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Wolfgang Koeppen

Pigeons on the Grass Paperback – 6 October 2020

by Wolfgang Koeppen (Author), Michael Hofmann (Author)

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Pigeons on the Grass is told over a single day in Munich in 1948. The first new cinemas and insurance offices are opening atop the ruins, Korea and Persia are keeping the world in panic, planes rumble in the sky (but no one looks up), newspaper headlines announce war over oil and atomic bomb tests. Odysseus Cotton, a black man, alights at the station and hires a porter; Frau Behrend disowns her daughter; with their interracial love affair, Carla Behrend and Washington Price scandalize their neighbors--who still expect gifts of chocolate and coffee; a boy hustles to sell a stray dog; Mr. Edwin, a visiting poet, prepares for a reading; Philipp gives himself up to despair; Emilia sells the last of her jewelry; Alexander stars as the Archduke in a new German Super-production; and Susanne seeks out a night to remember. In Michael Hofmann's words, "in their sum, they are the totality of existence."

Koeppen spares no one and sees all in this penetrating and intense novel that surveys those who remain, and those who have just arrived, in a damaged society. As inventive as Joyce and as compulsively readable as Dickens, Pigeons on the Grass is a great lost classic.

ISBN-10

0811229181
ISBN-13

978-0811229180
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

6 October 2020
Language

English
Dimensions

13.21 x 1.78 x 20.32 cm
Print length

208 pages
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Review

A kaleidoscopic narrative that follows a disparate cast of characters whose lives accidentally intersect during a single day in Munich, Germany, in 1948. Now available in an inspired new translation, this portrait of despair and endurance amid postwar ruin is nothing less than a miniature masterpiece.-- "Kirkus (STARRED)"

Almost eerily contemporary in its concerns, and remarkable as a sidelong, searing appraisal of the legacy of the Nazi years, it is a recovered masterpiece.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"

In a many-toned language Koeppen not only depicts a cacophonous world but peoples that world with individuals whose lives barely overlap. The result documents a uniquely German situation; it also, with its echoes of James Joyce and John Dos Passos, reconnects the German novel at a surprisingly early date to modernist fiction.-- "The Independent"

Koeppen's prose, as deftly channelled by Hofmann (who acknowledges the 'perfectly good' version of 1988 by David Ward), seems to expand and contract to fill the space offered by each consciousness.--Dustin Illingworth "TLS"

Koeppen's voice--cold, defiant and relentless in its fury at the deadly amnesia he saw emerge from Germany's ruins after World War II--neither transforms nor imbues the world around him, but rather indicts it.--Peter Filkins "The New York Times"

Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history... a forgotten masterpiece.-- "The Evening Standard"

Scathing, disillusioned novel ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany. Pigeons on the Grass is set in Munich on a single day and its 105 short fragments reveal the failure of more than thirty characters to face up to reality.-- "London Review of Books"

There are rare writers who inform and enthrall, even terrify. The gifted German enigma Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1990) is one such witness: candid and strange, allusive, unsettling. Time and again Koeppen stage-manages an unforgettable scene.-- "Irish Times"

Wolfgang Koeppen, a remorselessly brilliant German writer of the 20th century, has long remained scandalously obscure in the Anglophone world. His reputation can finally begin to flower with Michael Hofmann's fine translation of Pigeons on the Grass, an acute and disquietingly contemporary novel about a society disfigured by racism and historical amnesia.--Pankaj Mishra

Germany's greatest living writer.--Gunter Grass

Scathingly beautiful--lyrically inescapable.--Nadine Gordimer

Among the earliest, grandest, and most poetically satisfying reckonings in fiction with the postwar state of the world.--Michael Hofmann

Those who haven't read this novel cannot claim to know German literature after 1945.--Marcel Reich-Ranicki

About the Author

Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996) was born in Greifswald and died in Munich. He worked as a commis chef, a dramaturge, and an editor. In 1951, 1953 and 1954 three novels were published to high acclaim for accurately capturing the atmosphere of the republic under Konrad Adenauer: Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death In Rome.

