I’m getting all this from the introduction by translator Michael Hofmann (whose name attached to a work in translation is almost a guarantor of quality). In fact the introduction was written when this English version was first published, in 1992; as a result Hofmann’s words have a touching quality to them: Koeppen is still alive as he writes, and Hofmann seems to hope for a break in his four-decade silence yet.
The novel describes the meeting of four members of the same family in Rome, and switches deftly between points of view in two long chapterless parts. It is dense but engrossing, and the changes in character which at first seem disorienting soon become invigorating. The only first person narrator is Siegfried Pfaffrath (“an absurd name, I know”), a composer who is waiting to attend the performance of his first major work. But this event in the near future vies for attention in Siegfried’s mind with his past: “Why don’t I use a pseudonym? I have no idea. Is it the hated name clinging to me, or do I cling to it? Will my family not let go of me?”
No, they won’t: his father, Friedrich, is also in Rome; he held office under the Nazi regime but is now a democratically elected official. His wife Anna and her sister Eva are there too, and Eva’s husband Judejahn. Judejahn is the monster of the novel, an unrepentant Nazi, who has nothing but contempt for his brother-in-law Friedrich, “who in his opinion was an asshole.” Central to understanding Judejahn is that “in Hitler’s service [he] became respectable, he made it, he put on weight, he got fancy-sounding titles,” and so his attachment to the regime is as much personal as political. Judejahn cannot bear to recall the boy he was before, and his forename Gottlieb (“a ridiculous, unmanly name … priestly slime left on him by the schoolmaster his father, and he didn’t want to love God”) is used as a marker of his past haunting him. The present isn’t looking as good as it used to either:
He crossed the square and reached the Via Condotti, panting. The pavement was narrow. People squeezed together in the busy shopping street, squeezed in front of the shop windows, squeezed past each other. Judejahn jostled and was jostled back. He didn’t understand. He was surprised that no one made way for him, that no one got out of his road.
Koeppen, a critic of postwar German complacency, expends much of his energy on the character of Judejahn, sometimes to the detriment of Friedrich and the female characters who are occasionally voiced. He leaves no aspect of Judejahn’s character unexplored, revealing that the child in him, the Gottlieb, remains still as he reflects that he “had tasted power, but in order to enjoy it, he required it to be limited, he required the Führer as an embodiment and visible god of power … He was afraid it might be discovered that he was just little Gottlieb going around in boots too big for him.”
The fourth character in the square is Judejahn’s son, named of course Adolf, who has betrayed his father by becoming a priest. He has concerns about his Church’s past association with the Nazi regime.
Did salvation lie in renunciation, in flight, in solitude, was the hermit the only prototype of survival? But the solitary man always seemed a figure of weakness to Adolf, because Adolf needed support, because he was afraid of himself; he required community, even though he doubted its worth.
Like father, like son. The characters together provide a convincing dialogue on the direction of post-war Germany, which is all the more impressive when we consider that the book was written when the marks of war were still fresh in all memories. There are personal considerations too which come to light; the scene is set for surprising revelations and a dramatic, if not so surprising, conclusion.
Death in Rome delights not just in its psychology but its fine writing too – family conversation is “twittering swallows of small talk” – and in its occasionally unconventional narrative conceits, from stream-of-consciousness to switching viewpoint in mid-sentence. It’s one of those rare books where every line seems weighted with significance. The title has a conscious nod to Thomas Mann (the last line of Death in Venice is its epigraph), and seems like a touch of attention-grabbing dramatics that this fantastic book really doesn’t need. - John Self
GERMANY in the Nineties has a surfeit of rampant ghosts from the past to deal with, and its people might well feel nostalgic for the Fifties. Those were the years not only of the Economic Miracle in the fledgling Federal Republic but also - according to Michael Hofmann, the translator of this remarkable Fifties novel - a time when the war-haunted Germans adopted an attitude of 'severance and disavowal' towards the past.
Wolfgang Koeppen, The Hothouse. Trans. by Michael Hofmann, W. W. Norton, 2002.
"A recovered masterpiece....Remarkable as a sidelong, searing appraisal of the legacy of the Nazi years."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
A masterpiece by a writer long neglected in America, The Hothouse created a literary stir when it appeared in hardcover. Evoking comparisons to works by James Joyce and Malcolm Lowry, it traces the final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of post-World War II German politics and grieving after the sudden death of his wife. With a passionate, despairing voice, Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996), whom Gunter Grass once called the "greatest living German writer," creates a portrait of idealism crushed by political and personal compromise.The first English translation of an important German novel, first published in 1953, whose pointillist complexity offers a searing image of postwar Germany on the perilous threshold of partition and possible rearmament.
Virtually forgotten today, Koeppen (1906–96) was an expatriate member of the literary generation immediately preceding that of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, whose self-exile from Hitler’s Germany made him a prophet without honor in the country to which he returned after the war, living out the rest of his long life in undeserved obscurity. Though he published nothing after 1954, Koeppen is remembered for the so-called “Postwar Trilogy” that includes (his previously translated novels) Pigeons on the Grass and Death in Rome—and the present one: a meticulously observed chronicle of the last two days in the life of Keetenheuve, a Socialist Peace Party member of the Bundestag (Parliament) who, despairing over his countrymen’s amoral consumerism and reflexive drift toward militarism, finds he cannot survive in the “hothouse” atmosphere of Bonn, a capitol city sunk in the mire of getting and spending. Most of the story is keyed to Keetenheuve’s tormented psyche, and Koeppen produces numerous spectacular stream-of-consciousness passages—notably, the account of a long stroll through Bonn’s crowded mean streets, which triggers the bitter (and inevitable) hallucinatory ending. But The Hothouse isn’t hermetic: its flexible structure gracefully accommodates flashbacks illuminating its protagonist’s neglect of his weak-willed young wife, equally guilt-ridden love-hate relationship with his culture, and complex relations with colleagues who embody a spectrum of allegiance and resistance to the lingering phenomenon of Hitler’s “revolution.” This rich brew of history and psychological portraiture, further seasoned by subtle allusions to Teutonic myth and literature, is made fully accessible by Hofmann’s fluent, resourceful translation.
A rediscovered masterpiece. Norton is reissuing Koeppen’s Death in Rome to accompany it. Let’s hope a new edition of Pigeons on the Grass will follow soon thereafter. - Kirkus Reviews
Similar virtuosity marks the beginning of Koeppen’s next novel, The Hothouse (Das Treibhaus) of 1953. This somewhat simpler tale of two days in the life (and death) of a bumbling, well-intentioned politician in Bonn begins with Keetenheuve, the politician, approaching the capital on the spanking-new Nibelung Express as the wheels sing “Wagalaweia, wagalaweia”, the song of Wagner’s Rhinemaidens at the beginning of Das Rheingold. Once again outrage and dismay greeted Koeppen’s unflinching gaze at the wondrous new Germany that had risen from the ruins of the old.
- www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/prj/bkm/rev/aut/koe/enindex.htm
Between 1951 and 1954, Wolfgang Koeppen published three scathing, disillusioned novels ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany. At the time, perhaps as many as 80 per cent of public officials, including many judges and senior civil servants, were former members of the Nazi Party. Most people didn’t want to be reminded of this and when The Hothouse was published in 1953, one review carried the headline: ‘Not to be touched with a barge-pole’. The novels have come to be known as a trilogy, although they are united only in their concern to expose the residual effects of Nazism and the war on German society. Tauben im Gras (Pigeons on the Grass), the first of the three, is set in Munich on a single day and its 105 short fragments reveal the failure of more than thirty characters to face up to reality. The last to be published was Death in Rome, which examined the emotional and intellectual legacy of the Nazi period in two German families who meet again in Rome after the war.[1]1 The Hothouse, the middle volume, is set in Bonn. It covers the last two days in the life of a disillusioned politician called Keetenheuve, who became a member of the Bundestag after returning from exile at the end of the war with high hopes for the newly created Federal Republic.
