Out of the Rubble

Small wonder that Wolfgang Koeppen’s native Germany greeted his suite of postwar novels with hostility when they were first published in the early 1950s: When things go wrong, who needs to be shamed? Who needs to be mocked? Who needs—even worse—to be warned? The past is over, that’s its whole point.Now that the past of those years—the years immediately following World War II—has been superseded by so many other pasts, these novels are apparently received in Germany with (however temporarily) the great admiration and pleasure that was always their due. My own experience with them, though less illustrative, is vaguely parallel to Germany’s: some decades ago an acquaintance gave me a copy of Death in Rome, the third volume of the so-called postwar trilogy, and urged me to read it. I opened it up, it was opaque and inert, I closed it, and thought no more about it until recently, when it was reissued along with a new translation of Pigeons on the Grass and the first English translation of The Hothouse. Out of mild curiosity, I opened it up again, and, who knows why—possibly the atmospheric conditions of 2026—comets and stars came exploding out. I proceeded to read the three books in seq...