Customer Reviews

The Hothouse: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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]

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"?

This is Wolfgang Koeppen's masterpiece, a political novel about Bonn, a small town in Germany, the accidental capital of an accidental West Germany, a political entity with limited shelf life. The novel is written and set in the early 1950s, during the debate about re-armament, the founding of the Bundeswehr in cold war times. It is a political novel in that it deals with political issues and, more unusually, that it deals with the life of a politician.

In its center is a dissenter, a member of parliament who has a conscience and disagrees with things. Conveniently for his party he does away with himself by way of self doubt and being an extreme outsider, and worse. Even the opposition party can't live comfortably with opponents.
MdB Keetenheuve, the hero, is a veritable Hamlet. Koeppen was fond of the type, the hesitation, the thoughtful doubts.
Keetenheuve has just lost his wife, at the start of the narration. The middle aged widower is shattered and full of guilt. He feels he has neglected her. His much younger wife Elke was a drinking nymphomaniac with bi-sexual lusts. Her father was a Nazi grande, a Gauleiter (equivalent to provincial governor), which puts K., the emigrant and idealist returnee, in the odd light of being an enemy's son in law. Wagnerian allusions are ubiquitous. Wagalaweia!

Koeppen has chosen Novalis for his epigram (Der Prozess der Geschichte ist ein Verbrennen, i.e.history's progress is an incineration. If my translation looks clumsy to you, believe me, so does the original to me!). Novalis is also mentioned in the text. Keetenheuve is in search of the blue flower, the romantic ideal, but the blue flower of the revolution, thinks K., has lost its smell. K. surely doesn't share Novalis' nationalist dreams.
K. feels himself more and more as a misfit. He expects to get attacked for his emigration, for his activities abroad, whether real or alleged (as Willy Brandt and others did in real life). In a way he finds his situation worse than in 1933: there is nowhere to emigrate to anymore. He finds that he is not able to `like' `the people', whom he is supposed to represent. His own party, obviously the historical Social Democrats with their leader of the time, Kurt Schumacher, under the gorgeous name Knurrewahn (something like 'mad grumbler'), makes him unhappy. He can't forget their nationalist betrayal in 1914 and often during the Weimar years, when they repressed workers' uprisings.

While the man and politician K. makes sense in his individuality, and his political stance is plausible, it is also historically falsified: WW3 has not resulted from German re-armament, and retrogression into Third Reich politics did not continue in the way that K. expects. People like K. may have had a lot to do with that. Thanks to them!

Bonn's existence as a capital of anything was short-lived, and few writers dedicated themselves to its secrets. Apart from Koeppen I can think only of John le Carré, who gave us a story about spies in the diplomatic milieu, set 15 years later. Le C's theme was the resurgence of Nazis as sleepers in the Bonn bureaucracy. Not all that different in attitude from Koeppen. Remarkably, le C also sees the blue flower in the Bonner world's dreams. Might Le C have taken his themes from Koeppen?
While I think that Koeppen was a much better writer than Böll, this Bonn novel also has similarities to Böll's stance on politics in West Germany in the 50s.

(Though the book was not much good as advertisement for Bonn, the town has since experienced a revival as a tourist destination due to its main great son Beethoven. Chinese tourists, who are leading the world in exports, which in that case amounts to imports as they shop like hell when they get at it, have discovered it. They go to Köln for the dome, to Bonn for Beethoven, to Trier for Karl Marx, to Stuttgart for the Boss outlet, and to Frankfurt for the airport. All done in three days max. Impressive efficiency.)

reminiscent of hermann broch at his most accessible, this is marvelous to read, original thoughts popping up again and again and again. the wolfgang koeppen revival is certainly justified.