As the book opens, Keetenheuve is on his way back to Bonn from his wife’s funeral. She died from an overdose, but he believes that his neglect killed her: he spent his evenings attending to his political paperwork and was frequently away at conferences and meetings. He comes to the conclusion that these attempts to change Germany for the better are useless, that his wife’s love represented his one chance at a different, successful life. The Christian Democrat slogan ‘Keine Experimente’ encapsulates the 1950s wish to damp down any desire for radical change and Keetenheuve’s frustration with this conservatism is made clear when he attends a committee meeting to discuss new housing for miners. The flats – standard apartment blocks – are to be built in the ‘Nazi idiom’, by architects who also worked for the Fascists. Keetenheuve hates the scheme: it was exactly this kind of housing, he believes, that produced an environment in which the everyday became so repellent that ‘many went gladly to fight because they hated the daily grind, because they couldn’t stand their tight lives any more, and because, with all its terrors, war represented escape and freedom, the possibility of travel, the possibility of withdrawal, the possibility of living in Rothschild’s villa.’ Instead of saying any of this, however, he starts to daydream about ‘Corbusier machines-for-living, contemporary castles, an entire city in a single high-rise, with artificial roof gardens, artificial climate control’. He thinks about ‘the possibility of insulating man from excesses of heat and cold, of freeing him . . . from “ domestic squabbles and noise’. He sits through the meeting without saying a word, sure that the other committee members ‘would think his tower was a tower of Babel’. - Alexander Scrimgeour
The malaise of mid-century Germany and the early stirrings of disgust at the smooth machinations of postwar politics are startlingly fresh and vivid in this tour de force originally published in Germany in 1953 and only now translated into English. Koeppen (1906–1996) has been championed over the years by such luminaries as Günter Grass, Max Frisch and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and their faith in this novel and the two that with it make up a loose trilogy (Pigeons on the Grass and Death in Rome) proves to be amply justified. Set over the course of two stormy August days in Bonn in the early 1950s, where the German Parliament is meeting alongside the Rhine, the novel follows the actions and deliberations of a member of the socialist opposition party. Brooding over his young wife's recent death, the once-idealistic Keetenheuve struggles to renew in himself a sense of purpose. He left the country in the 1930s, disgusted by Nazi rule, and returned only after the war. As a result, he observes his colleagues with weary detachment, amazed at their ability to recover from dubious wartime activity—"back at the center, eight years previously one had been in Nuremberg, eight years before that one had also been in Nuremberg"—but also with a certain outsider's wistfulness. As an important vote approaches, he must decide: will he speak up once more for peace and justice, or will he resign himself to some darker fate? Gloom pervades these pages, lighted from within by the fireworks of Koeppen's dazzling prose, rich with allusions to classical and German literature and masterfully translated by Hofmann. Almost eerily contemporary in its concerns, and remarkable as a sidelong, searing appraisal of the legacy of the Nazi years, it is a recovered masterpiece. - Publishers Weekly
You ought to realize,'' a British officer tells a startled Stephen Spender in ''European Witness'' -- an account of Spender's mission to see what was left of intellectual life on the Continent in the autumn of 1945 -- that the Christian Democrat Party is a large-scale Catholic racket in Cologne. The whole administration is corrupt.'' The only other party, the Social Democrats, he avers, ''are too honest to get anywhere.''
Keetenheuve, the politician hero of Wolfgang Koeppen's novel ''The Hothouse,'' a masterpiece of German fiction published in 1953, is a Social Democrat Honest Joe, too honest to be an effective member of the Bundestag. Oppressed by institutional life, the ghastly persistence of Nazi jargon and what some Germans called demokratur (elective dictatorship under the tutelage of Konrad Adenauer), he keeps reminding himself that he is really a ''reader and devotee of contemporary poetry.'' Having weathered the war years in England, he has come back, with a modicum of hope, to a Germany of gutted cities and displaced people: ''The end of the war had made him somewhat optimistic, and he thought it was right that he should now devote himself to a cause, having been a marginal figure for so long.'' Unfortunately for Keetenheuve, he has been in the wings too long to adapt to the behemoth of realpolitik. No sooner does he stand up to speak than he is struck by the pointlessness of what he is saying. When he sits in committee he can't follow the language. ''What were they speaking in? Chinese? It was committee German. It was a language he knew!'' He lacks equivocation and vanity, feeling himself to be a ''grain of salt, the germ of unrest in their bland and sluggish porridge of a party, a man of conscience and thereby an irritant.'' The hothouse is Bonn, Germany's capital until very recently; it is the novel's other protagonist, with its ''parliamentary ghetto,'' press pack, wine bars, executive offices and bridge over the sluggish Rhine. Chosen as a capital at the behest of Adenauer, Germany's first democratic chancellor, it was, as one early reviewer of this novel observed, ''the most arbitrarily designated capital city in Europe.'' ''Even the storms seemed to be man-made here, an artificial entertainment in the restoration businesses of Fatherland & Sons Inc.,'' Koeppen writes. Keetenheuve's colleagues -- Mergentheim, a Nazi fellow traveler; Korodin, a prophecy-scouring Christian; and Knurrewahn, his party boss, ''who dreamed of becoming the man of reunification (a common enough dream)'' -- play the clowns to his Hamlet. (The Nazis integrated Shakespeare into their propaganda machine; some of his plays were performed more often in the Third Reich than any German classic.) Like his model, Keetenheuve responds largely to offstage insinuation and third parties: the 20,000 Hitler-adoring newsreel faces -- Do you want total war? Yeah yeah yeah'' -- he watches with detached revulsion in a cinema just happen to be the number of men who, Hamlet says, would die in Fortinbras's war, for ''a fantasy and trick of fame.'' At party headquarters, knives are out for him. An ambassador's post to Guatemala is offered as bait. ''It might be his salvation, the chance to grow old.'' But he doesn't take it. He addresses Parliament, knowing the stenographers who type his speech won't remember a word of it. In a nightmarish ending he has a weird tryst with a Salvation Army girl called Lena. He walks to the bridge over the Rhine: ''The delegate was utterly useless, he was a burden to himself, and a leap from the bridge set him free.'' Koeppen's novel stands at the beginning of the economic miracle, a few years after the new Federal Republic had been incorporated into the Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of today's European Union. In 1952, Ludwig Erhard, the finance minister, introduced the social market economy, a blend of paternalism and economic growthmanship. People wanted goods, not gods. Wooden language was the tribute. This was the era of state planning, egalitarianism and Keynesian economics. It needed a pliable human substrate and got it in the form of Unesco Man -- the idea that aggression and desire could be ''mollified.'' (Having told Spender in European Witness'' about plans for reconstruction, Adenauer terminated the interview with the telling phrase, ''The imagination has to be provided for.'') The ideal Keetenheuve clings to is individual freedom; his vision is beyond social utility and, in the end, incompatible with egalitarianism. The much-vaunted ''consensus'' society, he notices, is absolutist in spirit, since it credits itself with total rectitude. ''If you looked at the blueprints, it was the Nazi idiom they were still building in, and if you looked at the names of the architects, it was the Nazi architects who were still working.'' No wonder ''The Hothouse'' created a furor: it rehearses all the arguments against business as usual -- the same ones advanced in 1968, when the legitimacy of postwar society was repudiated by its offspring. Koeppen (1906-96) had an odd life and career that, perhaps because of its stops and starts (not all of his own making), failed to swell into what should have been a reputation as a novelist of the first rank. A journalist