Small wonder that Wolfgang Koeppen’s native Germany greeted his suite of postwar novels with hostility when they were first published in the early 1950s: When things go wrong, who needs to be shamed? Who needs to be mocked? Who needs—even worse—to be warned? The past is over, that’s its whole point.
Now that the past of those years—the years immediately following World War II—has been superseded by so many other pasts, these novels are apparently received in Germany with (however temporarily) the great admiration and pleasure that was always their due. My own experience with them, though less illustrative, is vaguely parallel to Germany’s: some decades ago an acquaintance gave me a copy of Death in Rome, the third volume of the so-called postwar trilogy, and urged me to read it. I opened it up, it was opaque and inert, I closed it, and thought no more about it until recently, when it was reissued along with a new translation of Pigeons on the Grass and the first English translation of The Hothouse. Out of mild curiosity, I opened it up again, and, who knows why—possibly the atmospheric conditions of 2026—comets and stars came exploding out. I proceeded to read the three books in sequence, dazzled and enthralled, and every time I put one down (which, owing to their richness, intensity, velocity, and sheer unexpectedness, was often) I wondered what on earth had just happened to me; it seemed I’d been tuned, sharpened, elasticized—reformulated with better neurons.
Pigeons on the Grass is the earliest of the three, published in 1951, followed by TheHothouse in 1953 and Death in Rome in 1954. Koeppen wrote them “live,” as it’s put by Michael Hofmann, whom readers can thank for the remarkable translations—“live” meaning in real time and also in real place, Germany, where Koeppen was born in 1906. His long life is interesting—no doubt easier to read about than to have lived, as you can see from the excellent essays by Hofmann, Pankaj Mishra, and Joshua Cohen included in the volumes.
During the days of the Weimar Republic, Koeppen made a living at this and that, for a while as a journalist, and wrote two well-received and poorly selling novels. In 1933, when Hitler was appointed chancellor and Nazism established as Germany’s sole state power, Koeppen went to Holland. As he was not Jewish, or Roma, Sinti, Black, Slavic, homosexual, a communist, a labor leader, or, formally, a dissident, he was not likely to be in official danger, but his publisher was a Jew, he had Jewish friends, he was by nature an intellectual and an aesthete—a type that autocrats tend to view, understandably, with great distaste. And personal safety aside, who, I ask you, wants to live in a country given over to insane, sadistic, thieving, power- and money-mad psychopaths?
In late 1938, just as droves of distinguished writers, artists, scholars, and scientists were fleeing Germany and its occupied or soon-to-be-occupied territories, Koeppen returned. Hofmann tells us that he “lacked the fame, the contacts,…the aptitude for languages, and perhaps ultimately, the brute necessity required to make a go of things in exile.” He also, clearly, lacked the money that might have compensated for those other deficiencies. In 1939 he flew into Berlin, the seat of Nazi operations, where he warily made a living in the film industry, although, owing to either guile or good luck, few of the projects he worked on were realized. In 1944 the apartment building where he lived was destroyed in an Allied air raid, and he slipped off untraced to Munich. A few years later he married eighteen-year-old Marion Ulrich. The relationship seems to have been turbulent and ardent, and they are buried together. He wrote various things in the forty years between these extraordinary books and his death in 1996, but he published no other fiction. He never had money.
Eccentric in just about every way, this trilogy shares no characters (unless you count an image of Frederick the Great on a broken teacup that makes brief appearances in both Pigeons on the Grass and The Hothouse). Nor do the books share settings—the first takes place entirely in Munich, the second in Bonn, and the third in Rome—nor are their stories related. And they are very different in some ways that seem musical, like key, scoring, tempo.
Koeppen was an insatiable reader, and these books demonstrate his assimilation of early-twentieth-century modernist techniques—stream of consciousness, startling disjunctions, abrupt switching of narrative perspective, typographical oddities, and the like. It’s entirely possible that he methodically aimed for specific effects, but his style, which includes plenty of conventional narration too, feels more like an exuberant ad hoc improvisation than virtuoso display or literary experimentation—a flexibility in pressing circumstances, as someone marooned on a desert island might hurl a shoe, then a tortoise, to get an apple down from a tree instead of waiting for a ship to happen by with an apple-harvesting machine. The prose, at least as it comes to us in Hofmann’s worked magic, is simultaneously wild, fluid, often flat-out gorgeous, and uncannily precise. Reading, one feels at the center of a living thing rather than looking on from a safe distance—receiving thoughts and sensations just as they’re hatching into the articulable.
