A German Master’s Modernist Epic of Postwar Amnesia and Hypocrisy
“Once upon a time, this city was a home to gods,” the enigmatic German writer Wolfgang Koeppen declares in his final novel, “Death in Rome” (1954). The gods in question, the jealously quibbling deities who ruled over the ancients with mercurial fervor, often came down and consorted with their subjects—but, by the time the book begins, they have fled. When the estranged members of a German family unwittingly converge on Rome for two days, they find countless reminders of the old pantheon and countless reminders of its abdication. “The angels from the Angels’ Bridge did not take up the invitation of the old gods,” Koeppen reports. When one character, a deacon studying to become a priest, sits “among the stone witnesses of antiquity,” he is “excluded from their society.” The statues watch “dry-eyed” as he weeps for the bygone world. Their response to the indignities of modernity is only contemptuous silence.
Koeppen’s response was similar. For decades following the publication of “Death in Rome,” rumor had it that he was on the cusp of completing a novel that never appeared. “His silence—which is perceived as such—is one of the loudest things in German literature today,” his English-language translator Michael Hofmann wrote four years before Koeppen’s death, in 1996. On one of the few occasions when Koeppen broke his silence to give an interview, he described his work as “a monologue against the world”—an attempt to dismantle West Germany piece by piece—and his fiction often seems to trade in disavowals and annulments. His informal “trilogy of failure,” of which “Death in Rome” is the third installment, is rife with questions that the text answers in the negative: “Was he afraid? He wasn’t afraid.” “Was it a triumph? It was no triumph.”
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Still, one affirmation is possible in the midst of all this negation: now that the final two books of Koeppen’s peculiar trilogy have been reissued in English by the publisher New Directions, we can see that it is a triumph, a gem of postwar German literature that has remained obscure in the Anglophone world for too long. As Hofmann notes, Koeppen “wrote his books quickly and in little clusters, or not at all,” and he dashed off those three marvellous novels, “Pigeons on the Grass,” “The Hothouse,” and “Death in Rome,” in a single three-year stretch, from 1951 to 1954. These ribald, irreverent, cutting, rhapsodic, and ultimately devastating portraits of German amnesia and hypocrisy, with their long, torqued sentences and jostling casts of doomed characters, were difficult for Koeppen’s contemporaries to assimilate. Formally, they were a ferment of hallucination, memory, fantasy, confession, and accusation. Substantively, they had little in common with the pacifying products of a culture that had decided, in the words of the novelist W. G. Sebald, to “proceed on its way,” after the Second World War, “almost undisturbed, as if nothing had happened.”
Koeppen knew that something had happened, and he was determined to prevent his compatriots from proceeding undisturbed. He certainly succeeded in irking them. Critics in the newly formed nation of West Germany were baffled by his polyphonic rapacity and enraged by his scorn for the country’s élite, many of whom were scarcely reformed Nazis—a fact that was considered tactless to mention. “Not to be touched with a barge-pole,” the headline of one review of “The Hothouse” declared. “People took my novel to be a mirror in which many individuals who were by no means in my thoughts claimed to recognize themselves,” Koeppen wrote in a defensive preface to “Pigeons on the Grass.” Seemingly wounded by the trilogy’s reception, he never wrote fiction again. He repeatedly promised his publisher drafts of his long-awaited new novel for the next forty-some years.
There was still occasional writing: reviews and essays and, from 1958 to 1961, a second gust of frantic activity, which yielded three travel books about Russia, the United States, and France, respectively. In 1976, he published “Youth,” a slim, fragmentary, associative recollection of his childhood, and, in 1992, the memoir of a Holocaust survivor which Koeppen had ghostwritten in the nineteen-forties was republished as a novel under his name, provoking some controversy. In the end, he did not suffer from want of recognition: in 1962, he won Germany’s most prestigious literary honor, the Georg Büchner Prize, in what was perhaps the establishment’s attempt to make belated amends. Among his admirers he counted Günter Grass.