for left-wing papers in Weimar Berlin, he left the country when the Nazis came to power in 1933: unlike Keetenheuve, Koeppen went to the Netherlands. Remarkably, he returned to Berlin in 1939, and spent the war years writing scripts for Universum-Film AG, better known as UFA (the German film production company that groomed Ernst Lubitsch and produced Fritz Lang's ''Metropolis''). Koeppen once said that his scripts were just good enough to keep him in a job, but not good enough to get filmed. Apart from two novels before the war and a Holocaust memoir that he ghostwrote just after it (Jakob Littner's ''Notes From a Hole in the Ground,'' a book that caused controversy when re-released as a novel under Koeppen's own name in 1992), it is for the trilogy written in the 50's that Koeppen will be remembered, the last book of which, ''Death in Rome'' (1954) has already been translated by Michael Hofmann. ''The Hothouse'' is essentially cinematic. It is what Nietzsche called monologic art, a rejection of naturalism and mimetic effects. Its jittery style derives as much from a poem like Gottfried Benn's ''Monolog'' as from any novel of its time, for example when the wheels of Keetenheuve's train (''the Nibelungen Express'') farcically stutter over the Rhine Maidens' chant ''Wagalaweia.'' Italic type is interpolated into the flicker of consciousness like captions in silent movies, underscoring the division between Keetenheuve's cool observations of his careerist colleagues and his sense of failure: his memory has gone AWOL. (Indeed, a politician hero who translates Baudelaire in his office suggests Koeppen is enacting his own predicament rather too closely: the tradition of the solipsistic artist alienated from society is a long one in German literature.) Filmic scenes of towns with their neatly stacked rubble shift abruptly to close-ups of Keetenheuve's wife, Elke, a gauleiter's daughter, who dies as the novel begins. Keetenheuve moves in a circle of purgatory, and his punishment is unreality. Perhaps his sin is falling victim to the democratic illusion that there can be such a thing as government by the people: the many are always governed by the few. Politics has to be based on policy. And if few good poems or novels ever get written about politicians, W. H. Auden once suggested why: a poem in the image of a political democracy would be ''formless, windy, banal and utterly boring.'' (Conversely, the Thousand Year Reich was an attempt to turn politics into a heroic epic.) Lucidity and idealism condemn Keetenheuve to isolation, and his sense of individuality contracts to the only freedom left to him: suicide. Overwhelmed by the impersonality of politics, refusing the consolations of what Heinrich Böll called ''keeping your superiority feeling fresh in a refrigerator of irony,'' his final act closes as neatly on itself as an aphorism by Adorno: rebuilding a culture implies its negation. In his introduction, Hofmann says no book he has translated has given him more pleasure to work on than Koeppen's novels. And none of Hofmann's translations have given me greater pleasure to read than ''The Hothouse.'' Translator and novel are perfectly matched, and Hofmann's mid-Atlantic English has all the kinetic qualities of Koeppen's ''hammering parlando.'' He extemporizes brilliantly -- gigalith'' for ''riesenbau'' and ''village scuttlebutt'' for ''dorfklatsch'' -- and even corrects Koeppen in one passage: ambassadors to Britain present their credentials at St. James's Palace, not Downing Street. - Iain Bamforth
Journalist and author Timothy Garton Ash enthused about Germany in a recent essay on the Oscar winning film The Lives of Others saying that, "No nation has been more brilliant, more persistent, and more innovative in the investigation, communication, and representation—the re-presentation, and re-re-presentation—of its own past evils." I was reminded of these words while reading The Hothouse by German novelist Wolfgang Koeppen. It is a little difficult to summarise but there is no mistaking the accusation underlying the disjointed and disconnected montage of images, thoughts and sense impressions which form the bulk of the book i.e. Germany after the war was in a hurry to "move on." Blinded by the "economic miracle" of the post war boom and the contingencies of a nascent cold war realpolitik, the Germans had enveloped themselves in a collective act of willful amnesia.
At the start of the novel Keetenheuve, the middle aged politician and a member of the Bundestag (the German parliament) has just arrived in Bonn to attend a party meeting. His wife has died recently and he seems to be deeply depressed and grieving, even though his relationship with his wife were not so good. He sees the meeting as a final chance to do something for the country and for himself; a way of finally doing something about the "mild futility of his existence." He doesn't succeed in doing anything about it though. Over the course of the next two days the novel charts the process of his mental collapse and psychological dissolution. He feels alienated among the politicians who are more interested in their respective career than real politics. Nobody is interested in mourning the past, everybody is in a hurry to move on and start afresh. He is further oppressed by the willful blindness of everybody to the continuation of the Nazi legacy. He feels the presence of a "Nazi idiom" in the design of the new buildings representing the so-called new Germany. The wheels of the train remind him of Wagner. There are many other similar references to Nazism throughout the novel. It is clear that he is transposing his inner life on to his surroundings and that the basic problem is that of psychology, rather than politics. What he wants is some kind of collective mourning for the past. This inability to mourn, as Freud suggested too in his essay "Mourning and Melancholia," can result in serious psychological consequences. An indeed the novel ends in as gloomy manner as it can be imagined.
This need for "collective mourning" was a theme that W.G. Sebald also returned to again and again in his novels. In his essay "On the Natural History of Destruction" he explicitly criticised the post-war Trummerliteratur literary movement ("literature of the ruins") for its failure to tackle, or indeed in perpetuating the collective amnesia about the recent past. In the essay he was talking specifically about the German victims of allied firebombings of German cities but in his fiction too, he always returns to this theme again and again, and most often victims of Germans. Michael Hofmann in his introduction says that this (and his other two novels on the same subject) were not received favourably by the mainstream literary establishment which was in the favour of "new start" and "clean slate" school of writing. Koeppen lived long but wrote very little mainly as a result of this. Though later he was eulogised by Gunter Grass and Marcel Reich-Ranicki as one of the greatest of post-war German writers. (In fact in Ranicki's autobiography the chapter on Koeppen stands out conspicuously because he rarely has anything nice to say about any of his contemporary authors.)
The Hothouse is often very difficult to follow. It is written in the style of an unbroken stream of consciousness and the disjointed, fragmented prose style takes some time getting into. There were also many references to German politics and culture which escaped me at many places. And as my summary above would have indicated, it is also very, very gloomy. In fact it is downright claustrophobic and oppressive. Reading these German books I was also thinking about how much unhappiness these Germans have brought into this world, both for themselves and for others. But that's a subject for another post. A couple of reviews from the new york times and TLS. There is also a nice introduction by Michael Hofmann who also translated it. - marcelproust.blogspot.com/2007/05/wolfgang-koeppen-hothouse.html
Wolfgang Koeppen, Journey through America, Trans. by Michael Kimmage. Berghahn Books, 2012.
read it at Google Books
Amerikafahrt by Wolfgang Koeppen is a masterpiece of observation, analysis, and writing, based on his 1958 trip to the United States. A major twentieth-century German writer, Koeppen presents a vivid and fascinating portrait of the US in the late 1950s: its major cities, its literary culture, its troubled race relations, its multi-culturalism and its vast loneliness, a motif drawn, in part, from Kafka's Amerika. A modernist travelogue, the text employs symbol, myth, and image, as if Koeppen sought to answer de Tocqueville's questions in the manner of Joyce and Kafka. Journey through America is also a meditation on America, intended for a German audience and mindful of the destiny of postwar Europe under many Americanizing influences.
