Authors: Wolfgang Koeppen
I said Koeppen wrote no more novels in his remaining forty years. But in 1976, he published a short memoir,
Jugend
(Youth),
and in 1992 a "novel" by the name of
Jakob Littners
Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch
, or
Jakob Littner's Notes
from a Hole in the Ground
, which has become the subject of one more controversy at the end of this quiet controversialist's life. That book was one he ghostwrote, in 1948, in return for two CARE packets a month, at a publisher's suggestion drawing on the manuscript of the real Jakob Littner, a Jewish stamp dealer from Munich, who was shipped off by the Nazis to Poland, and then to Ukraine, where he survived the war under unspeakable circumstances. Littner emigrated to the United States, and died in 1950. Recently, his original manuscript surfaced, and was published by Continuum in Kurt Grüblers translation as
Journey through the Night.
This has been used as a stick with which to beat Koeppen for his own reissued work. This is, I think, unfair. Koeppen's version of the story may not be—could not be—authentic, but sentence for sentence and page for page, it is incontestably the better book: it begins with the titles. Where I would take issue with him is in allowing it to appear—however sheepishly and halfheartedly and not altogether seriously—under his own name, and as a novel. "I ate American rations and wrote the story about the suffering of a German Jew. In doing so, it became my story," he wrote. What speaks here is not arrogation, much less theft, but a kind of wishfulness. My abiding memory of the one occasion I met Koeppen was the fervor and regret with which he spoke of the symbiosis of German and Jew. Certainly, I don't question the blend of altruism and self-seeking, of duty and imagination, of discipline and freedom that Koeppen brought to the original enterprise, in 1948. To claim that the story of a person or a group can only—or even best— be told by that person or group strikes me as a misunderstanding of what literature is. Whether there can be literature about the Holocaust is a difficult problem, but Koeppens champion, the—Jewish—critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, citing Paul Celan, thinks there can, and I am inclined to agree.
THERE
ARE
not many novels—except for those by ex-politicians, I suppose—that are situated in and around the corridors of power as
The Hothouse
is: Bulwer-Lytton and Anthony Powell come to mind (neither of whom I've read), and so do some of the South Americans such as Miguel Angel Asturias and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (whom I have). In a longer time frame, one might think of Shakespeare's history plays— though, with the exception of
Henry VIII
(if that is Shakespeare), they tend not to be about recent history—or Aeschylus's play
The Persians
, which, with a brilliant switch of perspective, treats events (the Battle of Salamis) barely a decade old, and in which the author himself had been a participant. This will already show what a rarity
The Hothouse
is. It is further blessed—whether by luck or judgment—by having been written from a time that seems to lie at the source of many of the developments and institutions that have shaped the world we live in still, and by having as its theme an issue—the Western alliance or, more broadly, the matter of armaments or "deterrent terror"—that will continue to exercise us and our leaders for generations to come. And then, as if it were not enough to take us back to the early days of the Cold War, of NATO and the Montan-Union (or European Coal and Steel Union—the forerunner of the EC), both dating back to 1949; and to the founding of the Federal Republic of a divided Germany, ratified in the same year; it opens the brief chapter—now handily closed again, with the transfer of the seat of government back to Berlin—in which Bonn, a small, old university town on the Rhine was for half a century "the most arbitrarily designated capital city in Europe," in the words of one reviewer of
The Hothouse.
All these contribute massively to the unrepeatable and inescapable interest of the book: that it deals with artistry and detachment with things that, fifty years later, are still warm.
One of the many hostile critics of
The Hothouse
claimed that it was only the specific character of Bonn that made the book what it was, while complaining that it was somehow unfair or antidemocratic to write such a book. This is nonsense, as much as it would be if someone said
Under the Volcano
owed everything to Cuernavaca, or
Ulysses
to Dublin. The books are wonderful, even to people who have never been to the places. Koeppen—like Lowry like Joyce— makes a Bonn that is part imaginary and wholly evocative, a derisive or cartoonish Monopoly board-like creation of "parliamentary ghetto," "pedagogic academy," press ship, station, church, park, wine bar, "American hive," and a few interiors, Knurrewahn's "avant-garde" office, Frost-Forestier's hi-tech multipurpose red grotto, and so on and so forth, with the turgid Rhine ominously at the back of everything. This all adds up to "Bonn"—and the place, and many of the characters thought they recognized themselves in Koeppen's descriptions. For instance, there was one Carlo Schmid (1896-1979), a leading socialist figure, an expert in international law, and—a translator of Baudelaire! But of course, Carlo Schmid isn't Keetenheuve, and no one would dream of reading
The Hothouse
as a roman à clef about the estimable Carlo Schmid, or as a naughty attack on Bonn, just as no one would read
Ulysses
because they wanted to find out about Dublin!
