Wolfgang Koeppen (1906–1996)

You won't enjoy this if you're looking for 'three dimensional characters,' and you won't enjoy it if you're looking for anything about Rome: someone is dying in Rome because it's like dying in Venice, except it's the seat of empire. If you're willing to tread the line between actual human beings and symbols of German history, on the other hand, this is a very moving novel, very well translated and rather insightful. The ex (sic)-Nazi Judejahn is too bad to be true, but, on the other hand, show more Nazism was too bad to be true; his family includes a priest (desperately trying to purify himself for his youth in Hitler's school); a composer (trying to flee his youth...); a politician (trying to cover up his Nazi past, but not too much, because really, they were mostly right...); a conformist (who wants Germany to be great and misses the old greatness but, on the other hand, really would like a well-paying job); and Judejahn's wife, surely one of the most appalling characters in all of modern fiction--more Nazi than Himmler, if you like. These character-symbols wander around Rome and struggle with their historical situation in various ways. There are a few pointless formal tricks (paragraphs that don't end in a full stop!!! WOW!!!!), but this is a serious, well-formed, discomforting book. show less

Wolfgang Koeppen is one of the least well-known literary giants of the twentieth century. While his output consists of only five novels, they all are at least minor masterpieces, and his final novel, Death in Rome, ranks as a major one. In this subtle and spare novel, Koeppen creates a vision of the German postwar experience that is at once bleak and devastating. The four main characters of the novel meet in Rome, and in small pieces of their thoughts and their lives, the anxiety and show more sordidness of their world are laid bare for the reader. The death motif is perhaps the strongest from the title through to the end of the book, but Koeppen also uses symbolism and unique metaphors, particularly animals and insects, to heighten the impact of his story. None of the characters are likable, but like a Kafka novel, I found myself fascinated with them and the world inside their heads.

Of particular interest to me was the use of music and the representation of the composer, Siegfried Pfaffrath, as a modern serial composer in the mold of Schoenberg. His music is described as being like the "degenerate art" that the Nazis rejected, while in its modernism, it is not approved by the Catholic Church either. Some readers have made the comparison of the structure of the novel itself with a twelve-tone musical composition. Perhaps--but whether the comparison is apt, the novel certainly seems surrealistic, especially in the use of time in the movement and activities of the characters. I am impressed even more, as I reread it, with the way Koeppen uses every line and page to build the tension that explodes at the end of the novel. Death permeates this book in a way that few other novels rival. I think of Death in Venice, another twentieth-century masterpiece, but Mann's enterprise is more Nietzschean than Koeppen's. While Tolstoy comes to mind also, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich he seems a nineteenth-century precursor to the existentialism that would blossom a few decades later.

No, Koeppen is more at home in the post-war dilemma of Europe and Germany in particular. And the world he depicts is brutal and dark. It is as if, at least for some of the characters, the war has not ended. This is particularly true of Gottlieb "Gotz" Judejahn, who is at the center of the novel. Having disappeared, he is tried in absentia at Nuremberg and is effectively a ghost (as is his wife, Eva) who haunts Germany, not directly but from a distance - in Rome. The other haunting theme mentioned above is the 'new' music of Siegfried Pfaffrath--best described as a latecomer to the atonal style whose priest was Arnold Schoenberg. Late in the novel Siegfried meditates on the nature of music:

"Music was an enigmatic construction to which there was no longer any access, or just a narrow gate that admits only a few people. Whoever sat inside couldn't communicate to those on the outside, and yet they felt that this enigmatic, invisible construction, built by magic formulae, was important to them."

The structure of this novel and the thoughts of the characters, their communication or lack thereof, seem to mirror this image of music and its relation to those who hear and do not understand. Perhaps the only answer is to act out your lack of understanding--to end the dark, unbearable world with death.

Overall, the effect is impressive, with the result being a novel that challenges the reader with its taut presence. I found the challenge invigorating, and it encouraged further meditation on the ideas raised by the author. show less

As blurry as the photo on the cover page of the first edition are Koeppen's descriptions in the haze of memory. Koeppen describes his impressions, memories, thoughts and feelings about Venice in short vignettes. Meanwhile, he takes the reader on a leisurely stroll through Venice, past famous palaces, churches and towers. A wonderfully light read to dream away and revel in the beauty of Venice for a very short while, as the book has only a mere 63 pages.

It is 1950s Rome, a city which has ties with Germany going back centuries. Four members of a German family are reunited there by chance: Siegfried, a young composer; his father Friedrich, a former local official during the Nazi regime who has now resumed his public role as a democratically elected burgomaster; Judejahn, Siegfried's uncle, an unrepentant former SS general; and Judejahn's son, Adolf, a Catholic seminarian.

The younger generation attempts a return to expressions of Germany's show more glorious past. Adolf, with his tortured soul, seeks redemption in the enduring rituals of the Church. For Siegfried, it was the grand tradition of the creation of music -- both acts of cleansing, a renewal, an upliftment of the soul. By these vocations, they might escape the evil shadow which they until very recently, simpy by virtue of who they were, helped cast. The older generation, complicit and guilty, deals with it in the here and now, brutish and extreme. Judejahn, now a renegade military adviser to an unnamed country in the north of Africa, is the central figure in this story, whose actions precipitate the disastrous events that take place within a few days of the crossing and crisscrossing of paths of the members of this family in the labyrinthian maze of the ancient streets and belowground -- a kind of macabre ballet where each meeting raises the temperature a notch higher, and the reader watches with an almost morbid fascination the tension that must soon give. Koeppen draws us into the workings of Judejahn's mind, crazed with hatred still, and obssessed with the fact that he was not able to exterminate them all, and deluded with the idea of his eventual return to Germany, through the graces of his brother-in-law, to resurrect the Reich believing that among his countrymen, many remain believers. Friedrich is the ultimate bureaucrat, loyal during the regime, accommodating, a broker of conveniences, useful to whomever is on top.

The novel is full of symbolisms, beginning with the major characters' names. The characters represent four areas of German achievement, or as Michael Hoffmann, the translator, describes it, the four quarters of the riven German soul: murder, bureaucracy, theology, and music. Koeppen's writing is powerful, compelling, and at a time when the 1950s Germany wanted disavowal, severance, Koeppen opts for confrontation. He was (and seems to be, until now) little forgiven for this.

In taut and searing prose and a plot that is both complex and elegant, Koeppen draws a portrait of the wrestling of immediate post-war Germany with its demons that many prefer to bury. Notes by Hoffmann explain that Koeppen's books, even in Germany, never had the acclaim they deserved, because they unsettled. His position never attained that of the returning exiles like Mann and Brecht. As the preferred form of literature was a clean slate -- an extension of collective amnesia, the nature of Koeppen's work exacerbated his position. He wrote of memory, of continuance, of criticism -- he was savaged for it by the press, which responded with "hostility, even revulsion and repugnance." The political content of his books embarrassed even those who praised them -- the conservatisim of the German public won out. Interestingly, though, he won the Buchner prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award, in 1962. show less