IN THE SPRING of 1958, the West German novelist Wolfgang Koeppen came to see America. His sightseeing tour took him from New York to Los Angeles and back, with stops along the way in New Orleans, Salt Like City, Chicago, Boston, and other cities and towns. And like so many European writers before him—from Tocqueville on down—he sought to turn his hastily gathered impressions into a book that would do nothing less than explain the essence of America, that envied, admired, feared, and hated civilization, to the Old World. Now his moody travelogue, Amerikafahrt, has been translated into English for the first time, by the wide-ranging scholar Michael Kimmage, as “Journey through America.” To an American, reading it is like being plunged into a fever dream, in which recognizable places and people are distorted into demons—and also, sometimes, into angels. For the fascination of Koeppen’s book is that these two visions of America, as a peaceable, multicultural Heaven and an acquisitive, conformist Hell, never quite manage to cancel one another out.
The greatest difference between those earlier travel writers (Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, Dickens, etc.) and Koeppen is that he is visiting America not as a disdainful visitor from a self-declared higher civilization, but as an emissary of a defeated and occupied country. The opening pages of Journey through America are a little prose poem of postwar Europe, where American hegemony is benevolent yet inescapable, and therefore inevitably a little menacing:
Four-star generals on the Champs Elysees, radio reports from the Pentagon, the banner of the Atlantic alliance in the friendly forest of Marly-le-Roi, dead the Christian Kings, magisterial the speeches from the President in the White House; urbi et orbi; speeches broadcasting from towers, fear and hope disseminated in the radio news hours, the Marshall Plan's good money, the solid dollar for undeveloped regions...
Koeppen had come to fame a few years earlier as the author of a series of novels excoriating Germany, in both its Nazi and Federal Republic incarnations; he was no apologist for his country, and in principle he finds much to admire in America. But he is weighed down by a long tradition of European fantasy about America—above all, by Franz Kafka’s Amerika, in which the Statue of Liberty’s torch is replaced with a menacing sword. Koeppen is constantly on the lookout for the Kafkaesque, and so of course he always finds it: stepping off the boat into a customs hall, he feels “the hall was America and it was as if Franz Kafka from Prague had imagined it, a room with such a swinging ceiling, with such a wide vastness that it dissolved into itself and seemed entirely unreal.”This sense of unreality haunts Koeppen throughout his journey. America is massively, undeniably there, yet in what seems like an act of psychological revenge or resistance, he is forever wishing it away, seeing its presence as an illusion, a foretaste of absence: “The city of New York, as it stretched itself out in the morning mist, a theater prop made from steel, cement and glass and old stone walls as well, suggested a house of cards and inspired thoughts of storms which might be brewing far away.” The reality underlying this fantasy is, of course, the Cold War, then at its height, and Koeppen—who had previously written a travelogue about the Soviet Union—is haunted in Chicago by fleeting visions of nuclear apocalypse:
An excited police siren sounded far away from me, then it was everywhere, I was surrounded by them, and planes invisible from my standpoint howled and buzzed overhead; the great air parade had begun, and on this street, belonging to dead things that till now had been quiet, I was in the middle of the coming war. I gathered that no fire escape, no firewall, no police car would save me ... I knew I was powerless, I could do nothing to prevent this destiny. No man could have. Man had been condemned from the beginning, and the little, holiday-quiet street in Chicago shouted out this truth to me.
Is there, in such a vision, some desire to inflict on America, in imagination, the kind of devastation it had actually inflicted on Germany? Certainly there is a kind of aggression in the way Koeppen describes Americans, which frequently involves attributing to them feelings of nullity and angst on what seems like no concrete grounds. In a small southwestern town, for instance, Koeppen muses, “What else could one do on an evening in Winslow other than be afraid of oneself?” Washington D.C. is said to be “no solid homeland, it was accidentally jumbled together and damned by God.” In a burlesque theater, Koeppen gets “a heavy sense of loneliness here, the special American loneliness, which Americans feared and which they hated.”All these judgments are not based on any conversation with actual Americans; as a fast-moving tourist, Koeppen seems to have had few chances to cultivate such relationships. They are, transparently, projections of the America he brought with him, a land of mistrust and alienation, too big for its people. The strange thing is that they are being projected onto a country which is actually, when Koeppen lets his observations peek through his projections, full of friendly abundance. Never is this clearer than when he visits Los Angeles, the favorite butt of European (and American) visitors. Koeppen rehearses some of the familiar tropes: the kitsch architecture, the spiritual fads, the cult of healthy living. Yet he is also deeply struck by the multiculturalism of the city, the way white and black and Mexican and Japanese Americans seem to live peacefully together:
The eternal sunshine, the warm air, which wasn’t damp, the desire for mixing and perhaps the forefathers’ efforts to reach these happy coasts as well, had brought forth a new race, which was only to be recognized still as black, yellow, or white in origin, but no longer distinguished from one another in their life’s joy; they had all grown bigger, more straight, more self-confident than their ancestors in the distant, forgotten or damned homeland, and what most amazed and delighted me was that they tolerated one another, they looked at each other in friendship.
This idyll is perhaps as superficial as Koeppen’s nightmare visions, but for a man who had lived through Nazism, the spectacle of racial harmony had a powerful, almost magical allure. Everywhere he goes in the United States, Koeppen is drawn to black neighborhoods, and writes about African Americans with a kind of friendly exoticism. (He is more ambivalent about American women, who he tends to divide into two classes: the young and beautiful, for whom he has an appreciative eye, and the primly respectable, who he mocks as “flowerbed women,” after their decorated hats.) Jazz music and black churches are among the high points of his trip, as are the University of California in Berkeley—astonishing in its wealth and resources—and the Capitol Building—guilelessly open to all citizens who want to visit. Practically the only truly frightening thing Koeppen finds in the United States is, oddly enough, Billy Graham, whose revival-meeting antics remind him of Hitler's demagogy. It is another reminder that Koeppen is seeing America through German and European eyes, and that “Journey through America” is less significant as a document of reality than as a major writer’s running fantasia on American themes. - Adam Kirsch
At the height of the Cold War the United States government made a concerted effort to attract European intellectuals to the "American Way of Life." In 1958 the US State Department invited the great writer Wolfgang Koeppen to travel across the US - at the expense of US taxpayers. The result was a fascinating travelogue, originally intended for German radio, but later published as Amerikafahrt.
Although this was Koeppen's first trip to America, it was really a homecoming, since he had traveled to America so often in his mind. Koeppen read all the American writers, but his image of America was perhaps shaped most by a writer who never set foot on US shores - Franz Kafka with his early novel Amerika. Koeppen had encountered American GIs in US-occupied Munich. And his postwar masterpiece - Tauben im Gras ("Pigeons in the Grass") - was Koeppen's reckoning with America. Or, rather, with the America of his imagination.
Koeppen arrived in New York Harbor on an ocean liner, and, setting foot on American soil, is overcome with a sense of homecoming, but also a strong feellng of freedom:
Ich stand in New York. Ich hatte dies oft geträumt, und es war nun wie ein Traum; und wie im Traum gab es kiene Fremde. Ich war auch hier zu Hause, und Amerika lag vor mir wie ein fester Besitz. Ich spürte Freiheit. Ich empfand Freiheit. Die Freiheit war der Wind.
