The Hothouse (24 page)

Keetenheuve reached the bridge. The bridge trembled under the force of the unearthly tram, and Keetenheuve felt the arch of the bridge was trembling under the weight of his body, under the force of his hurrying steps. The bells of the ghostly tramcars rang; it sounded like a malign giggle. In Beuel on the opposite side, a pattern of electrical bulbs made up the word
Rheinlust.
From a rural garden a rocket went up, exploded, fell, a dying star. Keetenheuve gripped the bridge rail, and once again he felt the supports trembling. There was a vibration in the steel, it was as though the steel was alive and wanted to betray a secret to Keetenheuve, the lesson of Prometheus, the puzzle of mechanics, the wisdom of the blacksmith—but the news came too late. The delegate was utterly useless, he was a burden to himself, and a leap from the bridge made him free.

About The Author

WOLFGANG KOEPPEN WAS BORN IN 1906 IN GREIFSWALD on the Baltic coast, the illegitimate son of a doctor who took no interest in his welfare. He was a student for a time, unemployed, and held an array of odd jobs, including those of ships cook, factory worker, and cinema usher. At the same time, he began to write for left-wing papers and, by 1931, was in Berlin, writing for the
Berliner
Börsen-Courier.
He published two novels with the Jewish publisher Bruno Cassirer,
Eine unglückliche Liehe
(An Unhappy Love Affair)
(1934) and
Die
Mauer schwankt (
The Tottering Wall)
(1935), before emigrating to Holland for a short period in the mid-1950s. Prior to the war, he returned to Germany and spent the war years writing film scripts for UFA that were, as he put it, just good enough to keep him in work, and just bad enough not to be made. The end of the war saw him in Munich.

In 1948, he ghostwrote Jakob Littners Holocaust memoir
Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (Notes
from a
Hole in
the Ground
), for which he was paid in food parcels. In 1992, the book was somewhat controversially republished under Koeppen's own name. The controversy was renewed when Littner's original manuscript, having been traced and translated into English by his relative, Kurt Grübler, appeared as
Journey through the Night
, published by Continuum in 2000.

In the 1950s, he completed the three novels that established him, alongside Günter Grass and Heinrich Boll, among the leading contemporary German writers:
Tauben im Gras (
Pigeons on the Grass
)
(1951),
Das Treibhaus
(The Hothouse)
(1953), and
Der
Tod
in Rom (Death in Rome)
(1954). Though quite separate in terms of character, action, and setting, these three novels, taken together, comprise a kind of trilogy on the state of postwar Germany. German readers and reviewers were wholly unequal to them, and Koeppen, either discouraged by their reception, or too proud, or too lazy, wrote no more fiction thereafter.

For the remaining forty-odd years of his life, he was a sort of literary pensioner kept by Suhrkamp, his loyal publisher, and by a series of prizes and awards that, guiltily and belatedly, came his way, among them the Büchner Prize of 1962. He wrote three travel books, on Russia, America, and France, and a memoir,
Jugend
(Youth),
that appeared in 1976, yet he never wrote the new novel that was touted and promised over several decades. In 1986, Suhrkamp published his collected works, somewhat surprisingly running to six volumes. He died in 1996, shortly before his ninetieth birthday In the summer of 2000, a 700-page collection of
inédits
was brought out under the title
Auf dem
Phantasieross (On the Wings of Imagination).

About
The
Translator

MICHAEL HOFMANN, THE SON OF THE GERMAN NOVELIST Gert Hofmann, was born in 1957 in Freiburg. At the age of four, he moved to England, where he has lived off and on ever since. After studying English at Cambridge and comparative literature on his own, he moved to London in 1983. He has published poems and reviews widely in England and in the United States. In 1993, he was appointed Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Florida at Gainesville.

To date, he has published four books of poems and a collection of criticism,
Behind the Lines
, all with Faber & Faber. He edited (with James Lasdun) a book of contemporary versions of the
Metamorphoses
, called
After Ovid
, and is currently editing
Rilke
in English
for Penguin. He has translated works by Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Gert Hofmann, among others. His translation of Wolfgang Koeppens
Death in Rome
(now reissued in paperback by W. W. Norton) shared the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize in 1993 when it first appeared in England. His translation of Joseph Roth's
Tale of the 1002
nd
Night
was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for translation in 1998.

{1}
The Europe Coal and Steel Community, avatar of the
EU.

{2}
Direct translation from
Hölderlins
great short poem
"Hälfte des Lebens"
(Half of life):
"im Winde / Klirren
die
Fahnen."

{3}
Perhaps a memory of the opening scene of
Tom Sawyer.

{4}
Freie
Bahn dem Volksvertreter
,
an untranslatable and malicious pun
—
either "Make way for the people's representative" or "free rail travel for the people's representative."

{5}
Literally "Wolf's Lair," the East Prussian headquarters of Hitler, who liked to style himself "Wolf' or even "Wolfi."

{6}
The German is
Hammelsprung,
literally "the jump of sheep."

{7}
The aversion of
Goebbels
and Hitler to borrowings from the French or Latin, like the more normal
Chefredakteur,
led to such ugly and zany Teutonisms as this "main-writing-leader."

{8}
The Nazis compulsorily reorganized every enterprise in Germany under this "work front."

{9}
An attempt to assassinate Hitler in
1944,
led by aristocratic military men, such as Stauffenberg and Beck. Four people were killed, but Hitler escaped with only minor injuries. The site of the attempt was the
Wolfsschanze.

{10}
Quite a lineup. Bismarck is Bismarck. The next three were part of a broadly liberal German opposition to Napoleon. August
Bebel (1840-1913)
co-founded the Social Democratic Party
(SPD)
with
Karl Liebknecht.
Ferdinand
Lassalle (1825-1864)
was a writer and politician.

{11}
Typical of Koeppen's way with names,
a
Schnuller
is a "dummy" or "comforter."

{12}
Literally, "coal grab," a ubiquitous Nazi propaganda creature, exhorting the populace to economize on scarce fuel.

{13}
Site of one of the abortive meetings between Hitler and Chamberlain.

{14}
Not the opinion of Keetenheuve, much less of Koeppen, but taken from Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du Mal
,
where it was the title of one of the poems to which the French censor took exception in
1857.

{15}
Die
blaue Blume
is the title of Novalis's novel and is used, in a wider way, for the object of any unattainable quest.

{16}
"Wo
sich
die
Füchse gute Nacht sagen"
(Where the foxes wish each other a good night), a fragrant German expression for "the boonies."

{17}
"Ich
weiß nicht,
was
soll es bedeuten,"
the first line of Heine's Lorelei poem, shamelessly re-ascribed by the Nazis as an "anonymous folk song," in view of Heine's Jewishness!

{18}
"Bei
mir bist du
scheen," the number by the Andrews Sisters, from
1937.

{19}
These very words were used in admonishment in England in the
1980s,
by John Biffen, a former cabinet minister of Margaret Thatcher's.

{20}
Gustave
Noske
(1868-1946), SPD
politician and minister of war in the first years of the Weimar Republic.

{21}
Arndt ( 1769-1860),
writer, poet, professor, and private secretary of Baron von
und zum
Stein.

{22}
An old term for eagle, punning on
Ahr.

{23}
Stands for
Winterhelfswerk,
another bit of Nazi nomenclature, in this instance for a Christmas charitable collection.

{24}
Austrian slang for Prussian soldiers or, more generally, nasty German tourists, after one Piefke, a Prussian music master who composed a march to celebrate the Prussian victory over the Danes in
1864.