The poet Michael Hofmann has won numerous prizes for his German translations.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (6 October 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811229181
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811229180
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.21 x 1.78 x 20.32 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 191,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 1,086 in Dark Humour
- 6,316 in War Fiction (Books)
- 11,380 in Classic Literature & Fiction

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Gio

The Forgotten and the Undiscovered

Reviewed in the United States on 26 May 2011

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Wolfgang Koeppen's trilogy of novels written in the 1950s -- Pigeons on the Grass, HotHouse, Death in Rome -- were putatively 'forgotten' or ignored through most of the latter 20th Century. Translations into English have been around since the 1980s, but Koeppen remains broadly 'undiscovered' by American readers. That's not unusual; many of the most potent novelists of the mid/late 20th C wrote in German -- Hans Fallada, Alfred Doeblin, Gert Ledig, Irmgard Keun, Joseph Roth, WG Sebald, others -- and remain little known to English readers. We anglophones are the losers here; in the aggregate, German literature of the 20th C towers over English/American in intelligence, originality, and honesty. By all means, read Koeppen now!

The previous reviews by RM Peterson and H Schneider are sufficiently eloquent and enthusiastic, and I won't repeat what they've already provided. I'd like to offer a few responses and addenda, however. Both reviewers connected Koeppen's literary structure to the work of James Joyce; there's nothing false about that connection, but for an American reader, a more revealing comparison would be to the work of John Dos Passos, especially his immense trilogy "USA", which is formatted very much like Koeppen's trilogy. Koeppen acknowledged the influence of Alfred Doeblin's "Alexanderplatz" and Doeblin in turn acknowledged the influence of Dos Passos, so if an American reader wants to know what to expect in "Pigeons on the Grass", the answer is to expect the journalistic collage structure of "USA" or "Manhatten Transfer", but with far finer control of imagery and style. Koeppen is a superb stylist! One of the previous reviewers suggested a lack of discipline and conciseness in "Pigeons on the Grass". To my mind, that's totally inaccurate; this is a very tightly crafted and coherent novel. To paraphrase Mozart's famous sassy reply to the Emperor, 'there's not a note - or a paragraph - too many.'

The previous reviewers paid far too little attention to the women characters in this novel, focusing all their remarks on the despairing German poet Philip and/or the African-American soldier Odysseus Cotton. The women characters range from prostitutes to an alcoholic heiress to an aging women of the highest respectability and Hitlerian sympathy. It seems to me that the women are as much the protagonists of this novel as the men. They are richly developed as characters. Their mentalities are key to the novel's content and social insights. Another American character, the visiting literary celebrity Edwin, is also crucial to Koeppen's portrayal of Germany in its post-war cultural crisis; his desperation is implicitly "ours" in retrospect, and his brilliantly un-portrayed fate in the mean streets of Goethe-land is in fact the climax of the novel.

Racism is also a huge part of this novel, the driving force behind most incidents in the narrative. If the assorted characters of the novel are as incidental and self-bound as 'pigeons' scattered on the grass, all pecking at their own merest survival, then the 'grass' is the poisonous herb of racism. The 'racial anti-semitism' of Nazi Germany has not been mown so short after all, Koeppen exposes, and the extension to occupied Germany of an American racism is not likely to amount to a solution.

Koeppen was clearly no optimist about the "Economic Miracle" in post-war Germany, or about the direction of European culture at large following the War. I would guess that he expected an even sourer and more sordid course of events than "we" have witnessed in the intervening decades. He was, however, an incredibly credible witness of the state of things in Germany at the exact historical moment when modern Europe was born.

12 people found this helpful

R. M. Peterson

"The river of history flowed. From time to time the river overflowed its banks."

Reviewed in the United States on 24 April 2011

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In PIGEONS ON THE GRASS, Wolfgang Koeppen examines post-WWII Germany much like a Roman priest poking through the entrails of a sacrificed chicken. Indeed, in the first paragraph of the novel, Koeppen presents a metaphor of augery. And in the course of his divination, Koeppen finds . . . well, many things: mankind seduced by sterile technology; individuals utterly unable to communicate with one another; a burgeoning Cold War that threatens a holocaust worse than the one so recently wrought by the Nazis (which, however, the Germans seem intent on repressing); a reprise of German anti-Semitism being played out before German eyes in the lives of the many blacks who are part of the American occupying forces; a ubiquitous fear; and on and on. What Koeppen finds can be summed up as something as inconsequential and tawdry as "pigeons on the grass", a phrase borrowed from Gertrude Stein's "Four Saints in Three Acts". It is a bleak and disheartening world view.

Until recently, I was entirely unaware of Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996). He fled Germany to Holland shortly after the ascension of Hitler and the Nazis, but in 1938 he returned to Germany in order to better eke out a living. He laid low and was able to avoid wearing the uniform of the Wehrmacht, something he prided himself on for the rest of his life. In the early 1950s, he came out with three novels about post-War Germany, the first of which is PIGEONS ON THE GRASS ("Tauben im Gras" in German). The next two novels are, in English translation, "The Hothouse" and "Death in Rome". But then, curiously, Koeppen wrote no more fiction.