In New York, Koeppen is in his element. He feels a special affinity to the city and its people. Later he often told friends that he wished he could spend an entire year living in New York and writing. Alas, that never happened, but Koeppen did manage to return to the city he loved several times, including one last visit in 1987 shortly before he died. I consider myself a New Yorker, but it is wonderful to see the city through the eyes of a modernist genius. Koeppen explored every corner of Manhattan, and even ventured to the other boroughs. Koeppen's writing made me nostalgic for a place that has largely vanished. Today Times Square is a sanitized Disney Land East for tourists, but in Amerikafahrt 42nd St. lives in all its past seedy glory - the peep shows, the greasy spoons, the human spectacle are all here. (Im Tageslicht glich der Broadway hier der Hamburger Reeperbahn, bevor am Abend die Lichter des Vergnügens angehen und die Mädchen sich geschminkt haben).
Koeppen leaves the Manhattan of John Dos Passos and travels south to the Washington DC of Walt Whitman and LIncoln, then by train to the Deep South of William Faulkner. In New Orleans he searches without success for the jazz of his youth - but it has disappeared. He then travels west through the desert to Los Angeles, where he peaks behind Hollywood's facade. Then on to San Francisco, back east through Upton SInclair's cattle yards and slaughter houses in Chicago, then a brief visit in staid and European Boston, and finally back to New York - where he flies back to Germany.
Koeppen was fascinated by race relations in the US - one of the central themes of Tauben im Gras. In 1958, the civil rights movement hadn't really gathered steam, but Koeppen coud sense that change was in the air. Everywhere he went he sought out black people - in black churches, black cemeteries, black diners, black waiting rooms in southern train stations. He felt completely at home in Harlem, In Chicago he met with the CEO of Ebony Magazine. He wrote about his feelings has his train enters the Deep South:
Wir waren in die dunklen Staaten der Rassentrennung gekommen. Wartesäle, Speiseräume für diese oder jene Haut, Pervertierungen der menschlichen Würde...
Whenever possible, Koeppen would sit in the "Colored" sections, knowing he could get away with it as a "dumb tourist".
The other aspect of America that Koeppen captures so brilliantly in Amerikafahrt it the sense of loneliness that pervades so much of American society. We catch glimpses of Edward Hopper's America from the train, as it passes through small towns, or on Broadway in mid-town Manhattan, or even with the Beats that Koeppen finds in San Francisco. Here is Koeppen at a strip club in Washington DC - a stone's throw from the Capitol building:
Man konnte glauben, mit dem Wesen, das sich da mit starrem Lächeln anbot, allein zu sein, allein mit dem Mädchen, das man für seine Träume kaufte. Wieder war hier stark die Einsamkeit zu spüren, die besondere amerikanishe Einsamkeit, vor der sich Amerikaner fürchten und die sie hassen.
(One could pretend to be alone with the creature, who offered herself with the fixed smile, to be alone with the girl that one could buy for his fantasies. Eveb here there was a strong sense of loneliness, that certain American loneliness that Americans both fear and hate. )
I have some good news for English readers: in August 2012 Berghan books will be releasing an English translation of Wolfgang Koeppen's Amerikafahrt (Journey Through America, translated by Michael Kimmage). I urge you to pick up a copy, along with Pigeons on the Grass. - www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2012/07/review-wolfgang-koeppens-amerikafahrt.html
Michael Hofmann on Wolfgang Koeppen:
In the winter of 1992, I visited Wolfgang Koeppen in his high gloomy cavernous apartment on the banks of Munich's green rushing river, the Isar, to give him a copy of my new translation of his novel, Death in Rome. Many things about that afternoon, which was dark when it began and soon turned into evening, might have been calculated to cause vertigo and bewilderment. I was there ostensibly to "interview" him, which was not something I'd ever done before. I had and have the deepest admiration for his writing—especially the so-called "post-war-trilogy" of Pigeons on the Grass (1951), The Hothouse (1953), and the book I had begun by translating, Death in Rome (1954—Koeppen was someone who wrote his books quickly and in little clusters, or not at all). It was all so long ago in his life, and before the beginning of mine—but what else was there to talk about? Death in Rome was and remained his last novel. Then there was Koeppen's age, he was in his mid-eighties, fifty years my senior: how to show respect and forbearance to such a man, and yet extract some information from him for the readers of the Observer? His long life was full of old mysteries. Uninquisitive and content with the books, I didn't know what they were: how he got through the War; the mystery of his writing and not-writing; his long, torturous marriage to a woman who when he married her was under-age—that was something else it certainly wouldn't have occurred to me to question him about. And yet here was someone who had haunted 1920s Berlin, the Romanisches Café and all—who spoke with real feeling for the lost decades of German-Jewish civilization, who, himself a young man in his twenties, claimed to have met Joseph Roth, whom I had also lately begun translating, and who had always seemed inconceivably remote to me, until I found myself sitting in the company of this man who had once been his younger colleague!
With my English reticence and youth, I met Koeppen halfway: in other words, we were both barely out of our shells. He was quietly plangent, courtly, a little dusty (literally, not in the sense of "dusty answer"), eerily patient. He gave me six hours of his time. I had a piece of paper on my knee, and tried to write down whatever struck me in what he said. Much of the time we must have been silent, some of it with me scribbling. What spoke to me was the décor, the stage-managed layout (Koeppen had a background in the theatre)—though he didn't show me round, and I of course didn't ask to be shown. A sense of dim rooms going off in two or three directions, each one with a writing table in it, each writing table equipped with a bright table-lamp and a typewriter, each typewriter with a piece of paper in it, scrolled half-down and written upon, everywhere a key practically in mid-stroke, mid-letter, mid-air. How could one man keep all these rooms and tables and typewriters happy? It suggested a kind of literary Jackson Pollock, hitting the ground, when at all, running. The appearance of an unremitting productiveness, a ghost factory, a grand alibi. If I had read it at the time, it might have reminded me of the scene in Koeppen's first novel, A Sad Affair (1934), in which Friedrich, his autobiographical hero, is set to work nights in a light bulb factory, replacing bulbs as they burn out in experimental circuits. Presumably, Koeppen would not have done much more than that, going the rounds of his sites of production, replacing the bulbs, feeding, depending on your point of view, a delicious refusal or a wretched hoax.
Because there were no novels after 1954. In 1958, 1959 and 1961—another cluster—there were three moody travel books about Russia, the USA and France (the American one was published last year in Michael Kimmage's translation). There were reviews, essays, occasional prose aplenty—but that, as a writer once said, I forget who, is the sort of writing that most writers don't usually think of as writing. And no novels. This was all the more troublesome as Koeppen in 1961 had been the subject of one of those expensive, long-running public transfers of a kind more apt to be associated with European footballers, where they are called "sagas": his publisher, Henry Goverts, went out of business, and Koeppen, with the kind of semi-dignified languid hustle that became his speciality, alerted half a dozen interested publishers, before finally moving to Suhrkamp, where Siegfried Unseld had just lately taken over the reins from the eponymous founder Peter Suhrkamp. Unseld worshipped Koeppen's writing, and soon fell thrall to his difficult personality as well (this is amply documented in their collected correspondence, published by Suhrkamp with the gorgeously, achingly literal title Ich bitte um ein Wort [A Word From You, Please] in 2006).