Still, the absent novel rankled. As Koeppen might have put it: Was he satisfied? No, he was not. In his correspondence with his publisher, released as a book in German under the rather desperate title “Ich Bitte um ein Wort” (“A Word from You, Please”—as no doubt his editor often pleaded), there is a bitter joke: a mock title page. “My Life” is the subtitle. “Wolfgang Koeppen” is the author. The title, a refusal to offer a title, is “No.”
No: it was the word that defined the century, at least in Germany. No Alsace-Lorraine, no Verdun, no revenge against the French, no Army, no Kaiser, no economy to speak of. Soon, the nation endured an even crueller string of “no”s: no degenerate art, no dissenters, no Jewish books, no Jewish shops, and, eventually, no Jews.
Koeppen lived to see the prim, bourgeois Prussia of his childhood unmade and remade by these sometimes conflicting proscriptions. He was born in 1906 in Greifswald, a zealously Lutheran city on the Baltic coast, the illegitimate child of a doctor who did not recognize him and a mother who worked as a seamstress and struggled to pay the bills. His early life, mostly conducted on the margins of respectable Greifswald society, was haphazard. He studied but did not earn a degree, worked as a cinema usher and as a junior cook, and settled for a time in Berlin, where he wrote for a left-wing newspaper from 1931 to 1934. His first two novels, the lugubrious love story “A Sad Affair” (1934) and “The Tottering Wall” (1935), were published to moderate acclaim, but both books were banned in 1936, for the venal sin of having modernist ambitions and for the mortal sin of having a Jewish publisher. In 1935, Koeppen fled to the Netherlands—perhaps in quiet protest of the Nazis, as he insinuated, or perhaps because he was having an affair with an S.S. officer’s wife, as others have alleged. Four years later, he returned to Germany, where he worked in the film industry, writing intentionally unfilmable screenplays, maybe as a way of defying Nazi rule without calling too much attention to himself.
Koeppen’s long-suffering editor once called the novel he was forever trying and failing to write “the German ‘Ulysses.’ ” That book will never be completed, but the trilogy comes close enough. Like Joyce’s masterpiece and another book often described as its German analogue, Alfred Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1929), each febrile installment takes place in a single city, and each compresses its action into a one- or two-day frenzy. Koeppen’s chapters are often fractured into short sections, yet these fragments are wonderfully overfull. Their sinuous sentences span pages and veer off into wild clauses, and they are densely allusive, reeling from Romantic poetry to Gertrude Stein to Plato, lurching from one character’s point of view to the next. Headlines and advertisements blare out; lists repeat and iterate. In “The Hothouse,” a wordless vocalization from Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, “wagalaweia,” is a frequent refrain—a fitting motif for novels that are not plotted so much as composed. Their many narratives and perspectives tend to converge, as music does, in concluding crescendos.
The principle of organization that connects each section to the next is often an echoed image or phrase: one segment in “Pigeons on the Grass” ends with an embarrassed character who “melted” out of a shop that sells wares he cannot afford, and the succeeding section begins with beer that foams “like snow.” In the classic 1927 film “Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis,” one shot fades into another not on the basis of narrative continuity but on the basis of visual affinity: the swooping lines of train tracks cut to the swooping lines of telephone wires, and a traffic conductor on the street dissolves into bobbleheads in a similar posture in a shopwindow. Koeppen’s technique is similarly collagist: he collects pieces and assembles them into a jagged approximation of the whole, a method that suits a world that has been physically shattered by bombs and morally shattered by atrocities.
“All we have is a supranational style, and this style is America,” laments one character in another post-Second World War German-language novel, “The Death of My Brother Abel” (1976), by Gregor von Rezzori. This Americanization is already well under way in “Pigeons on the Grass.” The book’s fragments—there are a hundred and ten—coalesce into a mosaic-like picture of a single day in postwar Munich, where American soldiers zoom down the streets in flashy cars and German bands play American jazz in night clubs. Koeppen’s jumble of characters includes a homeless dog with a string tied around his neck, a washed-up German actor playing an archduke in a nostalgic period movie, a gaggle of earnest schoolteachers from Massachusetts, and many others. Washington Price, a Black American sergeant, hopes to marry his lover, Carla, a German woman who dreams of the plasticky affluence of the States—of “the bright and beautiful world of the magazines, of the automatic kitchens, the television sets, and the Hollywood-style ranch apartment.” If Carla has inherited America’s vulgar dreams, she has also inherited its vulgar bigotries; after she finds out that she is carrying Price’s baby, she yearns to end the pregnancy because she does not want to give birth to a Black child. Germany’s liberators cannot even liberate their own country from its system of racial hatred.
