But could I? Could I even cope with my own life? And then I thought: If Adolf and I can't cope with life, then we should at least unite against those unscrupulous people who want to rule because they are unimaginative, against the real Pfaffraths, the real Judejahns, the real Klingspors, and perhaps we could change Germany. But even as I was thinking that, it already seemed to me that Germany was past changing, that one could only change oneself, and everyone had to do that for him or herself, all alone, and I wished I was shot of Adolf. People remind each other of ghosts. Familial blood clots and colludes in the vein that threatens to burst over your strong brow. You are the amputated arm of country. It is like when you travel to another town and everything looks like home stepping in the same creaky floorboard. The big institutions of family like the same damned chain restaurants in every city. Power, military, church and the artistic soul in twenty-four hour lights. It is parades and it chimes doom or dinner bells. Time's road kill feasts.Gottlieb Judejahn tightens his butt cheeks as if he is going to omit a very big fart. He sits on the toilet throne of life, always on the verge of the silent and deadly void of judgement and hate. The former Nazi. The once upon a time an angry little boy looking for the ground to listen to him when he stomps out his mighty fears. What is he afraid of? He hates like the wheels a rat runs on in a cage. The image of his belt that raises his buttocks stuck with me. He feels like underwear sweat on a hot day. He gave me the creeps. I could see a mustache hovering in the air over fat and sweat and bulge. He is enormous in the mind's eye in this book. He is loud. Feel skinned and can't breathe when a man like this takes up all of the clean air to breathe with his murderer's foul mouth. He wasn't flushed down the toilet. He climbed back up and stunk up the middle east with power and demands. He's oozing through the pipes of the old city of Rome. It is old and there have been centuries of crap for him to fit right in. A man like Judejahn bides his time. A little boy like Gottlieb stamps his feet.His son Adolf was under the false sun of the hot lamps of family power. When the guns run out he opens his eyes like someone who doesn't know what they are seeing. He could be on another planet and there are no names for the starving Jewish boy from the concentration camp. No names for what they used to tell him in the training school. What does Father and Mother mean? There is a man he meets in a church. What does it mean to be a deacon now? You cannot forgive sins. This is what you can do. What does it mean to love? Forgiveness? It is a distance that is there. He walks the distance and I felt a blind mole rat in ancient city tunnels. I felt his no one is me no family. Father and son have a woman they see, Laura. Laura does not think. Laura cannot count. She works behind the counter in a gay bar. Laura senses intent, or is it interest, from the two men. She is a prize to be collected. Judejahn is all about getting between moist thighs. Flesh and sweat and moving. I squirmed to think of his organs squirming between their body parts. Laura's empty mind like a cow put me in mind of more meat and rutting. I felt nothing for them but saw again the mustache of the father and the clerical robes to hide what may or may not be underneath. What is a prize mean to me? She was a person. She should be a person. The men flow into brains on the page and I felt her no brain a lot. If a person can be a prize for someone else I felt why even bother.What would the nephew Siegfried, a musician, look like if he was not measured with a distance from a monster's face. If you were not looking for the same materials, to determine what sparked one to consume hell fires? What if death were not the answer but only how you wanted to live your life as it was then. Nothing to stand underneath. Nothing in the sky, nor in the past or answerable future. His father Friedrich is rising to power again, same as Judejahn. I was not surprised to read the introduction from translator Michael Hofmann explaining why Koeppen's books were not taken open arms by the German public. "We don't need this at this time in our history." Writers who moved into exile were welcomed back and those who did not weren't. I thought about this a lot about why Stanislaw Lem moved back to Poland after exile during martial law. He couldn't make a living as a Polish writer anywhere else. Likewise, that was what Koeppen could do. There was no where else for him to go. In hindsight where could he have gone? The world was fucked up and doing fucked up things. If one does not want to name themselves from the people before them. I have seen photographs of the forced confrontations after the war. German women looked like they wanted to be anywhere else. They looked like cows. What had happened before didn't exist for them anymore. I had this feeling about the younger Adolf and Siegfried about their parents. Their mothers and fathers felt the tragedy was that the Nazis did not succeed. I felt the underneath and when they look up I see underneath a belly of death. I hear words about love, about forgiveness and family and I do not feel the meaning. They could feel the guilt, the collective guilt. Is it helpless to that, to own the human features that make those monster murderer faces and know that it isn't you? Would you have to get under the belly and carve into it, make it bleed, that you are not it? I felt the faces turning into the other face when their fists beat behind them for the world they live in. Judejahn who cannot wear his murderer's face. Adolf who wasn't born with a lover's face. Siegfried who should see music on his. There's another brother to Siegfried. He's the faceless of the masses who show the thoughtless rules of how it always is. It doesn't matter what you look like. This face will show what everyone else looks like. Look more like this and you will have the cruel faceless seas. I saw this face.