The fundamental unifying element of the trilogy, though, I’d say, is the simple implicit question: Does something in our nature compel us to repeatedly bring hell upon ourselves? The question is posed within the “live” historical moment in which the books were written, those few years after Germany conceded defeat in 1945, when the terrible war—which killed upward of 70 million, including the millions, mostly Jews, murdered by the Nazis—finally ground to a halt. It was a strange, unfixed interim, quickly eclipsed by the distortions and residues of time, by desperate needs and sudden opportunities, by the simple cinematic appeal of the grotesque objectives and machinery of Nazism, by the dramatic notion of “the end,” which camouflages beginnings, by the human gift for fashioning heroic images out of old junk, and so on. Actually, it was a critical interval—unsettled and unpredictable—an abrupt break in continuity, and like other broken things, it disclosed materials that are usually concealed or contained. These books are, among so much else, a reclamation of that moment of rapidly crystallizing forms in a country that concentrated so many hazardous volatile essences—an alarm, still sounding, as loud as ever, under a turf of ambient noise.
Almost from one day to the next, millions of Germans had awakened from the fever dream of imminent triumph and race-pure world domination to find themselves essentially soaked with incriminating blood, clutching the gnawed bones of their former neighbors. Millions of others, of course, had simply kept their heads down and held their breath through the nightmare their own country had induced. Still others were emerging from the camps of which they were the few starving survivors, or from the European forests, caves, and cemeteries where they had hidden throughout the years of the war. Children, parents, lovers, and friends were dead, murdered, or simply gone; where there had been homes, villages, ancient splendor, there was rubble. The matter of identity was at the forefront: What did yesterday’s passport, nation, history, ethnicity, affiliations mean, and how were they to be dealt with? The printers were busy minting new names and birthdays.
Each of these three novels is complete in itself; they can be read singly or in any order, but there’s something to be said for reading Pigeons on the Grass first, as I did, since it provides a kind of aerial view of that particular moment and of a range of individuals and relationships caught within its circumstances. Even before the cast of characters appears, we are given a quick look at their milieu:
Planes were over the city, birds of ill omen. The noise of their engines was thunder, was hail, was storm. Storm, hail, and thunder, every day, every night, landing and takeoff, death exercises, a hollow roar, a flinch, a tremor of memory in the ruins. For the moment, the bomb bays of the planes were still empty. The soothsayers smiled. No one looked up at the sky.
The next paragraph brings us streaking into terrifyingly familiar headlines:
Oil out of the arteries of earth, stone-oil…deposits of dinosaur lard, lizard carapaces…the buried inheritance guarded by dwarfs, by evil, greedy mages, the mythical devil’s hoard…lugged up to the light of day, it was put to use…. War over Oil, Conflict Escalates…Attack on the Pipeline…Here as there people were stockpiling gunpowder to blow the planet to smithereens, Atom Tests in New Mexico, Atom Plants in the Urals…. They spoke of rebuilding and made plans for demolition.
We are then abruptly redirected from the menace overhead and underground and brewing throughout the abstract world to the surface of the earth, where in the city of Munich humans are enacting for us one day of their human business. They include a shopkeeper; a porter; a celebrity and his pansexual wife; the punitive, sin-obsessed nanny of their terrified little daughter, and the child herself; two serious writers, one a very famous, exquisitely cultivated American poet who lives in England and is visiting Munich to give a much-anticipated talk, the other a German—not at all famous, blocked, frequently entangled in proliferating slapstick coils of rumination and uncertainties; the beautiful young wife of the blocked writer, whose emotional compass is governed by the loss of her enormous pre-war family inheritance; a German secretary formerly employed in the offices of the Wehrmacht and now in the offices of the Black military contingent of the American occupiers; two eleven-year-old boys, one German, one American, both imbued with two generations of their families’ experiences and today engaged in heart-stoppingly tense negotiations over a stray dog; several antique dealers; a German-born Jewish actress who cannot convince her American husband that it would actually not be fun for her to join him on his posting to Munich despite his joyful enthusiasm for the city and its people; a psychiatrist who sells his blood to keep himself afloat; a small tour group of American schoolteachers; a pharmacologically inventive narcolept; and—figuring prominently—two Black American soldiers. Extras and cameos, as in a filmed operetta, include beer drinkers, cooks, prostitutes, priests, fashion designers, children playing, Greek pool sharks, a librarian, rough trade, a jazz band, and party guests. They all have plenty to do; no one is looking up at the sky.
