Four men who are related to each other but became estranged during World War II are reunited in Rome after the war

Death in Rome (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Koeppen, Wolfgang

Hofmann, Michael

Contemporary

Penguin Classics

The Hothouse: A Novel

Grieving over the death of his wife and disillusioned by the political corruption that surrounds him, Keetenheuve, a minor German politician, confronts the political and social turmoil surrounding him in a ravaged, post-war nation.

United States

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

A prophetic novel that ranks with The Tin Drum and W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants as one of the essential works of contemporary European fiction. Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome, in the words of translator Michael Hofmann, "is a comprehensive and brilliant provocation of an entire nation." First published in 1954 to great controversy, it is only now being recognized as a classic. A tragic portrait of Germany after World War II, Death in Rome completes the trilogy that earned Koeppen praise from Günter Grass in his lifetime as "the greatest living German writer." Mirroring the social and political upheaval following the fall of Nazism, Koeppen here offers the story of four members of a Germany family-a former SS officer, a young man preparing for the priesthood, a composer, and a government administrator-reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome. Koeppen re-creates the soul of a nation at a significant juncture of history in this devastating work of literary genius. .

Death in Rome

Foul Play Press

"A recovered masterpiece....Remarkable as a sidelong, searing appraisal of the legacy of the Nazi years."―Publishers Weekly, starred review A masterpiece by a writer long neglected in America, The Hothouse created a literary stir when it appeared in hardcover. Evoking comparisons to works by James Joyce and Malcolm Lowry, it traces the final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of post-World War II German politics and grieving after the sudden death of his wife. With a passionate, despairing voice, Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996), whom Gunter Grass once called the "greatest living German writer," creates a portrait of idealism crushed by political and personal compromise.

Literary

W.W.Norton&Company

Review\n"There are rare writers who inform and enthrall, even terrify. The gifted German enigma Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1990) is one such witness: candid and strange, allusive, unsettling. Time and again Koeppen stage-manages an unforgettable scene." 
― Irish Times\n"A kaleidoscopic narrative that follows a disparate cast of characters whose lives accidentally intersect during a single day in Munich, Germany, in 1948. Now available in an inspired new translation, this portrait of despair and endurance amid postwar ruin is nothing less than a miniature masterpiece." 
― Kirkus (STARRED)\n"Scathing, disillusioned novel ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany. Pigeons on the Grass is set in Munich on a single day and its 105 short fragments reveal the failure of more than thirty characters to face up to reality." 
― London Review of Books\n"Almost eerily contemporary in its concerns, and remarkable as a sidelong, searing appraisal of the legacy of the Nazi years, it is a recovered masterpiece." 
― Publishers Weekly (starred review)\n"Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history... a forgotten masterpiece." 
― The Evening Standard\n"In a many-toned language Koeppen not only depicts a cacophonous world but peoples that world with individuals whose lives barely overlap. The result documents a uniquely German situation; it also, with its echoes of James Joyce and John Dos Passos, reconnects the German novel at a surprisingly early date to modernist fiction." 
― The Independent\n"Koeppen’s voice―cold, defiant and relentless in its fury at the deadly amnesia he saw emerge from Germany's ruins after World War II―neither transforms nor imbues the world around him, but rather indicts it." 
― Peter Filkins, The New York Times\n"Koeppen’s prose, as deftly channelled by Hofmann (who acknowledges the ‘perfectly good’ version of 1988 by David Ward), seems to expand and contract to fill the space offered by each consciousness." 
― Dustin Illingworth, TLS\n"Germany’s greatest living writer." 
― Gunter Grass\n"Those who haven't read this novel cannot claim to know German literature after 1945." 
― Marcel Reich-Ranicki\n"Among the earliest, grandest, and most poetically satisfying reckonings in fiction with the postwar state of the world." 
― Michael Hofmann\n"Scathingly beautiful―lyrically inescapable." 
― Nadine Gordimer\n"Wolfgang Koeppen, a remorselessly brilliant German writer of the 20th century, has long remained scandalously obscure in the Anglophone world. His reputation can finally begin to flower with Michael Hofmann’s fine translation of Pigeons on the Grass, an acute and disquietingly contemporary novel about a society disfigured by racism and historical amnesia." 
― Pankaj Mishra\nWolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann 
Pigeons on the Grass is told over a single day in Munich in 1948. The first new cinemas and insurance offices are opening atop the ruins, Korea and Persia are keeping the world in panic, planes rumble in the sky (but no one looks up), newspaper headlines announce war over oil and atomic bomb tests. Odysseus Cotton, a black man, alights at the station and hires a porter; Frau Behrend disowns her daughter; with their interracial love affair, Carla Behrend and Washington Price scandalize their neighbors―who still expect gifts of chocolate and coffee; a boy hustles to sell a stray dog; Mr. Edwin, a visiting poet, prepares for a reading; Philipp gives himself up to despair; Emilia sells the last of her jewelry; Alexander stars as the Archduke in a new German Super-production; and Susanne seeks out a night to remember. In Michael Hofmann’s words, “in their sum, they are the totality of existence.” 
Koeppen spares no one and sees all in this penetrating and intense novel that surveys those who remain, and those who have just arrived, in a damaged society. As inventive as Joyce and as compulsively readable