Another novel I read in order to write about it in my column in Florence News and Events and English-language monthly paper here in the boot.The Greatest Novel You’ve Never Heard ofFirst published in 1954, German novelist and travel-writer Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome is a little-known treasure well worth seeking out. I was drawn to it because of its Rome setting, as fodder for this column, but realized before I had finished reading the very first page that I had found something very, very special. Not only is Death in Rome a luscious and wonderful conjuring up of that Dolce Vita Rome of the post-war and pre-Beatles era, but it’s also a fabulous flowering of Modernist prose techniques, hypnotizing in its streams of interior monologues, thought-based rhythmic repetitions, and musically minded meanderings. It’s also one of the most convincing evocations, in a novel, of the dirty core of our Occidental political failings, that is to say of the slippery slope from national pride to patriotism, nationalism, imperialism, fascism, and finally the eventual pursuit of world domination and ethnic cleansing through genocide. It’s rare that a novel impresses so convincingly in both form and content.Death in Rome’s imaginative and organic style, its rhythms drawn from that inner monologue that we all carry around in our heads, takes us inside the thoughts, experiences, and desires of three protagonists whose particulars build them into representatives of their split, post-war German culture and, by extension, all modern nation states. They are: an artist, a soldier, and a seminary student. Evoking the historical moment, the soldier is JudeJahn, a former SS man who has escaped the Nuremburg comeuppances and finds himself in Rome to buy arms for the Middle Eastern nation he now serves as a soldier of fortune. He is in the twilight of his ascendancy, bloodstained, keeping the Fuhrer’s dream alive in his every vile thought. His nephew Siegfried is an inverted romantic escapist, a composer of avant-garde classical music, in Rome for the debut of his first controversial symphony. His cousin, Judejahn’s son Adolph, traumatized by the breakdown of fascism and the destruction of Hitler’s Germany while he was still at school, is a seminary student looking to find another, better Fuhrer to serve in the Catholic priesthood. Siegfried’s father and brother are also minor characters representing two generations of politicos who show us exactly what we all know, fear, and deny about politics: that it is more like prestidigitation or juggling than any ideological stance. They are mere opportunists, dancing to whoever fiddles them a momentarily credible tune.The novel’s three colliding forces, the military, the artistic, and the spiritual collide both unbelievably and entertainingly through two days of criss-crossing encounters all throughout the exquisitely drawn Roman backdrop. You can palpably hear the fontanelle tumbling down water into the streets and smell the espresso and cornetti from the corner bars. The characters’ encounters, dialogues, and the eventual death of the title (a nod to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice of course) meditate on the problems at the heart of the mid-century German drama and are certainly still relevant today: how do we negotiate and control systems constructed of power and born of conflicting beliefs? Who do we follow and why? And, most importantly—and frightening here in the vivid portrayal of the interior mind of the former SS man—where do these impulses to serve, to entertain (although there is much more to the portrayal of the artist here than merely that), and to dominate and destroy originate? I really can’t recommend this novel enough, it’s necessary food for thought.
What do You think about Death In Rome (2004)?
This is an incredible look at post WWII Germans - former Nazis, opportunities, and those who rebelled. It is about a family - one man a former SS general, his brother the opportunist city leader, back in power; the SS general's son, who's become a priest; and the city leader's son, a composer. These characters meet in Rome, and we see the thoughts and emotions of people trying to figure out what to do after the Third Reich. It's a disturbing portrayal of what evil has wrought, and the fact that one does not defeat evil through war.
—Aeisele
Death in Rome - Wolfgang Koeppen This is an extraordinary book, devastating, but also remarkable. Published just nine years after the fall of the third Reich, it is a carefully considered examination of the “collective amnesia” which enveloped the German people following the war and allowed them to forget their past, absolve their guilt, and move on with their lives. We see this as it plays out in the lives of two families related by marriage, but estranged for many years by the war. For different reasons they find themselves in Rome at the same time, and through the conversations and experiences of different individuals, we gradually learn their stories and much about the German ethos. The book captures the generational differences as we see the older members of the families living in the aftermath of the war: some in anger and bitterness hoping for a Nazi resurgence; others in denial and forgetfulness. In contrast, the younger generation lives in total rejection of the past separating themselves as far as possible from their parents whom they hold responsible. Adolf, the son of a brutal Nazi SS officer, is a seminarian in Rome studying to become a priest. His cousin, Siegfried, a composer of modern music, is in Rome where his latest composition is being performed. Siegfried’s brother, Dietrich, preparing for a career in the civil service, is accompanying his parents on a visit to battle fields. It is also a novel of ideas and character: ideas, because it examines the animating ideals of the time: socialism, communism, and capitalism and finds them all wanting including the ideals of religion; and character, because in their rejection of the ideals of the past, the young men discuss the fact that they have no convictions as they face the future. Perversely, it is the older generation who, despite their complicity in reprehensible actions, leave the stronger impression, reminding me of the lines from Yeats, “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” They may have been defeated, but Adolf’s repulsive father and even his mother are convinced of the rightness of their cause and their future vindication. Crazed and hateful, they live in this certainty. In this book, perhaps Koeppen lifts the veil too soon on what many Germans were not yet ready to confront. I read it as a serious, profound, and provocative meditation on the meaning for all of us of a terrible time in history
—Katy
Interesting early literary study of the way Germans deal with their recent past. Stylistically very atypical of German mid-century literature in that it plays with long long sentences, with quick-fire sequences of thoughts, repetitions, sudden shifts of perspective (shifting from first-person to third-person), reminiscent of Joyce and such like. Using some covert historical hints, it can be established that the novel is set in early May 1954 (and was published in that same year, so it was fresh fresh fresh), it juxtaposes the thoughts and emotions of people from various positions under Nazi rule: fervent Nazis, those that stood by and let it happen, those that were raised by the "system" and then rejected it, those too young to have had a part but now looking at benefitting from the German economic miracle, and those that were victims. Language-wise, it isn't an easy novel to read, which was only partly caused by the typography used in my edition (those letters were awfully small and close together -- my poor old eyes). It deals with some very heavy topics, but it is in its own way still extremely relevant to the Germany of today.
—Jaap
