Wolfgang Koeppen’s “The Hothouse”

Proud that he had survived the Second World War in his homeland of Germany without somehow having to serve in Hitler’s military, the German writer Wolfgang Koeppen once said “I asked myself what I had been waiting for all those years, why I had been a witness and why I had survived.” (From his obituary in The Independent.) The question I kept asking myself as I read the triptych of novels that Koeppen wrote in the early 1950s was: What did Koeppen’s role as a “witness” play in the outcome of these novels? What might we, as readers turning the pages of Koeppen’s novels, identify as evidence of “witnessing” Hitler’s rise to power, propelling the Nazi movement, and turning the German nation into sheep while he and his generals pursued the Final Solution against the Jews and a World War that killed tens of millions of people? Were these novels really different from those of someone who had not lived through what Koeppen had experienced, someone who might observed the Nazi years from Canada, say?

The first book in his trilogy, Pigeons on the Grass, set in postwar Munich (reviewed here), involves some ordinary German citizens—along with a handful of Americans. At most, this novel suggests that we don’t actually listen to other people very well. The final novel in the series, Death in Rome (reviewed here), involves several truly heinous Germans, including an SS officer who has been found guilty and condemned to death in absentia at the Nuremberg Trials. This novel, which I think is the best of the three, provides the most serious indictment of German mindset and German civilization through its critique of Teutonic ideals that extol dangerous hypermasculine traditions. The Hothouse, on the other hand, which is the series’ middle novel, is about bureaucracy of the postwar West German government in Bonn. It deals exclusively with postwar life and its main character, Herr Keetenheuve, was not in Germany at all from 1933 through 1949, but was in self-imposed exile in Canada.

Let’s look at The Hothouse, then we’ll ask ourselves what Koeppen has accomplished across the course of his three novels. This book follows a few days in the life of Herr Keetenheuve, a member of the postwar Bundestag. When we first see him he is returning to Bonn on the Nibelungen Express having just buried his wife, Elke. The first pages are dotted with references to Richard Wagner’s multi-opera known as the Ring Cycle. As the train travels alongside the Rhine, Koeppen invokes the dwarf Alberich, the “twilight of the gods,” the Rhine Maidens, and the “Wagalaweia” sound of the train’s wheels, which alludes to the Wagalaweia songs of the Ring Cycle. All of these references signal that we are in the land of the grand Teutonic myths of which Hitler was so fond. In 1936, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote a prescient piece called “Essay on Wotan,” in which he clearly identified the mythology of the Ring Cycle as an integral part of the Nazi program:

The emphasis on the Germanic race—commonly called “Aryan” — the Germanic heritage, blood and soil, the Wagalaweia songs, the ride of the Valkyries, Jesus as a blond and blue-eyed hero, the Greek mother of St. Paul, the devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic guise, the Nordic aurora borealis as the light of civilization, the inferior Mediterranean races—all this is the indispensable scenery for the drama that is taking place and at the bottom they all mean the same thing: a god has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a “mighty rushing wind.”

In 1933, just as Hitler rose to power, Keetenheuve, who describes himself as an ascetic, a Buddhist, a disciple of Zen, and a pacifist, fled Germany to Canada. He then returned at the end of the war, optimistic and “eager to reinvent the nation as a liberal democracy.” Elke, the woman who is half his age and who will become his wife, seems to symbolize his dedication to the future. He literally rescued her from the rubble when she was only sixteen, after her father (a high-ranking Gauleiter) and her mother committed suicide by swallowing cyanide as the war came to an end. But now, with Elke’s death, he feels “he had failed. Failed at every one of life’s crossroads. . . He had failed in his profession. He couldn’t cope with existence. . .”

Many of Keetenheuve’s positions make him a thorn in the side of his own political party, which, along with the German Chancellor, is pushing for significant German rearmament after the war. The party even attempts to buy Keetenheuve off by offering him the ambassadorship to Guatemala, but he refuses. “The knives are out for you,” he is warned. Repeatedly, Keetenheuve finds his political ambitions for postwar Germany thwarted because so many of the leaders of government, industry, the military, and even the press are tainted by the roles they played during the Nazi era, and their goals are now the opposite of his. They are building “careers,” they have expensive cars, chauffeurs, and the most desirable apartments. Many of them want to revive the National Socialist party and rearm the German military. Only Keetenheuve is clean—and therefore doomed.