They appear solo or in twos or threes; groups form, disperse, reconfigure; paths cross or fail to cross in an intricate choreography. Koeppen connects one little scene to the next in gleefully artificial ways, creating the sensation of an underlying loom-like thing at work, weaving a tight fabric, a fabric full, however, of irregularities—miscommunications, misunderstandings, and misattributions of feelings. Hofmann has described Pigeons on the Grass as “a modernist jigsaw in 110 pieces and showing 30 figures.” As this elegant formulation suggests, the puzzle is not only a portrait of the people who have, together, in their interactions, thoughts, and activities, made the present day what it is—it is also a portrait of the day itself, a day that shapes the day to follow. And among the questions that worry away from deep in the book are: Were these the inevitable figures, and if so, was this particular day inevitable? Or to put it another way: How much, and exactly what, does today tell us about tomorrow?
Once something has happened it occupies a position of suspect privilege; it seems to have been inevitable—but maybe only because it happened! Does it truly deserve the respect we accord it, or did it somehow cheat its way into reality? Are the mysterious forces we call chance, fate, destiny, the will of one god or another, always busily at work determining the course of our days and our lives? Or are these merely phantoms we invent to embody our own disavowed impulses and fears? Or is it merely random aggregations and intersections that cause things to happen as they do? How much power do we have, if any—as individuals or societies—to determine the course of our lives, the course of the world? Koeppen certainly doesn’t put these eternal questions to rest—on the contrary, he sets them juggling mesmerizingly in front of us; he himself seems to be watching, mesmerized.
A presumption of causality is as integral to fiction as pigment is to paint, but the question of what it is that causes this or that to happen is to some degree a subject of these books, though each clothes the question differently. It provides the title of Pigeons on the Grass: two of the visiting American schoolteachers are on their way—like most of Munich, it seems—to hear the lecture by Edwin, the formidable American poet. The schoolteachers are
crossing the great square, a place designed by Hitler to be the memorial grove of National Socialism…. There were birds sitting on the grass. Miss Burnett thought: That stuff that Miss Wescott keeps spouting, we don’t understand any more than the birds do about it, the birds are here by chance, we are here by chance, and maybe the Nazis were here by chance, Hitler was a chance, his politics were a dreadful and stupid chance, maybe the world is a dreadful and stupid chance of God’s, no one knows why we are here, the birds will fly off and we will walk on.
Shortly afterward, during his talk, Edwin, musing on the ideas of “certain civilization theorists” concerning “imaginary freedom from God and divine origin,” quotes Gertrude Stein (whom he considers, along with Hemingway, a “second-rate popular” writer): “Like pigeons on the grass…” Unfortunately the lecture, which has cost Edwin great effort and anxiety, is somewhat garbled by a malfunctioning sound system, and the increasingly sleepy audience doesn’t seem too clear on its meaning.
In addition to chance (which in the view of Miss Burnett, Edwin, and Gertrude Stein seems to be a subset of inevitability), all kinds of other forces that oversee the way things happen flicker in and out of Pigeons on the Grass and its two companions: destiny, fate, old myths, and various potentates, heroes, and gods, incarnate or ghostly, who often manifest disguised or altered, as degraded versions of themselves. The first character we meet, for example, is the archduke Alexander as he’s being dressed—“Here a medal, there a ribbon, a cross, a glittering star, the webwork of fate, chains of power”—and it’s another sentence or two before we understand that Alexander is not a bona fide archduke but a movie star (“the housewife’s dream of an archduke”) and that the imperial insignia with which his uniform is being camera-readied are trinkets scrounged up from the costume shop that represent no power beyond box office draw, and determine no fate.
