The Hothouse: A Novel [Hardcover]

Wolfgang Koeppen (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2001

Harrowing, Moody, and supremely powerful, The Hothouse, first published in 1953, stands among the finest novels written in postwar Germany. Largely unrecognized beyond Germany during his lifetime, Wolfgang Koeppen sought to make sense of German life amid the vast political and social reconstruction of the war-ravaged nation. The Hothouse traces the final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of German politics and grieving after the sudden death of his wife. With the narrative and sexual frenzy of James Joyce, Koeppen creates a portrait of idealism crushed by political and personal compromise. Rendered in English for the first time by award-winning translator Michael Hofmann, The Hothouse is a tragic masterpiece by a literary visionary who in his lifetime was called by Gunter Grass "the greatest living German writer".

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The malaise of mid-century Germany and the early stirrings of disgust at the smooth machinations of postwar politics are startlingly fresh and vivid in this tour de force originally published in Germany in 1953 and only now translated into English. Koeppen (1906-1996) has been championed over the years by such luminaries as Gnter Grass, Max Frisch and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and their faith in this novel and the two that with it make up a loose trilogy (Pigeons on the Grass and Death in Rome) proves to be amply justified. Set over the course of two stormy August days in Bonn in the early 1950s, where the German Parliament is meeting alongside the Rhine, the novel follows the actions and deliberations of a member of the socialist opposition party. Brooding over his young wife's recent death, the once-idealistic Keetenheuve struggles to renew in himself a sense of purpose. He left the country in the 1930s, disgusted by Nazi rule, and returned only after the war. As a result, he observes his colleagues with weary detachment, amazed at their ability to recover from dubious wartime activity "back at the center, eight years previously one had been in Nuremberg, eight years before that one had also been in Nuremberg" but also with a certain outsider's wistfulness. As an important vote approaches, he must decide: will he speak up once more for peace and justice, or will he resign himself to some darker fate? Gloom pervades these pages, lighted from within by the fireworks of Koeppen's dazzling prose, rich with allusions to classical and German literature and masterfully translated by Hofmann. 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. (June)Forecast: Wildfire word-of-mouth in literary circles and strong reviews will ensure respectable sales and maybe even breakout success. Either way, The Hothouse will be an essential backlist title for the foreseeable future. Death in Rome (Forecasts, June 4), first published in English in 1993, is being reissued simultaneously in paperback.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Koeppen was an influential post-World War II German writer, although he came of age before the war. He was little known outside Germany, yet his work was admired by many German writers of the next generation, including Gunter Grass. This novel, originally published in 1953 and now appearing in its first English translation, tells the story of the final days of a widower who is a member of the German parliament. As his sadness over his loss expands to encompass not only the death of his much younger wife but also the destruction and division of Germany and the present political corruption of which he finds himself a part, he moves deeper into depression. Written in a highly expressionistic style, this taut, existential novel firmly echoes its time and place. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Printing edition (June 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393049027
• ISBN-13: 978-0393049022
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,017,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Hofmann was born in 1957 in Freiburg, Germany, and came to England in 1961. He has published four volumes of poems and won a Cholmondeley Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for poetry. His translations have won many awards, including the Independent's Foreign Fiction Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the P.E.N./Book of the Month Club Translation Prize. His reviews and criticism are gathered in Behind the Lines (2001).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gloomy portrait of post-war West Germany, March 28, 2008

By 

Alok Ranjan (Bangalore, India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hothouse: A Novel (Paperback)

Journalist and author Timothy Garton Ash enthused about Germany in a recent essay on the Oscar winning film The Lives of Others saying that, "No nation has been more brilliant, more persistent, and more innovative in the investigation, communication, and representation--the re-presentation, and re-re-presentation--of its own past evils." I was reminded of these words while reading The Hothouse by German novelist Wolfgang Koeppen. It is a little difficult to summarise but there is no mistaking the accusation underlying the disjointed and disconnected montage of images, thoughts and sense impressions which form the bulk of the book i.e. Germany after the war was in a hurry to "move on." Blinded by the "economic miracle" of the post war boom and the contingencies of a nascent cold war realpolitik, the Germans had enveloped themselves in a collective act of willful amnesia.

At the start of the novel Keetenheuve, the middle aged politician and a member of the Bundestag (the German parliament) has just arrived in Bonn to attend a party meeting. His wife has died recently and he seems to be deeply depressed and grieving, even though his relationship with his wife were not so good. He sees the meeting as a final chance to do something for the country and for himself; a way of finally doing something about the "mild futility of his existence." He doesn't succeed in doing anything about it though. Over the course of the next two days the novel charts the process of his mental collapse and psychological dissolution. He feels alienated among the politicians who are more interested in their respective career than real politics. Nobody is interested in mourning the past, everybody is in a hurry to move on and start afresh. He is further oppressed by the willful blindness of everybody to the continuation of the Nazi legacy. He feels the presence of a "Nazi idiom" in the design of the new buildings representing the so-called new Germany. The wheels of the train remind him of Wagner. There are many other similar references to Nazism throughout the novel. It is clear that he is transposing his inner life on to his surroundings and that the basic problem is that of psychology, rather than politics. What he wants is some kind of collective mourning for the past. This inability to mourn, as Freud suggested too in his essay "Mourning and Melancholia," can result in serious psychological consequences. An indeed the novel ends in as gloomy manner as it can be imagined.