Koeppen positions Keetenheuve’s “failure” as a two-part problem. He is continually losing at politics and he has lost his marriage. At the Bundestag, being “the permanent opposition was no fun.” As a liberal, he felt like “a foolish knight, crusading against a 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, she tossed a windmill his way, good enough for that old-fashioned Don Quixote.” Nevertheless, he worked so hard at the office that he “forgot that a sun was shining on him, that a miracle had befallen him, that a woman loved him, that Elke, with her smooth young skin, loved him.” Keetenheuve was absent so often, at the office or on business trips, that Elke had fallen for another woman, who is known as “la Wanowski.”

Eventually, Keetenheuve falls into a kind of despairing madness in language that seems like it is trying to be a “stream of conscious,” but by any literary standard falls short. Every now and then it feels like Koeppen tries to get a little too “literary” (a little too Virginia Woolf-y, say), and it doesn’t come off well.

He saw the weepy immortelles of the graveyard in the pale flicker of the lightning. He breathed in the smell of moldy, damp yew hedges, the sweet corruption of rotting roses in funereal wreaths. The graveyard wall seemed to flinch in the lightning. Fear and trembling. Kierkegaard. Nursemaid consolation for intellectuals. Silence. Night. Keetenheuve timid night bird Keetenheuve night owl at the end of its tether Keetenheuve pathetic wanderer down cemetery avenues, ambassador to Guatemala lemurs accompany him.

But here’s the rub. From the moment we meet Keetenheuve on the train, returning from his wife’s funeral, he has been dreaming of murdering la Wanowski with an ax to the tune of Rosemary Clooney singing “Botch-a-Me.” (Yes, you read that right.)

Bee-oo, bye-oh, bee-oo, boo
Won’t you botch-a-, botch-a-me
Bee-oo, bye-oh, bee-oo, boo
When you botch-a-me
I a-botcha you and ev’rything goes crazy

Why? Well, la Wanowski happens to be a “bull dyke” who rules over “the tribades” (Google it). Her “square padded shoulders were a metaphor for penis envy.” She’s the “invert from the National Socialist Women’s Association” who has lured Elke away from “the ghastly, oppressive, voluble, swarming, frothy intellectualism of Keetenheuve” with a voice that reminds her of her Gauleiter father’s “low imperious voice.” Keetenheuve wants revenge. Later, toward the end of the novel, Keetenheuve will encounter a pair of young girls who are soliciting funds for the Salvation Army, which Koeppen likens to the Winterhelfswerk, which translator Michael Hofmann identifies as a Nazi Christmas charitable collection. Keetenheuve is sure that one of the girls, Gerda, is another National Socialist “dyke,” while the younger girl, Lena, becomes the object of his obsession. In the book’s final scene, which is one of the most wonderfully operatic, outrageous scenes I have ever read in a novel, complete with “Negro drums,” devils and vermin that are creating a homunculus, and “chimneys [that] popped up like erect penises,” Keetenheuve will take (or rape) Lena while he demands that Gerda sing a heavenly bridegroom song. Koeppen, it seems, has a thing about lesbians.

Despite being a self-described “witness” to the Hitler years and World War II from his vantage point in Munich, Koeppen’s three novels don’t provide any real in-depth analysis of what led the German people into the catastrophe of a world war or why Hitler’s machine why free to pursue unfettered by opposition the Final Solution that succeeded in murdering more than six million Jews. At most, Koeppen identifies the German love of Teutonic mythology and a tendency toward hypermasculinity as the primary elements that led Germans astray. And, as we have seen with la Wanowski in The Hothouse and with Judejahn in Death in Rome, Koeppen wants to hypersexualize the worst of his characters as a way of making them repellent and tainted by their Nazi backgrounds or connections. Certain Teutonic men have too much testosterone and certain Teutonic women, well, they become lesbian “bull dykes,” apparently. Pretty much every critical action taken by any character in this triptych of novels is motivated by sex. I’ll let the Freudians take it from here.