And here is Frau Behrend, wife of the former municipal band leader who’s now safely elsewhere (with his young Eastern Bloc fling), cozily drinking her morning coffee, which she’s bought
at the Jew’s—those were the dark-haired people who spoke hardly any German, undesirables, aliens, flotsam, the ones who looked at you balefully and accusingly out of their dark, liquid, night-threaded eyes, who probably wanted to broach the topics of gas with you and mass graves…who could think of nothing better to do with their saved lives than…sell you black market goods on the rubble squares of the bombed-out cities (why bombed? my God, why were we beaten? what sin were we guilty of?).
Frau Behrend is reading an “exciting story,” a “true fiction”: “Destiny Reaches for Hannelore,” with its title-page illustration
of a young woman, good, innocent, touching, and in the background were the clustered villains, tunneling away like destiny’s voles. Life was full of perils, the way of decency and respectability full of holes. It wasn’t just Hannelore that destiny was reaching for. But in the last chapter, the good will prevail.
Fittingly, it is Frau Behrend who takes it upon herself, toward the end of this novel, to direct, against a blameless Black American soldier, incoherent public rage; and it seems that her banal, self-flattering—politically useful—notion of “good” has a reasonable chance at prevailing. This is just one of the evening’s events, a dramatic one; the tendencies and accidents of the day have of course produced others of other kinds. And having observed the day so fully, the reader is likely to feel that no act, no choice, no exchange is entirely without weight, that none goes completely unnoticed by the future.
The single day’s duration of Pigeons on the Grass is enacted by a whole clamorous city full of people; The Hothouse, which spans about a day more, belongs almost entirely to the spectacular internal voice of one Keetenheuve, a member of parliament who, like Koeppen, left Germany when Hitler came to power; who, like Koeppen, married a teenager; and who, like Koeppen, is a serious reader. His briefcase (probably unlike Koeppen, he has one) contains poetry by Walt Whitman, E.E. Cummings, and Charles Baudelaire.
A novel about a highbrow politician might sound, to put it politely, drab. This one is decidedly not; here’s its undrab opening: “He was traveling under parliamentary immunity, seeing as they hadn’t managed to catch him in flagrante.” Keetenheuve is on his way, via railway sleeping car, to a parliamentary session of the brand-new Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), whose capital has been plunked down in the old university town of Bonn, and two distinct but related preoccupations—grief and remorse over the recent death of his young wife, and rage and anxiety about his country—are tumbling noisily around in his mind.
Keetenheuve is headed to a seat of worldly government, but the Nibelung Express, as he calls it, is routed along the Rhine, whose gods and spirits—obsolete, but not quite obsolete enough—intrude on his thoughts: “This was where the Nibelungs’ treasure had lain, the gold under the water, the hoard stashed in a cave. It was stolen, plundered, embezzled, accursed. Ruse, furtiveness, deception, lie, murder, bravery, loyalty, betrayal, and fog.” He recalls his first glimpse of his wife:
She slipped through a crack in the wall into the caverns of rubble and scree. She was like an animal taking refuge.
He fetched Elke out of the rubble. She was soaked and filthy…. Elke had come out of the war, and she was sixteen years old. He didn’t like her name…. A name out of Nordic mythology, it reminded him of Wagner and his hysterical heroes, a wily, unscrupulous, and violent set of gods, and in fact Elke turned out to be the daughter of a Gauleiter.
The Gauleiter and his wife were both dead. They had swallowed the little death capsules they had been given for all eventualities, and Elke had heard the news of their deaths when she was in the forest.
