In the beginning there is always a child. The child has experiences and becomes the man or woman who remembers and, perhaps, the artist who imagines, reimagines and creates.
There are rare writers who inform and enthral, even terrify. The gifted German enigma Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1990) is one such witness: candid and strange, allusive, unsettling. Time and again in his five singular novels Koeppen stage-manages an unforgettable scene.
There’s nothing surprising in this: Koeppen worked in theatre and also film. He was always writing, even when nothing spilled on to the waiting pages. He wrote, or at least contemplated writing, in a dimly lit apartment in which three typewriters, each primed with a blank sheet, were ready for the words that teemed through his thoughts, if not actually into print.
Koeppen believed in the power of an image. Astonishingly vivid images haunt his work. One such picture of devastating power occurs in his novel The Hothouse (1953, English translation 2001). The central character, Keetenheuve, is an idealist and an intellectual but also a politician who tries to deal with the corruption surrounding him. He has returned to 1950s Bonn, which is referred to only as "the city on the Rhine". Surrounded by hypocrites adept at concealing their Nazi pasts, Keetenheuve is confronted by ordinary people who appear convinced that nothing happened: it is all rumour.
Keetenheuve is a quiet hero, without stain. He has returned to Bonn without war crimes to hide or defend. He has memories but no secrets. His only guilt is a social conscience and grief over the death of his troubled young wife.
He recalls something he once saw. “When Keetenheuve had voluntarily left the Fatherland, driven by nothing beyond his own profound disagreement with what was happening and what would shortly happen, on his way to Paris, [he] . . . had watched a procession of the Hitler Youth, and there before his eyes the large and colourful square had widened, and all of them, with their flags and pennants, and fifes and drums and daggers, they had marched into a wide and deep grave. They were the 14-year-olds following their Führer, and by 1939 they were 20-year-olds, which made them storm troopers, airmen and sailors – the very generation that died.”
Vital link
Koeppen, who is like no other 20th-century German writer, provides the vital link between Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin and Hans Fallada, the fabulist, burlesque polemic of Günter Grass and on to the elegiac narratives of ideas shaped so beautifully and profoundly by WG Sebald, who emerged in the 1990s, at about the same time Koeppen was being rediscovered.
For Koeppen had two literary careers, possibly three, and it was the third and final phase that produced this small marvel of an autobiographical novel. Youth, which he wrote in 1976, at 70, has been finally, and brilliantly, translated by Michael Hofmann. The poet also translated Koeppen's first novel, A Sad Affair, an evocative romance based on Koeppen's obsession in his youth with an actress. Not surprisingly, it failed to impress the Nazis in 1934 and was banned.
Koeppen was in the Netherlands, having left Germany in the early 1920s, yet he returned in 1939 and spent his entire life in Munich, dying there in 1996, three months shy of his 90th birthday. “It is perhaps my only boast,” he once said, “not to have served in Hitler’s armies for a single hour.”
There is a haphazard, almost absent-minded quality about his life. Writing was, for him, an enormous effort, but he was fortunate to have secured wise, nurturing publishers who kept faith in his genius. The Sad Affair is a seductive performance and an effective counter to Youth. Both have a dream-like insistence and feature a wilful young man intent on seeing things his way. A Sad Affair is often funny; Koeppen loves the zany self-destruction practised by young actors and performers as well as his besotted hanger-on central character, which he based on his younger self.
Youth is as intense but far more personal and impressionistic, high art with a poet's anger. It offers not only Koeppen's memories of his early years but also a film-like collage of pictures from his life in the little town of Greifswald. He lived with his mother, a lone parent deserted by her lover, a married doctor. She is recalled as a tragic victim, earning a pittance for her poor sewing work.
Koeppen shared his birthplace with the great German painter Caspar David Friedrich, as well as with another major writer, the troubled Fallada. Despite being a drug addict with personal problems, Fallada produced a far larger body of work during a life that lasted only half as long as Koeppen’s.
Youth is powered by extraordinary images, many influenced by Prussia's military past and by the inescapable shadow of the first World War, which appears to have haunted Koeppen throughout his life. For a time he attended a military school: "I looked down onto the barracks yard, gazed upon the barracks yard, I found it empty, a bare rectangle, a barren space . . . worn down by standing at attention and goose-stepping. The yard lay there terrorized. The soldiers had quit it."
His wartime struggle took place in a hospital bed as he contracted the great flu. His thoughts dart back and forth: “I’m standing in front of the headmaster, I am a body, I have a soul too but I am losing my soul, I have to be careful I don’t lose it altogether.”
Poverty constantly intrudes; his life with his mother is dominated by their need to hide from their debtors. The language is cryptic yet richly descriptive and very like the interior world of Samuel Beckett’s prose narratives. It is, in fact, a sonorously dramatic performance piece, moving between first- and third-person voices, to be read aloud.
All the while there’s a sense of the boy growing, his narrow world broadening thanks to his engagement with books. Reading opens his mind: “Behind the shop door hung a newspaper, and he read in the glimmer of a gaslight that Lenin had died.”
At one point he recalls the local courthouse: "Its popular old German boxy style of 1870 was evocative of South German towns, a folksy romanticism that I knew from paintings." It all seems innocently factual, but Koeppen then recalls: "I lost my way in panic, ran madly up and down stairs. I was looking for a door through which I could flee." It could act as a metaphor for his early life, and at times it echoes Knut Hamsun's classic Hunger (1890).
Koeppen's postwar trio is Pigeons on the Grass (1951), The Hothouse and his probable masterpiece, Death in Rome (1954; 1992). The latter, a symphonic study of the 20th-century German dilemma of guilt and denial, and the defining presence of Goethe and Beethoven, as well as mythology and history, assures his genius. In fact Death in Rome, remorseless and controlled, sets out to explain Germany not only to the world but also to itself. Koeppen, the reluctant writer who battled his art, achieved the impossible in Death in Rome. Twenty-two years later he struck again with Youth. This dazzlingly oblique late work explains and elaborates one man's personal odyssey and also that of a society inching towards atrocity.
