Death in Rome Read online

  WOLFGANG KOEPPEN

  DEATH IN ROME

  TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION

  BY MICHAEL HOFMANN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Copyright Wolfgang Koeppen, 1954 Introduction and translation copyright Michael Hofmann, 1992 All rights reserved The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

  INTRODUCTION

  It was the painter Kokoschka who said, 'If you last, you'll see your reputation die three times, and even three cultures.' This is just what has happened to Wolfgang Koeppen, whose career has spanned six decades, from Weimar to post-Unification Germany. Important critics have repeatedly hailed him as—with Grass—'the greatest living German writer', but in spite of that, he has remained vastly less known and less read, a victim of call it what you will: Kokoschka's 'Law of Longevity', the censorship of fashion, the tyranny of neglect, the neglect of fashion, the fashion of neglect . . . Articles on him have been published with titles one might translate as 'Wolfgang Koeppen: the Anatomy of a Failure'. However, the failure is not Koeppen's but Germany's, and its circumstances are both specific and illuminating.

  Koeppen was born in 1906 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast. He studied, in the German manner, various subjects at various universities he doesn't seem to care to have publicized, and probably never took his degree. From 1931 to 1934 he had what he described as the only regular employment of his life, when he worked as a journalist for the Berliner Börsen-Courier. He published a novel, Eine unglückliche Liebe (An Unhappy Love Affair), left Germany for Holland in 1935, published another, Die Mauer schwankt (The Tottering Wall), but returned to Germany before the war broke out. He then dropped out of view until the 1950s, when, in the space of four years, he published the three novels that (perhaps for the second time!) made his reputation, all of them written very quickly, in no more than three or four months apiece, he says. These books are among the best things to have come out of post-war Germany: Tauben im Gras (Pigeons on the Grass; there is an English translation by David Ward, published by Holmes & Meier in 1988), set in Munich in a single day, a modernist jigsaw in 110 pieces and showing 30 figures; Das Treibhaus (The Hothouse), about the dilemma of a Socialist member of the Bundestag during a rearmament debate, and something of a succès de scandale; and Death in Rome, the most accessible and I think the best of the three, about a German family reunion in Rome. The three books form a loose trilogy, an interrogation of the Federal Republic's phoenix act, the famous Wirtschaftswunder. Since then, in almost forty years, Koeppen has published only one short work of semi-fiction, Die Jugend (Youth), three travel books about Russia, America and France, and some essays and reviews. His silence—which is perceived as such—is one of the loudest things in German literature today.

  So much for the fast-forward version. Taken a little more slowly, it shows the troubling shape of a career in twentieth-century German letters. Where Chancellor Kohl congratulated himself on being born late, Koeppen could lament being born early. He was formed by the 1920s, the great decade of modernism, late expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit. He read Proust, Kafka, Faulkner and Woolf as they appeared. Ulysses—the 1926 small-press edition of the first German translation—was the stuff his dreams were made of. By the 1930s his own career had begun. He went abroad. He wasn't a Nazi. He returned. He didn't have the reputation, the contacts, the command of foreign languages to enable him to make his way in exile. Nor did he lay claim to the condition of 'internal exile'. Along with the poet Gottfried Benn and a very few other significant writers he lived through the period in Germany.

  This put him at a disadvantage later. One might have supposed that the status quo ante 1933 would be restored as a matter of urgency, but that isn't what happened. Instead, the story was one of discontinuity. It was as though the literature had been bombed as the cities had been. It took until the 60s and even the 70s for the classic books of the 20s and 30s—a Silver Age of German letters—to get back into print, for the still-living writers from that period to be 'discovered' and the dead ones to be exhumed. Precedence was given to the returning exiles—to Thomas Mann in the West, Brecht in the East—and to the work of new writers like the Gruppe 47. The preferred form for literature was a clean slate, with only the distinguished markings of a very few on it—the ones with cast-iron alibis. It was a very German solution—Schwamm drüber!—unjust and evasive and superficial, an extension of collective amnesia.

