Wolfgang Koeppen’s Pigeons on the Grass, in the new translation by poet Michael Hofmann, is a dizzying novel. It has no central character. There is no governing plot. Composed of 110 fragments, the book unfolds over a single day in Munich in 1948, when planes still rumble over the city, “birds of ill omen” that remind inhabitants of Allied bombings. It is a great novel, vaster than its 208 pages might suggest. There are more than 30 characters, each important, each desperate, and each weighed down by a clutch of tawdry desires. When you think you are done with the book, it is not done with you. Phrases linger in your ear, demanding to be read again. Passages follow you around, nipping at your heels.
Some characters are unforgettable. There is Philipp, the floundering poet; Emilia, the manic heiress who pawns necklaces to get drunk; Alexander, the fat, half-rotten Bacchus; Ezra and Heinz, two boys haggling over a stray dog; Mr. Edwin, the visiting poet-intellectual who bemoans the death of European high culture and, perhaps fittingly, is a pederast; Dr. Behude, the “psycho-bureaucrat” and pill-pusher; and Schnakenbach, the brilliant chemist who dodged army service by getting intentionally hooked on Benzedrine and now, years after the war, cannot stop falling asleep.
Then there are the Americans. A gaggle of schoolmistresses from New England hauls Puritanism and credulity all over Munich, providing some of the funniest scenes in the book. Koeppen invents two American GIs, both black men, wittily (and cruelly) named Odysseus Cotton and Washington Price. Odysseus is powerful, hedonistic, and heroic, gliding through Munich on the wind of the dollar, looking for a good time. Washington, an idealist who dreams of opening a bar where “none are unwelcome,” brings flowers to his German girlfriend, Carla. She is pregnant with his child. He wants to start a family. She wants an abortion. Carla’s neighbors, caught between jealousy and racial hatred, hiss from their windows.
The plots are tornadic. Characters who do not know each other collide in the street, and Koeppen uses these coincidences to switch perspectives, slinging the reader into another brain. The fragments are connected by a mysterious fretting: Rhymes, homonyms, and metonymies transfer the reader from section to section. Sometimes Koeppen ends a section midsentence and finishes it at the start of the next chunk. None of this impairs the momentum of the book. Never does it feel mannered, baroque, or immoderately difficult. It is one of the novel’s mysteries that its jigsaw structure seems to make it more accessible, as if fragmentation were the lingua franca of modern people.
Koeppen’s prose, in the translation by Hofmann (one of my professors at the University of Florida), is scintillating, swerving, and slightly bug-eyed, always ambushing you with sudden delights. Short, barking sentences give way to sentences that stretch for pages, cascading with concrete nouns. Here is an example. As Odysseus Cotton walks into a street of Munichers, Koeppen describes their faces as “maggots in bacon, whey faces, sharp, hungry faces, faces that God had forgotten, rats, sharks, hyenas, newts, barely disguised by human skin, padded shoulders, plaid jackets, dirty trench coats, gaudy socks, thick crepe soles under the creasy pigskin shoes, parodies of American low style, poor bastards as well, homeless drifters, war losers.” There is beauty in bile, and Koeppen is a master of it.
Elsewhere Philipp, the ineffectual poet, reflects on politics:
I detest violence, I detest oppression, does that make me a Communist? I don’t know, social studies: Hegel Marx dialectics Marxist materialist dialectics — never understood it, call me an emotional Communist: always feeling futile indignation on behalf of the poor, Spartacus Jesus Thomas Munzer Max Holz, what did they all want? to be good, and what happened? they were killed, did I fight in Spain? the hour never struck for me, I kept my head down during the dictatorship, I hated but quietly, I hated but in my room at home, I spoke in whispers with the like-minded, Burckhardt said you couldn’t make a state with people like him, I could appreciate that, but you can’t destroy a state with people like that either.
There is one of the lines that has followed me around, nipping at my heels: “You can’t destroy a state with people like that either.” It is an elegant apology for quietism, a wonderful condemnation of mass politics, and it arises from Philipp’s helplessness. The tone of Pigeons on the Grass is despair, but it is intricate, ornate despair, despair with a paintbrush and a plan.
The novel’s title comes from a libretto by Gertrude Stein (“pigeons in the grass, alas”), and the metaphor suggests the random futility of human life. One of the visiting New England schoolmistresses, Miss Burnett, puts it this way: “The birds are here by chance, we are here by chance, and maybe the Nazis were here by chance, Hitler was a chance, his politics were a dreadful and stupid chance, maybe the world is a dreadful and stupid chance of God’s, no one knows why we are here, the birds will fly off and we will walk on.” Koeppen’s pessimism eats through the book like carbolic acid, but it is not the sterile, performative pessimism of 21st-century people hunting validation on Twitter. It is the wry, raw candor of a man who has seen bombs unmake his country.
Koeppen’s life (1906-1996) almost spanned the 20th century. Born in a place called Greifswald, he saw both world wars rip through Europe and lived long enough to see the fall of the Berlin Wall. World War II had just ended, and Munich’s ashes were still warm, when he entered the most productive period of his career. He published Pigeons on the Grass in 1951. His next two books, The Hothouse (1953) and Death in Rome (1954), completed what critics would come to call his “Postwar Trilogy.”
Koeppen is not well known in the United States, which is a shame. His three great novels represent the best of modernist literature. Gunter Grass called him “Germany’s greatest living writer.” Yet he was never very famous in Germany either. Part of this obscurity was due to long silences: Koeppen wrote volcanically or not at all, and publishers never could wrestle a book out of him. The last 40 years of his life were almost barren.
Koeppen also offended critics. His books rubbed salt in fresh wounds: the Holocaust, National Socialism, political cowardice in general. His three best novels appeared at a time when Germany wanted desperately to forget its recent past. But if Koeppen’s contemporaries wanted to ignore history, he exhumed it and dumped its body on the page. He was able to write about the present with remarkable detachment, skewering the sententiousness of Germany’s national myths, the swollen self-pity of its people, and the bestial selfishness of war survivors. Readers, for the most part, averted their eyes, and Koeppen was neglected. He dwindled to an obscure master, a writer’s writer, more like a poet than a novelist.
Koeppen saw his times clearly. He understood that Germany could not start over, could not clean the slate, could not hide its history beneath glittering mounds of commodities. He recognized the grotesqueness of its attempts to do so. Mr. Edwin, driving through Munich, thinks, “It had been tidied, ordered, plastered over, freshly rebuilt, and for that very reason so horrible, and so infirm: this could never be made good.” If the novel has a thesis, it is almost biblical in its morality: This could never be made good.
The one exception to the book’s pessimism is Washington Price, the black GI who wants to start a family with Carla. His idealism is never crushed. By the end of the novel, he has convinced Carla to carry the baby to term. They are leaving Munich and going to Paris, where they will open a bar with a sign that reads, NONE UNWELCOME. Probably they will fail when they get there — Koeppen’s vision does not allow happiness to last long. But at the end of the book, the future is unwritten. They are happy. They are together. They are going to Paris.
Forester McClatchey is a poet and critic from Atlanta, Georgia. He holds a master of fine arts from the University of Florida, and his work appears in the Hopkins Review, Slice, and Harvard Review, among other journals.