Initially all the signs were good: contracts were drawn up and signed, promising with brisk professionalism a play and two novels within two years. In 1962, Koeppen was awarded Germany's most important literary honour, the Büchner Prize. Unseld must have hugged himself for signing a great writer at the top of his game and in his best decade. Over the years Koeppen's backlist was acquired and re-jacketed by Suhrkamp: the post-war-trilogy, the travel books, the two early novels from the thirties. And the keenly awaited new book—the consummation of the deal—that was promised, mooted, announced, described in catalogues and face-to-face meetings, on occasion even read from. With the passage of time, it also (possibly) morphed identity, not just a moving target but a changing target: it involved Bismarck; it was to do with a masked ball; it was about the folk-hero and trickster Tyl Eulenspiegel; it was called Into the Dust with All the Enemies of Brandenburg; it was about the poet Tasso; it was set on a luxury liner. Unseld was in the role of a naturalist who was promised, one after the other, a unicorn, a yeti, a golden goose and a talking horse. And Koeppen? Well, he was always needy, apparently often on the brink of destitution, he had a difficult home life and where his productive morale was concerned he was disturbingly sensitive—but surely he was writing something, and he was negotiating in good faith?
The noli me tango between publisher/patron and silent, broody author went on for thirty-five years, till Koeppen's death. In the course of it Koeppen took the uncomplaining Unseld—a figure from Märchen, if not tragedy or sainthood—for tens, even hundreds of thousands in advances and retainers. A rhythm established itself: Koeppen intimated that he might like to go away somewhere, or that he was tempted by some sublunary offer of work, a journalistic piece for someone or other, something for the radio or television that was of course inopportune but given his circumstances irresistible. Thereupon Unseld would offer him money to go—or to stay—and apply himself to the phantom novel instead: perhaps all it took was an empty apartment in Manhattan. Koeppen would commit himself to a deadline, receive more money, endorse the deadline, be reminded of the deadline (usually it was so that a book might appear in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair of this or that year), miss the deadline, and go quiet, either from calculation or more probably shame. The correspondence, in the lovely term of one of the editors, Alfred Estermann, is an epistolary cosmos with many black holes. Probably there was always some little spark of hope on both sides that something might yet get written, or that Koeppen would finally permit a completed manuscript to emerge into the open. Unseld brought out deluxe editions of tiny opuscula of Koeppen's (and his dearly acquired backlist), while Koeppen's own stock in trade became first his silence, and then the discussion of the silence. German journalists beat a path to his door to ask him about it. It is both agonizing and shameless, coquettishness and torture, as here:
Interviewer: What are you most worried about at the moment?
Koeppen: "The Ship."
Interviewer: Is that a book?
Koeppen: 150 pages. But possibly, possibly! A book I've been working on for over a year, and can't seem to get anywhere with.
And so on. (There is a book of these too.) Surely, you think after reading a few of these, Koeppen has actually taken the hard way out: surely a novel, any novel, is easier than these unendurable questions and stricken answers, this mixture of over-obliging and prevarication. It's the opposite of a trap, or a trap in which the only party really to be caught and to suffer is the party setting it: a trap that bites itself. At its most reduced, artfully configured and psychologically expressive, it takes the form of a title page mocked up by Koeppen and depicted in Ich bitte um ein Wort: in the middle, the name of author, "Wolfgang Koeppen"; below, a descriptive subtitle, "My Life;" and near the top, the title, one word—though probably not the one Siegfried Unseld was craving for three decades—"No."
The one exception, the single oasis in thirty-five years of literary-commercial desert, the very last of the Sibylline books, is Jugend (Youth), which was first published in 1976 as number 500 in the iconic Bibliothek Suhrkamp series (there was really no limit to Unseld's generosity and thoughtfulness), when Koeppen turned seventy. "Dear Wolfgang," wrote the gallant Unseld as late as 1 July of that year, "I'm awaiting Youth every day, with the sort of intensity with which one only and always waits for youth." This time, for whatever reason, Koeppen didn't disappoint him. Perhaps it was that the book was in fifty-four separate sections, some of them written long before (he was like a baker, in the German saying, kneading his bread from crumbs)—but I don't want to interrogate its appearance, after wondering so long why nothing else appeared! I heard a story of Koeppen reading aloud from it, in my birthplace, Freiburg: he began, he read for a while, he paused, people left, he had a drink, he carried on, he paused again, more people left. By the end, he had read the whole thing, there was next to no one there, it was midnight, it must have been unforgettable. As Robert Lowell wrote, "genius hums the auditorium dead."
Here, Koeppen's characteristic "No" isn't confined to the title page, but suffused, dissolved throughout the book. What sort of "youth" is it in Youth? A second-generation illegitimate child, living alone with his mother who takes in boarders (one of whom makes her pregnant—it's the balloonist/ophthalmologist/anyone-for-tennis figure, one of the more marginal and absurd fathers in literature), and—not sewing—does sewing in the big houses. His experience comprises hunger, boredom, loneliness, punishment, discipline and fear. Have I omitted anything? Toward the end a little chaotic—and largely ineffectual—rebellion. His world contrives to be both claustrophobic and agoraphobic: little seems to come between him and the steely, striving, militaristic battery-farm of Wilhelmine Germany with its twin cults of cruelty and obedience. Whatever he does, whichever way he turns, he seems to encounter a main of power, the Prussian state embodied in teachers, policemen, officers, herring-sellers, pederasts, sadists, convicts, fraternity medical students, classmates, heiresses. The young Koeppen feels like one of those shrunken Beckmann figures who barely fit under an oppressively low ceiling in a chaotically full room: they are usually the ones being hanged or scourged or crucified. He goes around barefoot, in rags, a proto-dropout; the wags in the small town tell him to see a doctor—who will prescribe a haircut. He's friendless and in a minority—not just an autodidact, but a self-taught rebel, otherwise one might think the whole thing was fifty years later, in the 1960s, when rebellion was a sanctioned orthodoxy. When he goes into the city and witnesses a demonstration, he finds himself, so to speak, snubbed by the proletariat. The sailors don't want to know either. One might note that not one of the many institutions referred to in these few pages gets off intact: church, parliament, university, family, fraternity, army, police, law, hospital, school, theatre, feudal manor or small town; even the local cemetery turns out—small surprise there—to harbour corruption. The only things that seem to do well in this far from paradisal world are the snakes, literal and figurative.
But youth as in something to look back on with fondness, as in salad days and "fair seed-time had my soul," to wax nostalgic over? A time of pleasure, instruction, irresponsibility, secure in the pride and protection of family? Of winsome, attractive, promising growth and healthy experimentation? Hardly. It is hard to think of another book not just steeped but cat-drowned in poverty and perspectivelessness, lovelessness and universal disappointment as this Youth of Koeppen's—a sort of opposite of Cider with Rosie, if you like. Not that there is anything contrived or showy or larmoyant about it either. The young Koeppen glimpses the thing the soubrette is showing him in the window, and bravely toddles upstairs to claim it. There's no chance, is there, of his mother not taking it away?! Or later when he picks the lock of the bread-bin and scarfs their bread, or when he wastes the electricity by keeping a light on for himself. The pressure of society and of the history of the period—War, Revolution, Inflation, constant low-level political violence, provincialism,
the rise of the Nazi party—has garroted this youth. Nothing is exempt. There is no secret, protected pearl in this book, nothing kept in reserve, no recipe for survival, no self-complacent holy of holies. Sex—except as an expression of power, which he doesn't have—makes no sense to the young Koeppen (after all, how can something that produced him be in any way good?!). He lies chastely beside the young girl in the port of Stettin. Friendship is little short of hubris, an offence to the gods. The young salesman lodger takes him to the cinema for the first time; no wonder he is soon killed in battle. Ditto the communist friend, Lenz. Unforgettable, the son and his mother at night, hibernating: "[wondering] if we should play dead, ignore the summons, draw the curtains to keep out the town. We were a closed society of our own, on occasion stand-offish. We lay in our beds at right angles to each other, not sleeping. We did nothing but listen to the other's breathing; sensing it might stop at any moment, out of fury or fatigue." At a pinch, all there might be is books—and again, not lovingly gone into, but boiled down into one or two lists: books borrowed overnight from the bookshop, and returned in the morning.
