EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Death in Romeby Wolfgang Koeppen (1954)
AN UNPLANNED FAMILY reunion with a difference takes place in this daringly well choreographed exploration of the 20th century German dilemma. Here are all the defining elements of the nation of Goethe and Beethoven; music, war, guilt, racism, God, romance, mythology and history, always history.
Koeppen tells his story with an unnervingly candid mixture of irony and regret. If it is polemic, it is polemic as high art. The bizarrely dreamlike narrative structure spanning two hectic days ebbs and flows between snappy observation, symbolism and long flowing phrases; and between the contrasting preoccupations of a small group, each member of which has his or her own ghosts.
Young Siegfried Pfaffrath has come to Rome for the performance of his new symphony. Doubt stalks his every moment. “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 . . . in particular it was the violins that were wrong, their sound was too lush; it wasn’t the unearthly wind in the trees . . . it should be more tormented, more passionate. . . ” Siegfried feels like crying yet the conductor Kürenberg reassures him. The nervy composer, though troubled, manages to respond to the richness of Rome. Koeppen not only describes Siegfried’s sensations, Siegfried articulates his thoughts and fears.
The conductor's wife looks on. She knows that Siegfried "has come from my home town and he writes symphonies and his grandfather may have played the harpsichord or the flute, but his father killed my father, who collected books and loved listening to the Brandenburg Concertos." Siegfried's estranged father is also in Rome. Formerly a holder of high office under the Nazis, the grandly named Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, has managed to reinvent himself sufficiently to have resurfaced as a respectable bürgermeister. He and his wife are accompanied by their other son, Dietrich, already a civil servant in the making.
Pfaffrath’s brother-in-law, Gottlieb Judejahn, a former SS general, personifies the unredeemable face of Nazism, (and note the ironic use of Jude meaning Jew in the name). Symbolic intent is evident in the names Koeppen gives the central characters.
Drawn rather like a Grosz caricature, Judejahn is repulsive; detecting in every Italian female the face of a Jewish woman deserving to be killed. Holed up in a hotel with a mangy cat named Benito for company, Judejahn, refuses to accept he was on the losing side. He swaggers and fantasises about murder, victory and sex. Meanwhile his son, Adolf, has given up being a soldier and is preparing to become a Catholic priest.
Wolfgang Koeppen who was born in 1906 and died ninety years later, lived a life that spanned the German century. In the 1930's he published two novels, including the beautiful A Sad Affair. He went abroad and was never drawn to Nazism. Nor did he idealise his detachment and returned to Germany before the war. During the 1950's he published three openly political, courageous and stylistically ambitious novels; Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, which is a superb study of apathy, and Death in Rome. While his countrymen preferred to forget what happened, Koeppen confronted a past that was still too recent.
Long ashamed of his family, Siegfried continues to fret. Having agreed to meet his cousin Adolf he realises he has forgotten the arrangements: “Was it noon or was it later?” For the composer his cousin is an unhappy reminder of their shared history.
“He took me back to the oppressiveness of youth, the past, family, morning exercises and lessons in patriotism in the Nazi academy, and even though Adolf had, like me, immediately dissociated himself from those days. . .the whiff of family still clung to him. . .”
Published five years before The Tin Drum, Koeppen's remorseless tale explains a nation to the world and to itself.
- This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon