I was very taken with Koeppen's first post-WWII novel, "Pigeons on the Grass." I am less excited about THE HOTHOUSE. Perhaps my expectations were unreasonably high, but I don't think that really explains my disappointment. Ultimately, I had two perhaps related problems with the novel. First, it never really engaged me. Second, it is cynical and negative. It depicts a frenetic, unthinking world tumbling through space and time and it offers nothing to offset the void. It is a startlingly modern novel, Joycean, protean, phantasmagoric. There is much truly brilliant writing (refracted or reflected in the stellar translation by Michael Hofmann). But much of that brilliance, I fear, is only so much authorial showing-off.
The protagonist is Keetenheuve, 45, a member of the German parliament in the early 1950s. He had rejected the politics of the National Socialists and went abroad for eleven years. Upon his return to Germany after the War, untainted by the Nazis and with an idealistic dream of influencing the world for the good, he was ensnared by politics. But he is an unusual politician. He often does things without appropriate regard for the possible adverse consequences for his political career. Such as marrying Elke, a girl of sixteen whom he had found amidst bomb rubble; she had been the daughter of a Gauleiter who, with his wife, had swallowed the little death capsules. And Keeteneuve is somewhat of an intellectual. For instance, on the side he translates poems from Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du mal". (He also is enamored with e e cummings.) And, worse, he has a conscience.
Keetenheuve views his fellow parliamentarians as so many sheep, and he resolves not to be one himself - nor to be bought off with a sinecure as the Ambassador to Guatemala - but he does not have a vision (other than one of utopian pacifism). And Elke, after bruising him with her alcoholism and dalliances with lesbians, has just died, so he no longer has a mission in life. The Bundestag, as well as life itself, has become a stuffy, suffocating hothouse. This novel of that name follows Keetenheuve over two days, as he returns to his political duties after the death of Elke and quickly becomes sucked under by the whirlpools of politics and life, in resistance to which he no longer has any residual natural buoyancy. His descent to oblivion becomes a surrealistic nightmare, accompanied by the "Wagalaweia" of Wagner's Rhine Maidens.
THE HOTHOUSE is rich with allusions to German culture and history, many of which surely went by me unnoticed like bats at dusk. And a native German, especially one who had lived through the early 1950s, probably would find the political context of the novel much more interesting than I do. In the course of the novel, Koeppen quotes Walter Rathenau, "Only depravity has an end in mind." Perhaps that's true for Koeppen and Keetenheuve, and therein lies the problem: Keetenheuve has a conscience, he is not depraved - but he has no end in mind. Life in the hothouse is rich with the trappings of German civilization but it is meaningless.
P.S.: Several times in the novel Koeppen refers to e e cummings's untitled and powerful (like a blow to the solar plexus) poem that ends "how do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death". It seems that Koeppen was quite conversant with what was then contemporary American literature. In "Pigeons on the Grass", he referred directly to Gertrude Stein, leading one, naturally, to conclude that the title of that novel was drawn from Stein's "Four Saints in Three Acts", where the phrase appears. But might its provenance also include, at least subconsciously, the line in cummings's poem: "and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat"?
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