Elke survived the forest and the rubble, but she had not been equipped to survive free time. Her father’s prisoner-servants had laid the table, arranged the flowers, saddled the magnificent horse for Daddy’s morning gallop over the lovely estate. And as the pampered child of one who presided over the life, or murder, of those who lived within his official precinct, Elke had been required to do and to learn precious little. Later, salvaged from the ruins by Keetenheuve, she was as much his ward as his lover—furiously resentful of his precious books, his writing, the attention he spent on “his many avocations, which took up more and more of his time, and left him more and more disillusioned.” She would become ill-tempered when he “sat over his papers of an evening, still obsessed with the notion of helping, reconstructing, healing wounds, providing bread.” What was Elke to do with all her time, other than play with his kitten, have sex, and drink?
Although it was Wagner who resurrected, assembled, and transfigured the humorless Norse crowd, it was Hitler who, decades later, repurposed—or, some would say, merely focused—Wagner’s monumental Ring cycle to serve as a grandiose foundational mythology for his costume-drama dream of a heroic Aryan “race.” All along the journey to Bonn, Keetenheuve hears the train wheels singing the song of Wagner’s Rhine maidens—Hitler’s Rhine maidens. Wagalaweia go the wheels: “Wagalaweia. In Bayreuth the girls, glittering goddesses, floated over the stage in swings. The dictator had been aroused by the spectacle, he had felt a surge in his marrow…. Tears flowed, tears of emotion.”
Well, that was back then, the overture to the devastation of the country. Now it’s time for the country’s reconstruction, and Keetenheuve fervently aspires to contribute. Things were happening at an astounding speed. The rehabilitation of the ruined economy, known as the economic miracle, was spawning quantities of infrastructure and industrial initiatives, food was sufficient again, and the sleek, gleaming German cities recent generations know were springing up at a fantastic pace.
But there was no shortage of problems for the new Germany, nor were German problems confined to Germany. There was, for instance, the intractable dilemma that had been around since the country’s unification in 1871: How to keep this (very Prussian) Germany from running roughshod over everyone else? Germany’s arrogant nationalism and military aggressions, often said to have ignited World War I, were punished, at that war’s end, by the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, under which Germany was disarmed and enormous reparations were levied. And was the result of all that corrective retribution a chastened Germany? Why no, the result, as we know, was Nazism and a second world war.
War can reduce continents to ash, but the beliefs, attitudes, customs, ambitions, systems, and horrible human characteristics that generate war are all but imperishable. So what could be done to sedate Germany this time around? This time there was the Yalta Conference and other international powwows aimed at doing right by…by everyone who had a seat at the table. The Allied occupiers insisted that Nazis be purged from influential positions, that once again Germany be disarmed, and that Germany be divided into two “spheres of influence,” which became the Eastern and Western Blocs.
Once again, the results could have been predicted. As Koeppen wrote in Pigeons on the Grass,“People lived in the forcefield of tension, Eastern world/Western world, they lived on the join, on the crack.” The push for rearmament was strong, and the halfhearted, transparently hypocritical, and obviously counterproductive Allied program of German denazification was officially abandoned in 1951, putting plenty of former (whatever that would mean) Nazis right back into influential positions. Moreover, the country was functioning partly under the occupation and administration of four powers whose objectives were often at odds and whose alliances were shifting. In short, enormous areas of the world were struggling to codify themselves and their relationships as political and economic entities in the high-stakes game of musical chairs that has since become a constant deadly threat to us all.
It is into this crucible of boomeranging policies, supremely complicated arrangements, unstable compromises, nascent coalitions and enmities, and, above all, entrenched, unreconstructed attitudes that the passionate idealist Keetenheuve—a Germany-loving antinationalist depressed by borders and by the shortsighted objectives of his colleagues (which, at this moment of opportunity, can only reinforce the old status quo); an unreserved pacifist, disdainful of class snobberies (including his own, to which he is alert); a candidate who fears campaigning because he knows that his uncertainties make him an unconvincing speaker—is headed.
Twenty years earlier, when the newspaper he worked for was taken over and the “Jewish editors were sacked on the spot, clever people, adroit leader writers, exquisite stylists, but they had misread the signs,” Keetenheuve
took his back pay and went to Paris. He was free to go, no one stopped him. In Paris, though, people asked him in bewilderment: What are you doing here? Why have you come? Not until German troops were marching down the Champs-Elysées did Keetenheuve have an answer…. And now it was Keetenheuve who was asking himself: What am I doing here, what’s the point of this, is it just to avoid taking part, so that I can wash my hands in innocence, and is that enough?