PIGEONS ON THE GRASS traces the activities of about two dozen characters, German and American, during one day in an unnamed occupied German city, most probably Munich. They include Washington Price, a black American serviceman, and his girl Carla, a German whose husband went missing somewhere on the Volga and who now is pregnant and debating whether to have an abortion or move with Washington Price to Paris and open a bar where nobody is unwelcome; Philipp, a despondent and cynical German writer, and Emilia, his alcoholic wife from a pre-WWII family of bourgeois fortune who goes around pawning family jewels and treasures in order to pay the gas bill; Odysseus Cotton, a black GI from Memphis, Tennessee, who good-naturedly tours the city, first with Josef, a German veteran and porter who carries his music box, and then, after Josef's death by stoning (at the hands of Odysseus?), with Susanna, a whore otherwise known as "Circe the Sirens and maybe Nausicaa". And many more.

The novel is a kaleidoscopic, cacophonous montage. There are many brilliant passages. To be sure, it is a tad undisciplined, often on the verge of spinning out of control. (I read somewhere that Koeppen wrote it over just a few weeks.) But nonetheless it is a tour de force. Koeppen and the novel clearly were influenced by Joyce's "Ulysses", but PIGEONS ON THE GRASS is by no means derivative. I also am reminded of Heinrich Böll, but Koeppen is denser, richer, more fecund.

Here's one sample from the novel, which must have presented an extraordinary challenge to translator David Ward that he nonetheless carried off in superb fashion. The passage relates to Schnakenbach, a German teacher who managed to avoid military service in WWII by becoming hooked on amphetamines:

"His teacher training had imparted to Schnakenbach * * * the world view of classical physics, in which everything nicely followed laws of causality and in which God lived, smiled about but tolerated, in a kind of rest home. * * * Now he was looking into a world in which God's rest home was gone. Either there was no God, or God was dead as Nietzsche had claimed or, this too was possible and as old as it was new, God was everywhere, yet formless, no bearded God the Father, and the whole of mankind's father complex from the Prophets to Freud proved to be a self-tormenting error on the part of homo sapiens, God was a formula, an abstraction, maybe God was Einstein's general theory of gravity, the feat of balance in an ever expanding universe."

In first enountering Koeppen through reading PIGEONS ON THE GRASS, I experienced a frisson of discovery similar to that felt when I first read "Rings of Saturn" by W.G. Sebald, or "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" by Javier Marías. It is a great work of modern literature. I look forward to reading more of Koeppen, as well as re-reading PIGEONS ON THE GRASS.

2 people found this helpful

Roger Brunyate

Life in limbo

Reviewed in the United States on 27 August 2007

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Clearly influenced by ULYSSES , Koeppen describes a day in an unnamed city in the American zone of Germany after WW2. The writing, even in translation, is fine throughout: sometimes quite straightforward, concerned with the streets and bars of the city, sometimes rising to poetic heights with multicultural literary allusions. But on the whole Koeppen's style is simpler than Joyce's, his world less glamorous, and his aim less consciously epic.

The book is a collage of paragraph- or page-long sections describing the actions of a dozen or more German characters from various walks of life -- decadent, downtrodden, or hopeful -- and a smaller number of Americans. There is little plot, but various characters do meet and cannon off each other in a sort of random Brownian motion, leading to a climax of sorts at the end, potentially serious but unresolved. Some of the characters are more fully realized than others -- I was personally moved, for instance, by the affair between a German ex-prostitute and an African American GI, both living on the fringes of their respective societies -- but the book as a whole is more important than its individual parts. It paints a powerful picture of life in that particular post-Hitler limbo, and therein lies its uniqueness for its time (written even before Gunter Grass' monumental THE TIN DRUM ).

My four-star rating does not reflect the importance or basic quality of this book, though I do consider it a weakness that several of the characters are less fully realized. It is more a reflection of my own enjoyment. Although short (202 pages), this is not a book to be read quickly; it is difficult to take in its almost musical structure at a single reading; although simple enough from page to page, the book juggles so many balls that it becomes hard to keep track of them. But the subject is important, there is nothing else quite like it, and that alone makes it well worth picking up.

6 people found this helpful

Donald Sessions

As a U. S. Army veteran, who ...

Reviewed in the United States on 5 February 2015

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As a U.S. Army veteran , who served in post war Germany,I found this book to be a fascinating and enlightening look at the German perspective on the allied occupation. An important literary work largely overlooked outside of Germany.

2 people found this helpful

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