In the end, I would posit that there are few, if any, observations or conclusions that Koeppen puts forth in these novels that resulted from his having lived as a “witness” in Germany throughout the Hitler years and World War II. More likely, his wartime experiences compelled him into writing these three vital, sometimes angry novels. Wolfgang Koeppen may be not have been a Hannah Arendt, but that is not to say that he isn’t an important, occasionally innovative writer. He knew that a fast-paced novel will keep the reader engaged. Scenes rarely last more than a few pages, and are sometimes much shorter, and he tends to quickly shift from character to character, the way so many contemporary television shows do. These books also play with time and space cinematically, sometimes moving the reader from one character to the next—characters who may not even be in physical proximity to each other—while keeping time synchronous, like a baton hand-off in a virtual relay race.

Koeppen was also a bit prescient about modern politics.

“We know it’s a lie, a completely baseless story. But one day a newspaper decides to print it, for the hell of it. If you’re lucky, it’s forgotten again. But then someone else runs it. You know Hitler knew a thing or two about black propaganda, and what is it he says in his book? You repeat the lie over and over again. A man’s name is Bernhard. You call him Isaac. You do it again. You keep on doing it. Never fails.”
“We’re not at that stage again”
“You’re right. Not yet.”

I highly recommend all three of these novels. They can each be read independently of the others.

The Hothouse. NY: W.W. Norton, 2001. Translated from the 1953 original German by Michael Hofmann. See my reviews of Pigeons on the Grass and Death in Rome.

Death in Rome

From the title until the last words of the novel, Wolfgang Koeppen’s 1954 novel Death in Rome moves relentlessly towards its predicted fatal end. In our era, when novels so often consist of one digression after another, it’s a little startling to read a novel that signals its intentions from the start and never wavers for a moment. Like the first novel in Koeppen’s triptych, Pigeons on the Grass (which I wrote about recently), Death in Rome funnels everything toward one culminating event—in this case, a performance of a new piece of symphonic music by the young German composer Siegfried Pfaffrath, which will take place in a concert hall in Rome sometime in the years shortly after World War II. Siegfried doesn’t know it yet, but his parents, one of his brothers, and an uncle are also in Rome for a unique kind of family reunion. The most prominent of these relatives is Gottlieb Judejahn, a former SS general who has been convicted and sentenced to death in absentia at the Nuremberg Trails, but who now runs the military of an unnamed Arab nation under an assumed name. The family hopes to convince Judejahn to return to Germany to help revive the struggling National Socialist cause. Unbeknownst to everyone, Judejahn’s son Adolf is also in Rome, waiting to be ordained as a Catholic priest. Throughout the novel, we will follow these family members as they explore the Eternal City, meet in various combinations, plot, sin, and discover family secrets.

No sentence is wasted in this compact book of a mere 202 pages. The opening sentences let us know right away that Koeppen is not likely to allow any of his characters get through his novel unscathed. A group of tourists passing through Rome’s Pantheon.

Once upon a time, this city was a home to gods, now there’s only Raphael in the Pantheon, a demigod, a darling of Apollo’s, but the corpses that joined him later are a sorry bunch, a cardinal of dubious merit, high-flying civil servants, scholars that made it into the reference books, artists of academic distinction. Who gives a damn about them?

It will be family secrets and irrepressible personal urges that will ultimately prove fatal in Death in Rome. Koeppen’s conceit is to bring a handful of Germans to Rome, a city “built on the bodies of its victims,” let them loose in an inviting atmosphere, and watch them self-destruct. In doing so, Koeppen intends to let everyone’s true nature shine through, exposing, if everything goes according to plan, whatever might have led the German people to go astray in the first place.

Gottlieb Judejahn, “the butcher” and former SS general, has lived on the run since the end of World War II under an assumed name. In Rome to buy “tanks, guns, [and] aeroplanes” for his Arab military, he lets his guard down and consorts with sleazy ex-SS soldiers and Italian prostitutes. Throughout the book we see the fearless soldier “Judejahn” arguing with his child-self “Gottlieb.”