The two days related in “The Hothouse” are even more cramped and compacted. The book is set in Bonn, where the West German Bundestag was situated, and its events are undated but probably take place in the early fifties, when the Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” of postwar reconstruction had reached a fever pitch. The city in the book is a strange hodgepodge of affluence and poverty, of shiny new shops and ragged old ruins. But if the seat of the West German government is flush with cash, it is also overrun with barely de-Nazified politicians, lending its prosperity a sickly cast. “Even the storms seemed to be manmade here,” the protagonist thinks, “even the hot tired wind felt unreal.”
Of the books in Koeppen’s trilogy, “The Hothouse” is the most traditional. It does not quite confine itself to one character’s point of view, but it is narrated almost entirely from the delirious and disintegrating perspective of Keetenheuve, a staunchly pacifist member of parliament who has travelled to the capital for a vote about whether to rearm the country—a vote that his side is sure to lose. The leader of his party entreats him “not to become too vehement in the forthcoming debate, not to offend nationalist instincts,” even though offending nationalist instincts is precisely what he longs to do.
Keetenheuve is as contradictory and inconsistent as the rest of Koeppen’s characters—heroic one moment, craven the next. He often wonders whether he should have given up on politics and devoted himself to his wife, who drank herself to death in large part because he neglected her; for long stretches of the day, he absents himself from party business and translates Baudelaire in his office. But he is drawn to escapism because he is crushed by vicarious guilt and dismay at his country’s failure to atone for its crimes.
In one exquisitely dizzying sequence, Keetenheuve dissociates during a meeting about public-housing policy. Parliament’s plans are unambitious, and he yearns for an entirely new sort of architecture, a landscape free of Nazi taint. Where are the millions of marks that his peers have budgeted for the project? “No one had ever seen them. . . . They were on paper, they were handed on on paper,” he thinks. “They remained paper, a number on a piece of paper, until they finally materialized somewhere, and became forty marks in someone’s pay packet, and a stolen fifty-pfennig piece in a little boy’s hand for an Indian comic book.” Keetenheuve’s imagination is too novelistic (that stolen fifty-pfenning piece! The crinkled pages of that comic!) to deal coolly in the abstractions that are the currency, literal and figurative, of the new Germany. What good is his determined humanism in the face of the great humming machine of bureaucracy? No good. His side loses the vote. Scarcely ten years after the end of the Second World War, West Germany is back to politics as usual.
“Death in Rome” is the outlier in the trilogy: it is the only book not set in Germany, the only one with stretches of first-person narration, and the only one in which sections end midsentence, as if it is crumbling before our very eyes. It is also the most nakedly accusatory. There are Nazi sympathizers and casual antisemites in “Pigeons on the Grass” and “The Hothouse,” but “Death in Rome” is the only book of the three to feature rabid Nazi holdouts. One of these is Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, who served as a Nazi administrator in a town where he has now been elected mayor. Perhaps his most deeply ingrained Nazi tic is an instinctive reverence for boorish authority, epitomized in the figure of his brother-in-law, Gottlieb Judejahn, a top general who only escaped a death sentence at Nuremberg by fleeing to an unnamed Arab country.
Judejahn is in hiding, training an army for a king in the desert. He has travelled to Rome on a fake passport to meet Friedrich Wilhelm, who hopes to rehabilitate him and find him a position in the new West German administration. But Judejahn has no truck with his brother-in-law’s accommodationism. He remains a true believer, and in his long, vengeful harangues he rages against (and lusts after) Jewish women, rants about his carnal craving for power, and surrenders to a “red mist” of irrepressible fury. Koeppen has been accused of writing caricatures rather than characters, and it is true that Judejahn claims to have been present at virtually every major event of the Third Reich—a career that even the most enterprising fascist could hardly have managed. He may be more of a symbolic figure than a believable one, but his fantastical wickedness is apt in a book with mythic undercurrents and a wealth of classical allusions.