Koeppen said: "I wrote
The Hothouse
as a novel about failure," and I see no reason to quarrel with that. Many critics, even admirers of Koeppen, have made the mistake of seeing the failure in the novel itself. Reich-Ranicki quotes Thomas Mann's phrase "Helden der Schwäche," "heroes of weakness," but it doesn't help him to see the point and the necessity of Keetenheuve. To take on a strong, overbearing, even poisonous system, he would argue, requires a strong hero. It is a pity he has failed to understand that Koeppen's great idea was to inject, as it were, Hamlet into the world of one of Shakespeare's history plays. There is a glorious—and terribly sad—incommensurability in perhaps every one of the contacts in the book: how can Keetenheuve even talk to Korodin, say, or Frost-Forestier, or Mergentheim, or Elke, or Lena? But he, with his griefs and complications, is always more real than they are. The world needs more of him—the amateur in love, and writing, and politics—but it will only get—has only got— more of them: the career politician, the specialist, the Teflon man, before the threatened rise of a new and worse era of career miracle workers and cargo cults and apolitical money-men, Berlusconi, Tyminski, Forbes, Perot.
The Hothouse
is an elegy to the amateur and the dilettante: it already completely anticipates the plastic world of show, the world of newsreels, of sound bites, of calculation, of Piranesian or Pirandellian inconsequence, of near-virtuality, where, Koeppen wrote fifty years ago, "the century was reduced to imitating its own movie actors, even a miner looked like a film star playing a miner." Keetenheuve has an adolescent purity of heart, and that's what makes him such an inspired pendant to the corrupt drift and setting of this book, where there is Hiroshima and then business as normal, where there is Nuremberg and then business as normal; and such a perfect mouthpiece for a book that, as Koeppen says somewhere, is not a dialogue with the world, but "a monologue against the world."
None of the books I have translated have given me more pleasure than
The Hothouse
and
Death in Rome.
I find Koeppen's "hämmernder Sprechstil," as it was described by one critic, his "hammering parlando," completely congenial. I love the way he hides a phrase on a page, and a scene in a book; it takes many readings to become aware of the richness and the breadth of his vision, of his prismatic way with details and motifs. His rhetorical approach to a sentence, improvising and appositional, but wound tight in a mighty rhythm, is quite exhilarating. (You need to read them "aloud" to yourself.)
Koeppen describes
The Hothouse
as "a German fairy-tale, but, if anything, too mild." To that end, he has incorporated a lot of talismanic German material (German with a capital
"D").
He takes "Wagalaweia" from the Rhine Maidens' song at the beginning of Wagner's
Rheingold
, and makes it into train noise; Alberich the dwarf, and Hägen, and the Norns (a sort of Nordic Fates) also come from Wagner. Novalis and Hölderlin and Heine all supply hugely famous tags. The historical Musaeus (1735-1787) was a collector of fairy tales (like the Grimms), a satirist, and a tutor to the court pages at Weimar. German politics, especially the short and often sadly compromised history of German socialism (the word is never mentioned in the book), is ransacked by Koeppen to similar effect. This system of allusions—to literature, to mythology, to politics—all serve to amplify the story, give it more, ironic, noise. As if it needed it: a man who emigrated in 1933, returned in 1945, was elected to Parliament in 1949, and drowned himself in the Rhine in 1953. As Karl Korn wrote in
1953:
"
The Hothouse
is literature of a quality that is not often attained."