The trip, under the heavy shadows of Elke’s death, of his country’s horrifying past and uncertain future, forces to the surface a set of recurrent anxieties. His conduct is increasingly under severe review, his review: Who is he, really? Has he been honest, either in his love for Elke or in his efforts for the general good?
Koeppen’s Bonn seems highly unlikely and is also utterly persuasive. The more or less impromptu capital, with its overgrowth of new industry and government construction, is pictured as almost subtropical, vaporous, disturbingly fertile—the perfect milieu for a crisis of confidence. In this slightly woozy atmosphere, Keetenheuve’s colleagues and acquaintances seem somehow to materialize rather than to be consistently corporeal, and politics itself is inherently illusory. It is from his vantage that we observe the nature of his government, including in a vertiginously disappointing parliamentary session about working-class housing that makes crushingly clear how irreconcilable are his ideals with the proposals of his complacent fellow MPs. On display are the self-deception, venality, limited imagination, rashness, self-interest, and other characteristics that ought to disqualify people from political life but instead often send them sailing to the top. Naturally, Keetenheuve’s character, his analytical and discerning mind, renders him suspect. “Maybe you’re just a gnat,” an acquaintance from the press offices says to him, irritably. “But the elephants and tigers are afraid of you. And you’d better watch out for them.”
He is offered a remote ambassadorship that would render him honorably hors de combat. When is one compromising and when being compromised? And who has he been fighting for, anyway? What, really, do his constituents want? They write plenty of letters of complaint, but he has begun to suspect that the public for whom he toils is perfectly happy to share the view of itself and of life held by his privileged, shallow—often corrupt—colleagues, that they don’t dream of anything truly different in kind from what has been accorded them. The more he comes to feel that his work is sterile and pointless the more dubious he becomes about his own role. Pressure only increases throughout the day. He sometimes thinks of himself in italics, trying out, parodically, different versions of himself: “Keetenheuve bad customer, bottle baby, won’t buy his round, sucks on his pacifier”; “Will Keetenheuve learn? No, he will not learn. Is he condemned? Yes, he is condemned. All those in favor?”; “Ascetic Keetenheuve. Keetenheuve disciple of Zen. Keetenheuve Buddhist. Keetenheuve the great freer from the shackles of self.”
What has happened to him over this day or two is cruel, probably the thing to be most greatly feared: the sudden conviction that one has misspent one’s life. It’s impossible without quoting the entire book to convey the impact and beauty of Koeppen’s portrait of a mind enduring great sorrow, a mind arresting and satirizing its own tendencies to falseness, struggling to characterize its own activities truthfully. The sensation of despair flooding the fragile surface of waking life is so vividly communicated that one experiences something like the compassion of a lone witness.
According to Hofmann, Koeppen said he wrote the books very rapidly, each in three or four months. Speed is not an approach generally recommended for writers as it tends, except in the hands of the very lucky few, to lead straight into a verbal pigpen, but the rightness of these novels recalls disciplines of classical Chinese painting that stipulated long periods of study, intense preparation, sustained observation, and lightning-fast execution to capture the essence of the subject as well as its appearance. Are these novels, like the ideal of those Chinese paintings, to be considered perfect, or are they, possibly, somewhat disheveled? No matter—the books have their own sort of ideal integrity.
Near the beginning of Death in Rome a young composer, Siegfried Pfaffrath, hears for the first time at a rehearsal a twelve-tone symphony he’s written. The conductor, Kürenberg, is a German émigré, and the occasion is an important concert in Rome. This wonderful event is the result of a correspondence initiated by Siegfried from an English prisoner-of-war camp and encouraged by the internationally famous conductor: “For Kürenberg, Siegfried’s prisoner-of-war letter had been a sign, a message from a Europe that had collapsed into barbarism, the dove that signaled that the floodwaters were receding.” The two men sincerely admire each other and are profoundly grateful for what the other represents, but at the rehearsal the music sounds wrong to Siegfried:
It wasn’t the unearthly wind in the trees, it wasn’t the child’s conversation with the daemon at nightfall, that wasn’t what fear of being sounded like…. Kürenberg smoothed, accented, articulated Siegfried’s score, and Siegfried’s painful groping, his search for a sound, the memory of an Edenic garden before the dawn of mankind, an approximation to the truth of things, which was by definition unhuman—all that, under Kürenberg’s conducting hand, had become humanistic and enlightened, music for a cultured audience; but to Siegried it sounded unfamiliar and disappointing…but then again the artist in him enjoyed the precision, the clarity of the instruments, the care with which the celebrated hundred-strong orchestra were playing his composition.