Youth ends—this youth does, anyway—before sex and before foreign travel, the point at which the novels begin. It ends at the same place where Knut Hamsun's Hunger ends. Tried and found wanting for terrestrial existence. And then, in a final scene, we are given to understand his mother dies—at the age of only forty-four, in 1925. Koeppen is orphaned, and delivered into a profession that isn't really one, that he doesn't want or understand, with which—no pun intended—he can't cope. This character is like a younger, callower version of the adults and young adults who people the novels—just as Youth, in the oddest way, offers a kind of concordance to them: military cadets, red swimming trunks, boys' bare legs in shorts, a luminous unapproachable blonde, evening dress, beer (Koeppen disliked beer), gourmandise, Vehmic murders, the cinema, the theatre, his horror of a bourgeois public, the railway station and railway porters, the hotel, field-shovels and many other things besides had a role to play in the novels, and feature in Youth. When the Koeppen character is only a little older, he will become Friedrich in A Sad Affair, the romantic lead who runs everywhere and gets nowhere; or Philip in Pigeons on the Grass, an introverted man of letters in a time of spivs; or the neo-Quixote Keetenheuve, widower and failed MP in The Hothouse; or the younger generation of Germans in Death in Rome, Adolf Judejahn the Catholic priest, and his cousin Siegfried Pfaffrath, the gay atonal composer. He has nothing to teach them but dissidence, disobedience, disaffection. Ohne mich, he says in a slogan that—alas for Germany!—didn't become popular till the Sixties: include me out.
One of the points of Youth is this all-pervasive ugliness—objectively present, one feels, in the history and project of Prussia, as much as subjective. But one's sense, in reading it, is overwhelmingly of beauty. This is rapturous, sublimely willful, independent-minded, resourceful prose, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger declared, the most beautiful twentieth-century German prose. Whether a sentence is a beautifully landscaped torrent going on for several pages or a dumbly insolent "I was Germany's future" or one of Koeppen's patented "or maybe..." constructions, sidestepping into freedom, it is all scrupulously managed, supple, cadenced, sumptuously lexical, expressive prose.
With my English reticence and youth, I met Koeppen halfway: in other words, we were both barely out of our shells. He was quietly plangent, courtly, a little dusty (literally, not in the sense of "dusty answer"), eerily patient. He gave me six hours of his time. I had a piece of paper on my knee, and tried to write down whatever struck me in what he said. Much of the time we must have been silent, some of it with me scribbling. What spoke to me was the décor, the stage-managed layout (Koeppen had a background in the theatre)—though he didn't show me round, and I of course didn't ask to be shown. A sense of dim rooms going off in two or three directions, each one with a writing table in it, each writing table equipped with a bright table-lamp and a typewriter, each typewriter with a piece of paper in it, scrolled half-down and written upon, everywhere a key practically in mid-stroke, mid-letter, mid-air. How could one man keep all these rooms and tables and typewriters happy? It suggested a kind of literary Jackson Pollock, hitting the ground, when at all, running. The appearance of an unremitting productiveness, a ghost factory, a grand alibi. If I had read it at the time, it might have reminded me of the scene in Koeppen's first novel, A Sad Affair (1934), in which Friedrich, his autobiographical hero, is set to work nights in a light bulb factory, replacing bulbs as they burn out in experimental circuits. Presumably, Koeppen would not have done much more than that, going the rounds of his sites of production, replacing the bulbs, feeding, depending on your point of view, a delicious refusal or a wretched hoax.
Because there were no novels after 1954. In 1958, 1959 and 1961—another cluster—there were three moody travel books about Russia, the USA and France (the American one was published last year in Michael Kimmage's translation). There were reviews, essays, occasional prose aplenty—but that, as a writer once said, I forget who, is the sort of writing that most writers don't usually think of as writing. And no novels. This was all the more troublesome as Koeppen in 1961 had been the subject of one of those expensive, long-running public transfers of a kind more apt to be associated with European footballers, where they are called "sagas": his publisher, Henry Goverts, went out of business, and Koeppen, with the kind of semi-dignified languid hustle that became his speciality, alerted half a dozen interested publishers, before finally moving to Suhrkamp, where Siegfried Unseld had just lately taken over the reins from the eponymous founder Peter Suhrkamp. Unseld worshipped Koeppen's writing, and soon fell thrall to his difficult personality as well (this is amply documented in their collected correspondence, published by Suhrkamp with the gorgeously, achingly literal title Ich bitte um ein Wort [A Word From You, Please] in 2006).
Initially all the signs were good: contracts were drawn up and signed, promising with brisk professionalism a play and two novels within two years. In 1962, Koeppen was awarded Germany's most important literary honour, the Büchner Prize. Unseld must have hugged himself for signing a great writer at the top of his game and in his best decade. Over the years Koeppen's backlist was acquired and re-jacketed by Suhrkamp: the post-war-trilogy, the travel books, the two early novels from the thirties. And the keenly awaited new book—the consummation of the deal—that was promised, mooted, announced, described in catalogues and face-to-face meetings, on occasion even read from. With the passage of time, it also (possibly) morphed identity, not just a moving target but a changing target: it involved Bismarck; it was to do with a masked ball; it was about the folk-hero and trickster Tyl Eulenspiegel; it was called Into the Dust with All the Enemies of Brandenburg; it was about the poet Tasso; it was set on a luxury liner. Unseld was in the role of a naturalist who was promised, one after the other, a unicorn, a yeti, a golden goose and a talking horse. And Koeppen? Well, he was always needy, apparently often on the brink of destitution, he had a difficult home life and where his productive morale was concerned he was disturbingly sensitive—but surely he was writing something, and he was negotiating in good faith?
The noli me tango between publisher/patron and silent, broody author went on for thirty-five years, till Koeppen's death. In the course of it Koeppen took the uncomplaining Unseld—a figure from Märchen, if not tragedy or sainthood—for tens, even hundreds of thousands in advances and retainers. A rhythm established itself: Koeppen intimated that he might like to go away somewhere, or that he was tempted by some sublunary offer of work, a journalistic piece for someone or other, something for the radio or television that was of course inopportune but given his circumstances irresistible. Thereupon Unseld would offer him money to go—or to stay—and apply himself to the phantom novel instead: perhaps all it took was an empty apartment in Manhattan. Koeppen would commit himself to a deadline, receive more money, endorse the deadline, be reminded of the deadline (usually it was so that a book might appear in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair of this or that year), miss the deadline, and go quiet, either from calculation or more probably shame. The correspondence, in the lovely term of one of the editors, Alfred Estermann, is an epistolary cosmos with many black holes. Probably there was always some little spark of hope on both sides that something might yet get written, or that Koeppen would finally permit a completed manuscript to emerge into the open. Unseld brought out deluxe editions of tiny opuscula of Koeppen's (and his dearly acquired backlist), while Koeppen's own stock in trade became first his silence, and then the discussion of the silence. German journalists beat a path to his door to ask him about it. It is both agonizing and shameless, coquettishness and torture, as here:
Interviewer: What are you most worried about at the moment?
Koeppen: "The Ship."
Interviewer: Is that a book?
Koeppen: 150 pages. But possibly, possibly! A book I've been working on for over a year, and can't seem to get anywhere with.
