Wolfgang Koeppen
Wolfgang Köppen (1906-1996) was born in Greifswald and died in Munich. He worked as a junior chef, a dramaturge, and an editor.
Death in Rome
Death in Rome tells the story of four members of a German 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. A chilling account of Nazis after the war, here the older generation is resentful but not repentant. From the old unreconstructed Nazi officer Judejahn (the name has a suggestion of “Jew hunter”) to the young and apparently gay priest, from the supposedly reformed Mayor to the acclaimed but haunted young composer Siegfried, no clear hope emerges. And amid haunting flashbacks and against the shadows of Rome with its imperial echoes, the darkness is alive. Brace yourself: the novel takes place over a two-day period, mostly at night, and it's certain that the present will be governed by the past, if you let it. In Death in Rome, Koeppen amply demonstrates that evil doesn't simply cease once it loses a war—it seeps out, hungry to exist in other forms. And as Siegfried confesses: “In my daydreams and nightmares I see the Browns and the nationalist idiocy on the march again.”
Death in Rome—following Pigeons on the Grass and The Hothouse— blazingly concludes Koeppen’s masterful trilogy.
The Hothouse
The Hothouse traces the tragic final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of his country after WWII. Following his self-imposed exile during the war, Keetenheuve returns to the hothouse: the city of Bonn. Until this point he has led a life guided by principle and political optimism. Here, in spellbinding internal monologue and jarring montage, he meets his end. The Hothouse is an existential masterpiece and a portrait of a moral man crushed by an immoral world.
Bitterly controversial at home and a cult writer abroad, Koeppen (1906– 1996) brought a volcanic modernist style to German literature that remains unparalleled to this day. His uniquely radical voice and breathtaking prose is rendered magnificently by Michael Hofmann.
Pigeons on the Grass
by Wolfgang Koeppen
Translated by Michael Hofmann
Pigeons on the Grass is told over a single day in Munich in 1948. The first new cinemas and insurance offices are opening atop the ruins, Korea and Persia are keeping the world in panic, planes rumble in the sky (but no one looks up), newspaper headlines announce war over oil and atomic bomb tests. Odysseus Cotton, a black man, alights at the station and hires a porter; Emilia sells the last of her jewelry; Philipp gives himself up to despair; with their interracial love affair, Carla Behrend and Washington Price scandalize their neighbors—who still expect gifts of chocolate and coffee; a boy hustles to sell a stray dog; Mr. Edwin, a visiting poet, prepares for a reading; Frau Behrend disowns her daughter; Alexander stars as the Archduke in a new German Super-production; and Susanne seeks out a night to remember. In Michael Hofmann’s words, “in their sum, they are the totality of existence.”
Koeppen spares no one and sees all in this penetrating and intense novel that surveys those who remain, and those who have just arrived, in a damaged society. As inventive as Joyce and as compulsively readable as Dickens, Pigeons on the Grass is a great lost classic.
Koeppen’s prose, as deftly channeled by Hofmann (who acknowledges the ‘perfectly good’ version of 1988 by David Ward), seems to expand and contract to fill the space offered by each consciousness.
A modernist tour of Munich over the course of one eventful day in 1948. The novel’s roving consciousness deliberately blurs the boundaries between the characters’ minds, turning Munich into one large, pulsing brain—exhilarating and original.
Now available in an inspired new translation, this portrait of despair and endurance amid postwar ruin is nothing less than a miniature masterpiece.
— Kirkus (starred)
Hofmann’s brilliant translation finds pathos in the characters’ quest for meaning and significance in a world of randomness and chance. Koeppen’s masterwork soars.
A kaleidoscopic narrative that follows a disparate cast of characters whose lives accidentally intersect during a single day in Munich, Germany, in 1948. Now available in an inspired new translation, this portrait of despair and endurance amid postwar ruin is nothing less than a miniature masterpiece.
— Kirkus (STARRED)
Scathingly beautiful—lyrically inescapable.
— Nadine Gordimer
Germany’s greatest living writer.
— Gunter Grass
Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history… a forgotten masterpiece.
— *The Evening Standard *
Scathing, disillusioned novel ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany. Pigeons on the Grass 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.
— London Review of Books
In a many-toned language Koeppen not only depicts a cacophonous world but peoples that world with individuals whose lives barely overlap. The result documents a uniquely German situation; it also, with its echoes of James Joyce and John Dos Passos, reconnects the German novel at a surprisingly early date to modernist fiction.
— The Independent
Koeppen’s voice—cold, defiant and relentless in its fury at the deadly amnesia he saw emerge from Germany’s ruins after World War II—neither transforms nor imbues the world around him, but rather indicts it.
— The New York Times
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 (STARRED)
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