I only did what I was told, I only obeyed orders [Judejahn says to himself]. Did he have a conscience then? No, he was only afraid. He was afraid it might be discovered that he was little Gottlieb going around in boots too big for him. Judejahn heard a voice, but not the voice of God nor the voice of conscience, it was the thin, hungry, self-improving voice of his father, the primary schoolteacher, whispering to him: You’re a fool, you didn’t do your homework, you’re a bad pupil, a zero, an inflated zero. And so it was as well that he had stayed in the shadow of a greater being, stayed a satellite, the shining satellite of the most powerful celestial body, and even now he didn’t realize that this sun from whom he had borrowed light and licence to kill had himself been nothing but a cheat, another bad pupil, another little Gottlieb who happened to be the Devil’s chosen tool, a magical zero, a chimera of the people, a bubble that ultimately burst.

Judejahn’s wife, Eva, who is accompanying the Pfaffraths, is still “shedding tears for the Führer, lamenting the fact that treachery and betrayal and unnatural pacts had brought down the Germanic idea of world-salvation, the millennial Third Reich.” She has just learned for the first time that her husband is alive, although perhaps perpetrating “blood-treason and racial betrayal in the soft enemy climate, in rose-scented harem darkness, in garlic-reeking caves with Negresses and Jewesses, who had been waiting for revenge, and were panting for German sperm.”

Siegfried’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, his wife Anna, and his younger son Dietrich, are “fortunate survivors. . . with short memories,” who all wish for the return of National Socialism and a restrengthened, re-armed Germany. Friedrich feels it might be time for “a tighter rein” and deeply regrets that “the Jews were back in business.” He is embarrassed by what his son, the modernist composer, has become. Siegfried’s music strikes him as part of a frightening program of “surrealism, cultural Bolshevism and negroid newfangledness.”

Siegfried, an “involuntary soldier” during the war, had become a German POW in England during the the War. He then became a composer, vaguely hoping to do some good as an artist. But when pressed by Adolf, he admits that he doesn’t really think he can change people through his music and he can’t quite say why he is a composer.

Adolf, Judejahn’s son, was just a boy during the war. By becoming a priest he has enacted the ultimate betrayal of his father’s warrior and hyper-masculine ideals. As a child, his parents had sent him to a “Teutonic camp” run by the Nazis. On the way home, the train carrying many of the boys was crippled by Allied aircraft and as the children walked away they encountered another stopped train, one carried children that looked like skeletons. “They’re Jews!” the boys whispered to each other. “But they didn’t know why they should be afraid. They were German children, after all! They were the elect!” Adolf and one of the Jews eventually exchange jackets, which, ironically, allows Adolf to be rescued by Allied forces later on.

Even from this brief synopsis, it is clear that Koeppen has laid his agenda on thick. Yet the novel always reads as a lively story built around intriguing characters, some of whom are more richly constructed than others. Koeppen seems to suggest that Germany’s future is likely to be decided by which of the three sons—Siegfried, Adolf, or Dietrich— will dominate. Siegfried signifies culture, Adolf religion, and, as Siegfried says, his brother Dietrich is “the representative of law and order, of the state and the strong hand.” Siegfried predicts that “we’ll lose to Dietrich. My brother Dietrich will always get the better of us.” Why would he think that? I suspect because neither culture nor the church hindered the rise of the Nazis in any way and neither brother seems capable of effectively stopping the rise of any future fascist takeover.

Siegfried may be correct in believing that culture is powerless, but it does bring about a momentary crisis in his father’s conscience. For a brief spell after attending the concert, Siegfried’s father glimpses that there might have “been another road for Germany and himself than the military road.” However, this lasts only for a moment. “For men the reproachful voice of the night passes with the nocturnal trembling of the trees, and after a refreshing night’s sleep Pfaffrath will once more feel without strain, an upright German man and an Oberbürgmeister, free from guilt. . . But now, in this transfiguring hour of the night, he asked himself whether Siegfried and his symphony hadn’t sought the better home, and whether the notes jarring in Pfaffrath’s ear hadn’t held a dialogue with his own youthful soul.”