  Koeppen's position was exacerbated by the nature of the books he wrote and published in the early 50s. Far from underwriting a fresh start, they connected stylistically with the 20s and politically with the 30s. They were works of memory and continuance and criticism—and they were savaged for it by the press. The response to them was characterized by 'hostility, even revulsion and repugnance' (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). Their detractors squealed at their ferocity and outspokenness, their self-conscious and difficult technique, their sexual content. 'Is this really what we need at such a time in our history?' (always an obnoxious argument in literary politics) was the gist, 'let's look on the bright side!' Even those praising Koeppen were embarrassed by the political content of his books, or sold their artistry short. And so the conservatism of the modish and dirigible German public won out. Koeppen's books never had anything like the currency and acclaim they deserved.

  Five years later, Grass's Die Blechtrommel appeared; another four, and Boll's Ansichten eines Clowns; and the internationally accredited commodity 'post-war German literature' had come into existence. The earliest and fullest and most drastic description of German post-war reality didn't figure in it. Anyway, whether for that reason or others, Koeppen gave up fiction. His travel books were respectfully reviewed—no one to tell him what he had and hadn't, could and couldn't see—but as a writer of fiction, in spite of the efforts of two determined publishers and a handful of cognoscenti, he has ceased to exist. It is a great scandal.

  Death in Rome is the most devastating novel about the Germans that I have ever read, and one of the most arresting on any subject. It takes a German family—not a real German family, not even a caricature German family, but a prototypical German family that George Grosz would have had the bile but not the wit to invent, and Musil or Mann the wit but not the bile—and brings them to Rome, a city having an association with Germans that goes back hundreds of years, there to enact their conflicts. It is a history book, a family book, a book about the battle over who gets to represent the authentic face of Germany.

  Significantly, this German family is all male. (Of course there are women in it too, but they are minor, though also well done.) There is the older generation, consisting of Gottlieb Judejahn, the unreconstructed and unkillable old SS man, and his brother-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, who held office under the Nazis and is once more making his way up the greasy pole, this time as democratically elected burgomaster; and there are their respective rebel sons: Adolf Judejahn, who is on his way to becoming a Catholic priest, and his cousin, Siegfried Pfaffrath, a composer of serial music. (There is also Siegfried's conformist brother Dietrich, but let's forget about him for the moment.) These four represent the four principal areas of German achievement, or the four quarters of the riven German soul: murder, bureaucracy, theology and music. It is like having Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Luther and Beethoven in one family. Their movements, their meetings and remeetings in the alien city of Rome—which, interestingly, offers each of them what they want, so each of them sees it in a different version—are, as the novelist and critic Alfred Andersch pointed out, choreographed like a ballet: a macabre ballet of outrageous contrivance, viewed by the reader with growing horror, alarm and incredulity: how dare these people show their faces, how can they belong together . . .

  This is part of Koeppen's point. Chur
ch and state. Music and the camps. You can't have one of them without the others. In the 50s when Germany wanted severance and disavowal of the past, Koeppen showed it bonds of steel and blood instead. He gave Germans a character at a time when they were supposed not to have one; he wrote the history of a period that strove for greyness, and—until invented by Fassbinder—had seemed invisible: whatever happened between 1945 and the World Cup in 1966?! There is something implacable, almost vindictive—like one of his Furies—about his pursuit of the Germans postwar, post-Holocaust, post-division, turning away from their crimes towards rehabilitation and the EC, once again exporting their goods and their culture and themselves. He shows them to us. All of them.

  Death in Rome is a comprehensive and brilliant provocation of an entire nation (it's only a pity that the nation didn't respond a little better to it). It begins, like all the best German stories, with the words, 'Es war einmal . . .', 'Once upon a time', and it ends with a dirty, tawdry version of the last sentence of Death in Venice (the original of which is helpfully given as an epigraph). In between there are countless glancing references to German history, from Roman times to when the novel was written in 1954. There is a whole micro-plot about the German presence in Rome, from Alaric the Goth to the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (who was also Emperor of Germany, is known as Karl der Grosse, and lies buried in Aachen), Henry IV's penitential visit to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa, the cultural trippers of the Grand Tour including Goethe, and finally Hitler himself on his fraternal visits to Mussolini. In their various ways—destroyer, ruler, penitent, tourist, warrior—these are all antecedents for the various Judejahns and Pfaffraths who have descended on the city now. As I said before, Koeppen is interested in establishing continuity and pattern.

