Koeppen, Wolfgang

The reputation of Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-96), one of the outstanding German writers of the second half of the twentieth century, rests on five novels, some travel writing and criticism besides a handful of miscellanea. There is nothing surprising in that: the oeuvre of several superb writers, the American William Gaddis for example, is similarly restricted. What is unusual (perhaps unique) in Koeppen’s case is that the production of those five works of fiction – three of them acknowledged masterpieces – was confined to two brief periods in a life spanning the best part of a century.

Koeppen was born in 1906 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, some 200 kilometres north of Berlin. By 1931, after a shiftless childhood and youth he had gravitated to Berlin, the unchallenged cultural capital of Europe in those days. There he published two novels, Eine unglückliche Liebe (available in an English translation by Michael Hofmann as A Sad Affair) in 1934 and in 1935 the yet-to-be translated Die Mauer schwankt (The Tottering Wall).

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.

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.

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.

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.

After Death in Rome, the rest, as Hamlet said, was silence. A few things followed, including the memoirs of a Holocaust survivor which Koeppen had ghosted immediately after the war (in exchange for food, as he claimed) then republished, for some incomprehensible reason, under his own name. But, to all intents and purposes, his remarkable career ended in 1954, forty-two years before his death.

Critics have for long speculated on the reasons behind Koeppen’s strange silence. Had he been discouraged, had he written himself out, or was he just lazy? We shall never know for certain. I was struck however by the following snippet from an interview quoted by Michael Hofmann:

INTERVIEWER: To put it another way, what do you do all day?
Do you go for walks, do you watch TV?
KOEPPEN: I’m terribly busy.
INTERVIEWER: What are you busy with?
KOEPPEN: I don’t know.

The Books

Koeppen, Wolfgang: Death in Rome / translated by Michael Hofmann. - New York : Norton, 2001. - 202 pages
ISBN 0-393-32194-0
Original title: Tod in Rom (German)

Koeppen, Wolfgang: The Hothouse / translated by Michael Hofmann. - New York : Norton, 2002. - 221 pages
ISBN 0-393-32326-9
Original title: Treibhaus (German)

Koeppen, Wolfgang: Pigeons on the Grass / translated by David Ward. - New York : Holmes $ Meier, 1991. - 202 pages
ISBN 0-8419-1291-2
Original title: Tauben im Gras (German)

Koeppen, Wolfgang: A Sad Affair / translated by Michael Hofmann. - New York : Norton, 2003. - 176 pages
ISBN 0-393-05718-6
Original title: Eine unglückliche Liebe (German)