This conversation hints at an analogous conversation (I think) between Koeppen and himself that runs throughout these novels but seems particularly near the surface of Death in Rome. It is the most overtly furious of the three, and it is as extreme as, no, more extreme than Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, whose title Koeppen has pinched—it’s something like a slow-motion film collaboration between Luchino Visconti, Alfred Hitchcock, and Lars von Trier about an international sports-car race/demolition derby.
The book’s head-clutching premise, a family reunion, is the premise of innumerable suboptimal creative ventures, but apparently the statistics allow for a masterpiece. This family consists of two branches—one being Siegfried; his father, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, who has been reelected Oberbürgermeister of his city; his mother, Anna; and his younger brother, Dietrich. The other consists of Anna’s sister Eva, her husband, Gottlieb Judejahn, and their son, Adolf. Owing to the war, some of them have not seen one another in a long time, and although there’s not much (any) love lost between them, and, except for Siegfried, their interest in twelve-tone music is at most zero, they have their various reasons for joining the family party in Rome—the pleasurable, untidy capital of harsh Nazi Germany’s ally—on the occasion of Siegfried’s artistic success. Here is Siegfried’s immediate family enjoying their hotel lounge:
Already they had made contact with visiting compatriots, with Germans of similar background and outlook, fortunate survivors but with short memories like themselves. VW-owners, drivers of Mercedes, redeemed by German efficiency and now once more valued bringers of foreign currency, they were conversing and drinking sweet vermouth, and on the table were street maps and guidebooks…. The time of hanging was definitely over, for them at least, the Americans had come to their senses, they now had a truer measure of German circumstances and German usefulness, and vengeful judgments and hatred were no longer wise or appropriate.
Should our beautiful planet itself survive, creatures of the future might commemorate our extinct species with an Anthropocene museum, where the Pfaffrath/Judejahn family would provide the models for the obscure exhibition “Figures from the German Third Reich.” The obvious monster in the grouping is Judejahn (a monster who has left his despised baby name, Gottlieb, as far behind him as possible). Since the end of the war—tried and condemned in absentia at Nuremberg—he has been ensconced somewhere in the Levant, well funded by who knows exactly who, drilling troops, building up an army. He arrives in Rome incognito, intending to buy arms, “pick up what the town had to offer by way of balmy air, historical sites, sophisticated whores and rich food,” and possibly take up his loathed brother-in-law’s offer to “fix” his record, in a noiseless, gleaming black car, “a lacquered coffin…maybe the ambassador from Pluto.”
Here he is as his nephew Siegfried first catches a glimpse of him in Rome, not recognizing him after thirteen years: “This man was a butcher. He came from the Underworld, carrion smells wafted round him, he himself was Death, a brutal, mean, crude, and unquestioning Death.” Siegfried has grown up fearing and hating this brutal uncle, but the truth is “the mighty and universally feared tribune,” whose image was everywhere during the war, is the classic bully—a coward, a bully made by fear, fear of the beatings his father gave little Gottlieb for doing poorly at school, for being slow, fear of being mocked by the richer, smarter kids, by his teachers, fear and hatred of people who might consider themselves superior. Who does Judejahn hate most? Jews, of course. But also Americans, Italians (really all southerners; Mussolini was a “sentimental indulgence on the part of the Führer”), the Arabs he’s now training, and religious people—especially Catholics!