  Most of the German references concern the Nazi period—although the Nazis themselves, in their hunt for legitimacy and historical validation, had a deliberate policy of reinvesting old words, old places, old habits and old wars. For instance, they set up their élite 'Napola' schools in the old Teutonic fortresses in the East—which is why Adolf and Siegfried talk about their school as the Teutonic castle or academy; they revived concepts like the Femegericht, the 'Vehmic Court', first used in fourteenth-century Westphalia, then applied to political killings in the 1920s; they tried wherever possible to associate themselves with the military traditions of German history. And so the great majority of these terms and references are military or power-related, and are woven in around the figure of Judejahn, whose own immaculate National Socialist c.v. takes in everything that was anything in terms of right-wing murder and thuggery in the years after 1918: the Ruhr Uprising, the Freikorps, the Kapp Putsch, the Black Reichswehr. Of course, it's all too bad to be true—no single person can have participated in all of the above—but it tags, insists, calls to mind, reinforces the myth. Koeppen is calling the German language as evidence of the recurring violence and power-lust of German history.

  I would like the English reader not to be too bothered by all this. If it's any comfort, I doubt whether most German readers would be able to explain half the references. It isn't necessary. You take in the principle of historical labelling and cross-referencing, feel the (foreign) texture of the word, take from the context whether it's a building or a political movement or a personality that's being referred to, and pass on. It can be read pedantically—by all means, consult an encyclopaedia—but it wasn't written in such a spirit, and the original didn't come with notes either. Death in Rome works as myth much better than as an agglomeration of allusions.

  Koeppen seems to sit on the shoulders of his four main protagonists and parrot their thoughts and impressions: the brutal, rueful Judejahn (rueful for not having killed more); the discriminations—havering but also frank in their way—of Siegfried; pat Adolf and fearful Pfaffrath. In the modernist manner, they take up prismatically different attitudes to the same things: sex, dress, food, the gods and God, myth, Rome. Judejahn has his desert, and Siegfried the Africa for his black symphony. The spooky arms-dealer Austerlitz has his warmed milk, Siegfried and Adolf their ice-cream. Everywhere there is congruence and difference. The events and perspectives of the book are related in a wonderful, highly wrought and rhythmic prose—how many novels are there about which you can say they have rhythm?—short, spat-out sentences, and long, sweeping, comma'd-off periods, protocols of consciousness that are actually less difficult to follow than they seem. Koeppen's style commends itself both to the eye and the ear, as much as to the cells of memory and knowledge. It was the style—gorgeous, bristling, pugnacious—that got me sold on the book, and that from the very first sentence: 'Once upon a time, this city was a home to gods . . .' If that worked, then everything else had to, too.

  A note on the names. Both surnames are significant fabrications: 'Judejahn' from Jude, a Jew, and jahn, not a word but like a cross between Wahn, madness, and jäten, to weed out; and Pfaffrath, from Pfaffe, a disrespectful term for a priest, and rath, council or counsel. With the first names, there is an awful irony in the way the fathers have named the sons—and been named by their own fathers before them!—as they themselves should have been named. No one likes or fits his own name. There is a narcissistic syncopation in the way the Nazis have names from the pious empire, Friedrich Wilhelm and Gottlieb (love-god); and the rebels and expatriates are called Adolf and Siegfried. Siegfried's brother Dietrich is named by Koeppen after Diederich, the creepy and servile anti-hero of Heinrich Mann's novel Der Untertan; while the word 'Dietrich' means a picklock. Truly, he will inherit the earth.

  I have various debts to record: to the bookseller Barbara Stiess in Berlin, who first recommended Koeppen to me; to Daniel Halpern for his unforgettably impulsive agreement to publish the book; and to Joseph Brodsky, for the gift of a Mussolini T-shirt, in which I did as much of the work as was decently possible. Thank you!

  Michael Hofmann London, March 1992

  DEATH IN ROME

  Il mal seme d'Adamo

  Dante, Inferno

  And before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.

  Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

  PART ONE

  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, a couple of monarchs and their purblind generals, high-flying civil servants, scholars that made it into the reference books, artists of academic distinction. Who gives a damn about them? The tour group stand in the ancient vaults, and gawp up at the light falling on them like rain through the only window, the circular opening in the cupola that was once covered with bronze tiles. Is it golden rain? Danaë succumbs to the approaches of Thomas Cook and the Italian Tourist Board; but without much enthusiasm. She won't lift her skirts to receive the god into her. Perseus won't be born. Medusa gets to keep her head and moves into a swish apartment. And what about great Jupiter? Is he here in our midst? Could he be the old fellow in the Amex office, or the rep for the German-European Travel Agency? Or has he been banished to the edge of town somewhere, is he in the asylum enduring the questions of nosy psychiatrists, or languishing in the state's prisons? They've installed a she-wolf under the Capitol, a sick and depressed animal, not up to suckling Romulus and Remus. The faces of the tourists look pasty in the light of the Pantheon. Where is the baker that will knead them, where is the oven that will give them a bit of colour?

