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 émigrés” 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.