Judejahn’s wife, in contrast, has probably never experienced an instant of fear:
Not even her sister Anna understood that Eva Judejahn was not weeping for lost possessions, or rank or respect, still less was it grief over Judejahn, whom she had seen as a hero entering Valhalla, that paled her countenance; she was grieving for Grossdeutschland, she was shedding tears for the Führer, lamenting the fact that treachery and betrayal and unnatural pacts had brought down the Germanic idea of world salvation.
Judejahn’s calling and joy is physical violence, but his loathed brother-in-law—“an asshole,” denazified and once again, as in the years of the Third Reich, mayor of his town—is the respectable type of enforcer no less indispensible to dictators, a vigilant opportunist adept at ensuring his own protection:
Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath slept contentedly…. His life appeared without blemish, and life on the whole rewarded those who were without blemish…and personal popularity, reputation, continuity, and the democratic process had made Friedrich Wihelm Pfaffrath the head of his city once more, absolutely legitimately…and even though he had once been Oberpresident and the administrator of great Party sums, he was content, he was without blemish.
Friedrich Wilhelm’s younger son, Dietrich, seems likely to rise even higher:
Even on a family visit to beautiful Italy he was preparing for his law exams…. And Dietrich’s fraternity cap had also accompanied him on his journey, because one might meet members of other fraternities in sufficient numbers to take over a bar. The cap with the colored ribbons lay beside the law books, and Dietrich was sure that both his fraternity and the law would stand him in good stead.
During this short visit to Rome, the complicated, tormented, questioning cousins, Siegfried and Adolf (who hopes to be ordained as a Catholic priest, his father’s worst nightmare) get to know each other a bit. With their burdensome names and their shared bit of blighting history—in addition to the fact that Siegfried is gay and Adolf probably is, though they do not discuss this—they have enough in common at least to communicate, and to feel something that resembles a pallid, provisional affection.
The other exhibit in that tiny museum of humans, I hope, though they are definitely less representative, would be the Kürenbergs—the conductor and his Jewish wife, Ilse, whose family suffered greatly under the Nazis:
Their union was harmonious, they had been all over the world together, often traveling in grim and dangerous circumstances, without friction.
They sat down in the sun, they enjoyed the sun, they sat down on the terrace of the wickedly expensive restaurant on the Piazza Navona, they enjoyed sitting there. They looked out into the calm harmonious oval of the onetime arena, they were glad that violent era was at an end, and they lunched. They lunched on little prawns crisply fried in butter, on tender grilled chicken, dry salad leaves dressed with oil and lemon juice, large sensuous red strawberries, and with their lunch they drank a dry lively Frascati. They enjoyed the wine. They enjoyed the food. They were serious and calm eaters. They were serious and blithe drinkers. They hardly spoke, but they were very much in love.
Later Ilse naps and “dreamed she was the Eumenide, the sleeping Eumenide, appeasingly called the Kindly One, the Goddess of Revenge.”
In its baroque grotesqueness, the unfathomable horror of the Third Reich seems to have breached the possibilities of human behavior; thus it serves as a convenient repository for our fantasies about our species, the ways we can bear to conceive of ourselves, reducing in our minds the unfathomable horror of, say, atrocities we see on our portable screens morning and night, including atrocities to which we dutifully contribute our tax dollars. Nazi Germany was indeed unique in its particular ghoulishness, ambitions, and scope—so, fine, let it stand as an eternal representation of larcenous, genocidal bloodlust. But, as Koeppen’s trilogy suggests, it was neither an aberration nor was it to be even for a short while an end to such atrocities.
“Dark times,” as people are saying—referring, obviously, to the rapacity, corruption, sadism, viciousness, irrationality, and clownish venality of our soi-disant elected leaders, the degradation of our public life, the gullibility of our electorate, and the many looming cataclysmic consequences. And it took me by surprise when these books, animated by alarms we can hardly fail to hear, filled me with joy and hope. But why not, really? We already know full well that we humans are capable of destroying our own species and our planet; more astonishing is the space that opens up in a sustained encounter with the unprecedented vision of another mind, the breathing space—the opposite of the imprisoning clichés, propaganda, and lies of autocracy—the free space where new thoughts thrive, the vital air of hope, which is what’s available when there is no evidence for hope.