And so on. (There is a book of these too.) Surely, you think after reading a few of these, Koeppen has actually taken the hard way out: surely a novel, any novel, is easier than these unendurable questions and stricken answers, this mixture of over-obliging and prevarication. It's the opposite of a trap, or a trap in which the only party really to be caught and to suffer is the party setting it: a trap that bites itself. At its most reduced, artfully configured and psychologically expressive, it takes the form of a title page mocked up by Koeppen and depicted in Ich bitte um ein Wort: in the middle, the name of author, "Wolfgang Koeppen"; below, a descriptive subtitle, "My Life;" and near the top, the title, one word—though probably not the one Siegfried Unseld was craving for three decades—"No."
The one exception, the single oasis in thirty-five years of literary-commercial desert, the very last of the Sibylline books, is Jugend (Youth), which was first published in 1976 as number 500 in the iconic Bibliothek Suhrkamp series (there was really no limit to Unseld's generosity and thoughtfulness), when Koeppen turned seventy. "Dear Wolfgang," wrote the gallant Unseld as late as 1 July of that year, "I'm awaiting Youth every day, with the sort of intensity with which one only and always waits for youth." This time, for whatever reason, Koeppen didn't disappoint him. Perhaps it was that the book was in fifty-four separate sections, some of them written long before (he was like a baker, in the German saying, kneading his bread from crumbs)—but I don't want to interrogate its appearance, after wondering so long why nothing else appeared! I heard a story of Koeppen reading aloud from it, in my birthplace, Freiburg: he began, he read for a while, he paused, people left, he had a drink, he carried on, he paused again, more people left. By the end, he had read the whole thing, there was next to no one there, it was midnight, it must have been unforgettable. As Robert Lowell wrote, "genius hums the auditorium dead."
Here, Koeppen's characteristic "No" isn't confined to the title page, but suffused, dissolved throughout the book. What sort of "youth" is it in Youth? A second-generation illegitimate child, living alone with his mother who takes in boarders (one of whom makes her pregnant—it's the balloonist/ophthalmologist/anyone-for-tennis figure, one of the more marginal and absurd fathers in literature), and—not sewing—does sewing in the big houses. His experience comprises hunger, boredom, loneliness, punishment, discipline and fear. Have I omitted anything? Toward the end a little chaotic—and largely ineffectual—rebellion. His world contrives to be both claustrophobic and agoraphobic: little seems to come between him and the steely, striving, militaristic battery-farm of Wilhelmine Germany with its twin cults of cruelty and obedience. Whatever he does, whichever way he turns, he seems to encounter a main of power, the Prussian state embodied in teachers, policemen, officers, herring-sellers, pederasts, sadists, convicts, fraternity medical students, classmates, heiresses. The young Koeppen feels like one of those shrunken Beckmann figures who barely fit under an oppressively low ceiling in a chaotically full room: they are usually the ones being hanged or scourged or crucified. He goes around barefoot, in rags, a proto-dropout; the wags in the small town tell him to see a doctor—who will prescribe a haircut. He's friendless and in a minority—not just an autodidact, but a self-taught rebel, otherwise one might think the whole thing was fifty years later, in the 1960s, when rebellion was a sanctioned orthodoxy. When he goes into the city and witnesses a demonstration, he finds himself, so to speak, snubbed by the proletariat. The sailors don't want to know either. One might note that not one of the many institutions referred to in these few pages gets off intact: church, parliament, university, family, fraternity, army, police, law, hospital, school, theatre, feudal manor or small town; even the local cemetery turns out—small surprise there—to harbour corruption. The only things that seem to do well in this far from paradisal world are the snakes, literal and figurative.
But youth as in something to look back on with fondness, as in salad days and "fair seed-time had my soul," to wax nostalgic over? A time of pleasure, instruction, irresponsibility, secure in the pride and protection of family? Of winsome, attractive, promising growth and healthy experimentation? Hardly. It is hard to think of another book not just steeped but cat-drowned in poverty and perspectivelessness, lovelessness and universal disappointment as this Youth of Koeppen's—a sort of opposite of Cider with Rosie, if you like. Not that there is anything contrived or showy or larmoyant about it either. The young Koeppen glimpses the thing the soubrette is showing him in the window, and bravely toddles upstairs to claim it. There's no chance, is there, of his mother not taking it away?! Or later when he picks the lock of the bread-bin and scarfs their bread, or when he wastes the electricity by keeping a light on for himself. The pressure of society and of the history of the period—War, Revolution, Inflation, constant low-level political violence, provincialism,
the rise of the Nazi party—has garroted this youth. Nothing is exempt. There is no secret, protected pearl in this book, nothing kept in reserve, no recipe for survival, no self-complacent holy of holies. Sex—except as an expression of power, which he doesn't have—makes no sense to the young Koeppen (after all, how can something that produced him be in any way good?!). He lies chastely beside the young girl in the port of Stettin. Friendship is little short of hubris, an offence to the gods. The young salesman lodger takes him to the cinema for the first time; no wonder he is soon killed in battle. Ditto the communist friend, Lenz. Unforgettable, the son and his mother at night, hibernating: "[wondering] if we should play dead, ignore the summons, draw the curtains to keep out the town. We were a closed society of our own, on occasion stand-offish. We lay in our beds at right angles to each other, not sleeping. We did nothing but listen to the other's breathing; sensing it might stop at any moment, out of fury or fatigue." At a pinch, all there might be is books—and again, not lovingly gone into, but boiled down into one or two lists: books borrowed overnight from the bookshop, and returned in the morning.
Youth ends—this youth does, anyway—before sex and before foreign travel, the point at which the novels begin. It ends at the same place where Knut Hamsun's Hunger ends. Tried and found wanting for terrestrial existence. And then, in a final scene, we are given to understand his mother dies—at the age of only forty-four, in 1925. Koeppen is orphaned, and delivered into a profession that isn't really one, that he doesn't want or understand, with which—no pun intended—he can't cope. This character is like a younger, callower version of the adults and young adults who people the novels—just as Youth, in the oddest way, offers a kind of concordance to them: military cadets, red swimming trunks, boys' bare legs in shorts, a luminous unapproachable blonde, evening dress, beer (Koeppen disliked beer), gourmandise, Vehmic murders, the cinema, the theatre, his horror of a bourgeois public, the railway station and railway porters, the hotel, field-shovels and many other things besides had a role to play in the novels, and feature in Youth. When the Koeppen character is only a little older, he will become Friedrich in A Sad Affair, the romantic lead who runs everywhere and gets nowhere; or Philip in Pigeons on the Grass, an introverted man of letters in a time of spivs; or the neo-Quixote Keetenheuve, widower and failed MP in The Hothouse; or the younger generation of Germans in Death in Rome, Adolf Judejahn the Catholic priest, and his cousin Siegfried Pfaffrath, the gay atonal composer. He has nothing to teach them but dissidence, disobedience, disaffection. Ohne mich, he says in a slogan that—alas for Germany!—didn't become popular till the Sixties: include me out.
One of the points of Youth is this all-pervasive ugliness—objectively present, one feels, in the history and project of Prussia, as much as subjective. But one's sense, in reading it, is overwhelmingly of beauty. This is rapturous, sublimely willful, independent-minded, resourceful prose, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger declared, the most beautiful twentieth-century German prose. Whether a sentence is a beautifully landscaped torrent going on for several pages or a dumbly insolent "I was Germany's future" or one of Koeppen's patented "or maybe..." constructions, sidestepping into freedom, it is all scrupulously managed, supple, cadenced, sumptuously lexical, expressive prose.
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