A friend just finished reading Death in Rome, Michael Hoffmann's translation of Wolfgang Koeppen's Der Tod in Rom (1954), and I realized I had purchased the novel years ago but never read it. Not sure why it took me so long to pick up, for the book is a masterpiece, and certainly stands up next to any postwar novel in Germany.
Actually, I know why it took me so long to pick up and read: Koeppen is unforgiving in his style. The sentences are unusually long, filled with mythological allusions; the narrative perspective shifts constantly without any transition, so the reader is constantly challenged to figure out which character is speaking or thinking. Koeppen brings the montage technique of film to the novel with startling effect. And then there is subject matter: death, decay, mass-murder, the dark undercurrent of German history -- not bestseller material. And, in fact, Der Tod in Rom sold only 6,000 copies when it was first published. Koeppen never wrote another novel, and died in 1996 in relative obscurity (there is not even a Wikipedia entry on him in English).
Der Tod in Rom is actually the final book in Koeppen's trilogy on postwar German Restoration; the first two are Tauben im Gras (Pigeons in the Grass) and Das Treibhaus (Hothouse). I have not (yet) read the first two, but if Der Tod in Rom is the final installment, then Koeppen had a very bleak view of the trajectory of history, and the future of the Bundesrepublik. I wrote in my last post about de-Nazification. Nothing was more absurd to Koeppen than the concept of de-Nazification. The central figure in Der Tod in Rom is the former SS-General Judejahn who remains true to the dream of the Third Reich, and who has nothing but contempt for those who have accommodated themselves to the realities of occupied Germany. His stream of consciousness is in the language of the Nazis, which was the last thing the German reading public in the 1950s wanted to hear. The counterpoint to Judejahn is his nephew Siegfried, a composer who fled Germany and who through his dissonant, serial compositions attempts to break the continuity of German cultural history. Siegfried is the only character in the novel whose thoughts are presented in the first person.
Der Tod in Rom is Koeppen's dark reworking of Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice). Forty years separate the two works, but during that period German history took a wrong turn; Koeppen's retelling must take into account the horrors of the recent past. There are some clear parallels to Mann: The theme of moral decay and death against the backdrop of a beautiful and historical city; Mann's Ashenbach risks death to experience the beauty of Tadzio, Judejahn must possess the prostitute Laura. While the man-boy love aspect is platonic in Mann, Koeppen's Siegfried is a pedophile who acts upon this impulse. Both works are infused with Greek and Roman mythology, filtered through Nietzsche. While Koeppen is to some extent the anti-Mann of the postwar novel, his themes echo those of Mann's famous essay Bruder Hitler (1939).
Der Tod in Rom is a tightly-structured short novel, nearly as short as Mann's famous Novella. Like Death in Venice it needs to be read several times to catch the symbolism and the nuances of the language. The final sentence is a nearly verbatim replay of the last sentence of Der Tod in Venedig. But where Mann is ironic, Koeppen is, at best, bleak. History has killed irony.
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