This need for "collective mourning" was a theme that W.G. Sebald also returned to again and again in his novels. In his essay "On the Natural History of Destruction" he explicitly criticised the post-war Trummerliteratur literary movement ("literature of the ruins") for its failure to tackle, or indeed in perpetuating the collective amnesia about the recent past. In the essay he was talking specifically about the German victims of allied firebombings of German cities but in his fiction too, he always returns to this theme again and again, and most often victims of Germans. Michael Hofmann in his introduction says that this (and his other two novels on the same subject) were not received favourably by the mainstream literary establishment which was in the favour of "new start" and "clean slate" school of writing. Koeppen lived long but wrote very little mainly as a result of this. Though later he was eulogised by Gunter Grass and Marcel Reich-Ranicki as one of the greatest of post-war German writers. (In fact in Ranicki's autobiography the chapter on Koeppen stands out conspicuously because he rarely has anything nice to say about any of his contemporary authors.)

The Hothouse is often very difficult to follow. It is written in the style of an unbroken stream of consciousness and the disjointed, fragmented prose style takes some time getting into. There were also many references to German politics and culture which escaped me at many places. And as my summary above would have indicated, it is also very, very gloomy. In fact it is downright claustrophobic and oppressive but it is still more than worthwhile.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Survival of the fittest?, September 12, 2007

By 

Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hothouse (Paperback)

HOTHOUSE is in many ways an unusual book. It is born out of and deeply anchored in the tumultuous days of the young German republic emerging from the devastation of WWII. In that framework, it is both brilliant fiction and a devastating political critique. The novel captures the intense and oppressive atmosphere in the temporary capital, Bonn. The "hothouse" image is aptly applied to the physical environment of this city in the Rhine valley, prone to a hot, muggy and stifling climate. It also pertains to the overwrought political atmosphere, characterized by the ambiguous and contradictory political interests of the key players of the day.

Koeppen's hero, Keetenheuve, having returned from voluntary exile in 1945, was elected to the new Parliament four years later. Due to his behaviour and his political views, however, he has remained an outsider: a sensitive intellectual with strong moral and pacifist beliefs. Viewed with suspicion by his opposition party colleagues, monitored by the other side, he is ready for a major political fight. The novel's plot unfolds over a period of two days, starting with Keetenheuve's train ride to Bonn for an important parliamentary debate and ending with his wandering off into oblivion. The issue concerns the planned rearmament of Germany's western part under the control of the Allied Forces. Despite his definite views on the matter that contrast sharply with the spineless compromise attitude of the party, Keetenheuve has been chosen to present its policy in the debate.

While the story is related almost exclusively in the third person, the perspective is primarily that of Keetenheuve. The narrative flows and ebbs between assessment of friends and foes or descriptions of events and his inner musings on the past, present and future. Memory and loss of his young wife, a victim of circumstance and recent history, permeate Keetenheuve's consciousness. His feelings of personal guilt fuse with his anger and frustration with the new society that has emerged from the ruins of the war. The chances for learning from the recent past seem to evaporate in political wrangling as the old powers reaffirm themselves. His attempts to escape into the poetry are constantly undermined by the preoccupations of the day. For Keetenheuve his upcoming speech will also be a battle cry. Is he truly fit to win?

While HOTHOUSE is without doubt a work of fiction, the context that Koeppen established was real and present at the time. However, he mixed and overlapped realities with the interpretations and compulsive dreams of his hero, interspersing additional identifiable inner monologue sections into the narrative. Furthermore, the novel is rich with literary, historical and cultural allusions, connotations and metaphors. The result is a literary work of emotional intensity and descriptive power, unique for its time and place.

Reading HOTHOUSE more than 50 years after its original publication in 1953 does not necessarily do justice to what the novel represented to his contemporaries. At a literary level, it has been called "avant-garde", influenced by English-language authors such as James Joyce, rather than building on the pre-war German literary traditions. For its time it was not only innovative but also provocative in form and content and attracted more resentment and rejection than praise. It is one of three novels by Koeppen, referred to since as the "Trilogy of Failure", written within the brief period of 1952 to 1954. They stand as a rare example of literary critical examination of the Germany shortly after World War II. For the general reader HOTHOUSE will not be an easily accessible book, for anybody interested in recent German and European history it is a must read. [Friederike Knabe]

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Buffalo Bill's / defunct", May 18, 2011

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Hothouse: A Novel (Paperback)

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"?