  Wrong, the music sounded wrong, it no longer moved him, it was almost unpleasant to him, like hearing your own voice for the first time, a recording coming out of a loudspeaker, and you think, well, so that's me, that braying twit, that phoney, that smoothie, and in particular it was the violins that were wrong, their sound was too lush; it wasn't the unearthly wind in the trees, it wasn't the child's conversation with the daemon at nightfall, that wasn't what fear of being sounded like, it wasn't so measured, so well-tempered, it should be more tormenting, more passionate, old panic fe
ar of the green trees, of the expanse of the sky, of the drifting clouds—that was what Siegfried had meant to sing, and he had totally and utterly failed, and so now he felt weak and timid, he felt like crying, but Kürenberg had been reassuring and praised the symphony. Siegfried admired Kürenberg, the way he ruled with his baton, the plenipotentiary of the notes; but still there were times when Siegfried felt violated by him. Then Siegfried would get angry with himself for not putting up any fight. He couldn't; Kürenberg was so knowledgeable, and Siegfried was green and no match for him in musical theory. Kürenberg smoothed, accented, articulated Siegfried's score, and Siegfried's painful groping, his search for a sound, the memory of an Edenic garden before the dawn of mankind, an approximation to the truth of things, which was by definition unhuman—all that, under Kürenberg's conducting hand, had become humanistic and enlightened, music for a cultured audience; but to Siegfried it sounded unfamiliar and disappointing, the feeling now tamed and striving for harmony, and Siegfried was worried, but then again the artist in him enjoyed the precision, the clarity of the instruments, the care with which the celebrated hundred-strong orchestra were playing his composition.

  In the concert hall there were laurel trees growing in green-painted tubs, or perhaps it was oleander; anyway the same thing that grew in crematoria, and even in high summer looked somehow wintry. 'Variations on Death and the Colour of Oleander' had been the title of Siegfried's first major composition, a septet that had remained unperformed. In the first draft he had had in mind his dead grandmother, the only member of his family to whom he had been at all close; perhaps because she had been such a strange and silent presence in the noisy and bustling house of his parents, forever echoing to the tramp of jackboots. And what a ghastly send-off they'd given her. His grandmother was the widow of a pastor, and had she been able to watch, she would have hated the technology and comfort, the hygiene and slickness, with which she had been turned to ashes, the deft and indifferent address, while the wreath, with the garish swastika ribbon that the SA Women's Section had contributed, was certainly repugnant to her, even if she would never have spoken out against it. But then, in the second version of his septet, Siegfried had tried to express something more universal and more suspect, a secret opposition, suppressed, brittle, romantic scraps of feelings, and in its posture of resistance his composition resembled a rose-garlanded marble torso, the torso of a young warrior or a hermaphrodite in the blaze of single combat: it represented Siegfried's rebellion against his surroundings, against the prisoner-of-war camp, against the barbed-wire fences, against his comrades with their boring conversations, against the war, for which he held his parents responsible, against his whole hellish and hellbent Fatherland. Siegfried wanted to pay them all back, and so, having read in an English newspaper that Kürenberg, who had been a rising conductor in Germany before the war, was now in Edinburgh, he had written to him, asking for some examples of twelve-tone music, a form of composition that was considered unacceptable in Siegfried's youth, and which now attracted him for that very reason, because it was frowned upon by those in power, his hated teachers at the military academy, his feared Uncle Judejahn, the mighty man whose glowering image in the vile uniform had hung over his despised father's desk, and Kürenberg had sent works by Schönberg and Webern to Siegfried in his camp, and sent a friendly note to accompany them. The scores were in the old Universal edition, published in Vienna before Siegfried's time and then banned after the Anschluss of Austria. The music represented a new world for Siegfried, it opened a gate for him, not just in the barbed-wire prisoner-of-war compound, but in something still more constricting. And afterwards he refused to crawl back under the yoke as he called it, the war was lost, and he at least had been freed, and no longer deferred to the views of the family to have been born into which had always seemed ghastly to him.