Michael Hofmann
September
2000
THE HOTHOUSE
1
H
E
WAS
TRAVELING
UNDER
PARLIAMENTARY
IMMUNITY
, seeing as they hadn't managed to catch him in flagrante. Although, of course, if it transpired that he was guilty, they would drop him just like that, hand him over with alacrity, the ones who called themselves the Noble House, and what a coup that would be for them, what satisfaction to have him depart under such an enormous and unforeseen cloud, off into the cells, safely to molder away behind the walls of some secure prison, and even in his own party, while they would witter agitatedly about the humiliation they would have been put through on his account (all of them, hypocrites to a man), secretly they would be rubbing their hands and be pleased that he had expelled himself, that he had had to go, because he had been a grain of salt, the germ of unrest in their bland and sluggish porridge of a party, a man of conscience and thereby an irritant.
He was sitting in the Nibelungen Express. There was a whiff of fresh paint, of reconditioning and renovation; these days, you traveled in comfort on the Bundesbahn; while on the outside all the carriages were daubed blood red. Basel, Dortmund, dwarf Alberich, and the factory chimneys of the Ruhrgebiet; through-coaches to Vienna and Passau, Vehmic murderer Hägen had put his feet up; carriages to Rome and Munich, and there was a flash of ecclesiastical purple through a chink in the drawn curtains; carriages to Hoek van Holland and London, the exporters' twilight of the gods, their dread of peacetime.
Wagalaweia, went the wheels. He hadn't done it. He hadn't killed anyone. It probably wasn't in him to commit murder; but he might have done, and the mere imagining that he had done it, that he had picked up the ax and brought it down, that vision was so clear and irrefutable to him, that he drew strength from it. Fantasies of murder galvanized his mind and body, lending him wings, lighting him up, and for a brief moment he had the feeling that everything would turn out well now, he would make a better fist of everything, he would assert himself and get his way, he would break through to the world of action and make something of his life—but unfortunately his crime had been purely imaginary, he was still the old Keetenheuve,
sicklied o'er by the pallid cast of thought.
He had buried his wife. And, not feeling at ease in bourgeois life, the act of interment alarmed him just as baptisms and weddings horrified him, and every other transaction between two individuals that became public and official. Her death grieved him, he felt deep sadness, choking loss when the coffin was lowered into the ground, he had lost the thing dearest to him in all the world, and, while the phrase had perhaps been devalued by appearing on millions of black-bordered death announcements sent by happy heirs, his dearest had been taken from him, his beloved was put in the ground, and the feeling
lost lost for ever I'll not see her again neither here nor in the hereafter I'll look for her and never find her
might have made him cry, but he felt unable to cry here, even though only Frau Wilms was watching him in the cemetery. Frau Wilms was his cleaning woman. She brought Keetenheuve a bunch of limp asters from her brother-in-law's allotment. For their wedding, Frau Wilms had brought a similar bunch of limp asters. On that occasion, she had said: "What a lovely-looking couple!" Now she didn't say anything. He wasn't a lovely-looking widower. Droll thoughts kept occurring to him. At school, instead of paying attention to the teacher, he had thought of ridiculous things, in the committee rooms and in the chamber, he saw his dignified colleagues as clowns in the ring, and even in situations when his life had been in danger, the grotesque side of it had not escaped him. "Widower" was a funny word, a grimly funny word, a somewhat dusty notion from a staider era. Keetenheuve remembered having known a widower when he was a boy, one Herr Possehl. Herr Possehl, widower, still lived in harmony with an ordered world; he was respected in the little town. He had assembled a widower's—one couldn't say weeds—garb, the stiff black hat, the morning coat, the striped banker's trousers, and later on an always slightly grubby white waistcoat, across which ran a gold watch chain that had a ram's tooth dangling from it, to symbolize that the animal in him had been set aside. And so, when Herr Possehl went to the baker Labahn to buy his bread, he was a living allegory of fidelity beyond the grave, a touching and estimable embodiment of loss. Keetenheuve was not estimable, and nor did he touch anyone. He owned neither a top hat nor any other kind of hat, and he had gone to the burial in his modish flapping trench coat. The word "widower," which Frau Wilms had not pronounced, but which had started up in him at the sight of her limp asters, pursued and embittered him. He was a knight of the sorrowful countenance, or a knight of the comical countenance. He walked out of the graveyard, and his thoughts raced toward his crime.