As one reads Death in Rome, it becomes apparent that Koeppen sees that the German problem (it’s a problem that larger than just the Nazi era) lies in its history of a male “fraternity” that bears the Teutonic ideals about race, masculinity, and war as a heroic enterprise—behaviors that he (and we) find toxic and repellant. For Koeppen, this behavior frequently plays out in the sexual lives of his characters. For example, when the ex-SS General Judejahn realizes that his son Adolf had been seated at the concert next to a Jewess, he was both “shocked and excited.”

Judejahn had no regrets about having killed, he hadn’t killed enough. . . the thought of a botched final solution to the Jewish problem, the thought of the mass executions he had ordered, the recollections of the photographs of naked women in front of the mass graves now roused perverted imaginings in him, it was a sin to consort with Jewesses. . . but the thought of sin tickled the testicles, stimulated sperm-production. . .

Even Siegfried has been tainted by his brief, unwilling indoctrination as a German soldier and has turned into a pederast. “Sometimes I yearned for contact, for warmth, for the smell of the herd and the stall, for a world of shared physicality, which I had lost, from which I had cut myself off, a compulsion I thought I was clear of, the boys’ world of the Teutonic castle, the smell of the dormitories, the naked bodies of the spartan regime, cross-country running in the early-morning mist in the woods.” As a result, Siegfried visits the male child prostitutes that hang out on the banks of the Tiber River and he frequents Rome’s gay bars.

Is it any wonder then that Judejahn’s son Adolf is becoming a celibate priest? (Although he, too, is sorely tempted by the same woman his father has been trying to seduce in Rome.) We will have to take up this matter of sexuality, gender, and Nazism, which is central to Koeppen, when we look at the middle novel in his trilogy, The Hothouse, in a future post.

Koeppen ends Death in Rome by making a direct allusion to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Koeppen’s final sentences echo the famous ending of Mann’s novella.

The ambulance men came, and a doctor closed his eyes. The ambulancemen were dressed in field grey, and they carried Judejahn off as though from a battlefield.

That same evening, Judejahn’s death was reported in the press; its circumstances had made it world news, though the fact of it can have shocked no one.

Wolfgang Koeppen, Death in Rome, translated by Michael Hofmann

Ω

Minutes passed before people rushed to the aid of the man who had slumped sideways in his chair. He was carried to his room. And that day a respectfully stunned world received word of his death.

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, translated by Michael Henry Heim

What are we supposed to think of this? I doubt that Koeppen is suggesting that we consider Judejahn, the aging SS General, and the enforcer of the Final Solution in relation to Gustav von Aschenbach, Mann’s aging titan of German literature who falls in love with a beautiful boy whom he spies on the beach one day. I think this has less to do with the two characters and more to do with Koeppen’s ambition for his trilogy of novels. I think he’s trying to stake a claim for the literary stature that he believes his German trilogy deserves.

Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome was published in Germany in 1954 as Der Tod in Rom and was translated into English by Michael Hofmann for the English publisher Hamish Hamilton in 1992. It’s now available in a Norton paperback. Hofmann has translated Koeppen’s triptych of postwar novels, Pigeons on the Grass (1951) (see my review here) and The Hot House (1953).

Pigeons on the Grass, Alas

“Eighty million Germans had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s nature. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so widespread—almost a moral prerequisite for survival—that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.” Hanna Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem, The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 1963.

That was Hanna Arendt, the great political philosopher, as she observed the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi organizers of the Holocaust, play out in Israel in 1963. She came to think that the “self-deception, lies, and stupidity” of the German population had played an important role in the ability of the Nazi party to dominate that nation for more than a decade and lead it into a war that caused tens of millions of deaths.

A dozen years earlier, the German writer Wolfgang Koeppen was also thinking about his fellow Germans as he began writing a triptych of novels that would also explore the mindset of the nation during this same period. Pigeons on the Grass, just translated by Michael Hofmann (New Directions, 2020) but originally published in Germany in 1951, is the first of the trio. In this wonderful, often antic but deadly serious novel, we follow the actions of approximately two dozen characters through a single day in post-war Munich. The Germans, along with a handful of their American “conquerors” who now occupy the city, shop, have coffee, run errands, pawn their valuables, and generally go about their daily lives. Everything is leading up to one main evening event: a lecture by an important American visiting poet, Edwin.