Pigeons on the Grass

Humor & Satire

New Directions

The Hothouse traces the tragic final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of his country after World War II. Following his self-imposed exile during the war, Keetenheuve returns to the hothouse: the city of Bonn, the capital of that new postwar capitalist nation, West Germany. Until this point he has led a life guided by principle and political optimism. Here, in spellbinding internal monologue and jarring montage, he meets his end. The Hothouse is an existential masterpiece and a portrait of a moral man crushed by an immoral world.&nbsp;Bitterly controversial at home, a cult writer abroad, Koeppen (1906-1996) brought a volcanic modernist style to German literature that remains unparalleled to this day. His uniquely radical voice and breathtaking prose is rendered magnificently by Michael Hofmann. Bitterly controversial at home, a cult writer abroad, Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996) brought a volcanic modernist style to German literature that remains unparalleled to this day. His uniquely radical voice and breathtaking prose are rendered magnificently by Michael Hofmann.&nbsp;

The Hothouse

Genre Fiction

Death in Rome tells the story of four members of a German family--a former SS officer, a young man preparing for the priesthood, a composer, and a government administrator--reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome. A chilling account of Nazis after the war, here the older generation is resentful but not repentant. From the old unreconstructed Nazi officer Judejahn (the name has a suggestion of "Jew hunter") to the young and apparently gay priest, from the supposedly reformed Mayor to the acclaimed but haunted young composer Siegfried, no clear hope emerges. And amid haunting flashbacks and against the shadows of Rome with its imperial echoes, the darkness is alive. Brace yourself: the novel takes place over a two-day period, mostly at night, and it's certain that the present will be governed by the past, if you let it. In Death in Rome, Koeppen amply demonstrates that evil doesn't simply cease once it loses a war--it seeps out, hungry to exist in other forms. And as Siegfried confesses: "In my daydreams and nightmares I see the Browns and the nationalist idiocy on the march again." With Pigeons in the Grass and The Hothouse, it concludes Koeppen's masterful trilogy.&nbsp;

Here is an English translation of a post-war German classic. The events of the novel take place during the course of a single day in an unnamed city in occupied Germany where the endless drone of allied planes overhead increases the already heightened tension. Throughout this powerful narrative, the characters' experiences ultimately reveal how and at what cost Germans in the 1950s, by failing to confront their recent past, blinded themselves to its after effects.

Pigeons on the Grass (Modern German Voices Series) (English and German Edition)

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Holmes & Meier Pub

Here is an English translation of a post-war German classic. The events of the novel take place during the course of a single day in an unnamed city in occupied Germany where the endless drone of allied planes overhead increases the already heightened tension. Throughout this powerful narrative, the characters' experiences ultimately reveal how and at what cost Germans in the 1950s, by failing to confront their recent past, blinded themselves to its after effects.

Pigeons on the Grass (Portico Paperbacks Series)

Reference

Amerikafahrt by Wolfgang Koeppen is a masterpiece of observation, analysis, and writing, based on his 1958 trip to the United States. A major twentieth-century German writer, Koeppen presents a vivid and fascinating portrait of the US in the late 1950s: its major cities, its literary culture, its troubled race relations, its multi-culturalism and its vast loneliness, a motif drawn, in part, from Kafka’s Amerika. A modernist travelogue, the text employs symbol, myth, and image, as if Koeppen sought to answer de Tocqueville’s questions in the manner of Joyce and Kafka. Journey through America is also a meditation on America, intended for a German audience and mindful of the destiny of postwar Europe under many Americanizing influences.

Journey Through America (Transatlantic Perspectives, 1)

Kimmage, Michael

Americas

Berghahn Books

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Books by Koeppen, Wolfgang

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Death in Rome (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

The Hothouse: A Novel

Death in Rome

The Hothouse: A Novel

Pigeons on the Grass

The Hothouse

Death in Rome

Pigeons on the Grass (Modern German Voices Series) (English and German Edition)

Pigeons on the Grass (Portico Paperbacks Series)

Journey Through America (Transatlantic Perspectives, 1)