The younger generation of Pfaffraths are less fancifully sketched and more despairing. Friedrich Wilhelm’s estranged son, Siegfried, who was captured by the Allies and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, has yet to set foot back in Germany and yet to speak to his family. When his father learns about an experimental symphony that Siegfried has composed, he dismisses it as “full of surrealism, cultural Bolshevism, and negroid newfangledness.” Judejahn is even more mortified when he discovers that his son, Adolf, is in Rome training to become a priest. Both Siegfried and Adolf have rejected the indoctrination they were subjected to as students at an élite Nazi academy; both are desperate to expiate the sins of their fathers, one through prayers that he sometimes suspects are fruitless, the other through his peculiar art.
Siegfried is a composer of twelve-tone music, like the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel, “Doctor Faustus.” (The title of Koeppen’s novel is a reference to Mann’s novella “Death in Venice.”) He means for his bizarre symphony to summon the old pagan gods—to evoke “the child’s conversation with the daemon at nightfall.” His music is bleak, and it often reflects the smashed-up world in which it was composed, but it is also designed to function as a kind of excavation, to reach beneath the sediment of the recent horrors to a past free of them. Like the poet Paul Celan, who sought to renew and thereby redeem the German language by resuscitating archaic words that the Nazis had not used or corrupted, Siegfried is in search of “the memory of an Edenic garden before the dawn of mankind, an approximation to the truth of things.” His music is mostly, but not entirely, without hope.
Siegfried is largely resigned to the departure of the old gods and the innocent past they represent. Still, every so often, Koeppen’s creations wonder whether divinity could be lurking where they least expect it. Siegfried is not religious, but he lights a candle in a church and offers it up to an “unknown saint.” Maybe this figure “is even living in our midst, maybe he’s someone we pass on the street, maybe he’s the newspaper vendor in the passage shouting out the headlines.” On the book’s first page, Koeppen asks, “And what about great Jupiter? Is he here in our midst? Could he be the fellow in the Amex office, or the rep for the German-European Travel Agency?” In one mood, it is a ridiculous conjecture, a mockery. In another, it is a fleeting and fragile but decidedly real possibility.
For the most part, the trilogy of failure casts history as an inexorable force: “water flowing through the old Roman pipes” and sweeping us along with it, a “stream . . . noisily rushing past,” a guide leading a blind man. And yet the very same characters who are most entangled in history’s meshes sometimes briefly wriggle free. In one moment in “Pigeons on the Grass,” the sun is setting: “The people were released from their factories and shops, and they weren’t yet caught up in the demands of their ordinary lives and the expectations of family. The world hung in the balance. For a moment, everything seemed possible.” Despite its cynicism, Koeppen’s trilogy is full of such moments, of cracks in the edifice of things, of what you might call grace.
What is so surprising about these often disconsolate books is that they are, perhaps despite themselves, outrageously beautiful. Often, Siegfried is convinced that his music is “futile,” that the only thing he believes in is “the futility of everything.” But then he is assailed by the beauty that so improbably and insolently persists:
So he continues for more than a page. Meanwhile, the Jewish daughter of a man whose murder Siegfried’s father sanctioned and his uncle carried out looks out over the same city, and marvels that “the Romans, well acquainted with ruin and the devastation of former splendor, believed in the everlastingness of this particular arrangement of stones on the old earth.”
Who could dare love a world so cracked and sullied? Most of the time, we are not capable of it. But sometimes, in the slim space between evening and night, between one note in a song and another, between one page of a book and the next, we discover a new power in ourselves. Listening to Siegfried’s discordant symphony, Adolf discerns “the memory of a time before guilt in these sounds, of a paradisal peace and beauty, of sadness at the entry of death into the world, there was much clamor for amity in the notes, no hymn to joy, no panegyric, but still a longing for joy and praise of creation.” Out of the “No” that so often muffled Koeppen, there occasionally issued a choked but audible “Yes.” ♦