Customer Reviews

Pigeons on the Grass (Modern German Voices Series)

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

 

 

...is Wolfgang Koeppen's magnum opus and in addition, it is one of the greatest German post war novels to date. The english title derives from the motto of the novel, a one liner by Gertrude Stein, that was quoted by the author in the beginning of the book. The novel is great in creating an authentic, general yet intimate picture of Germany in the years after WW II. The novel shows autobiographical strains and indulges in references to the traditions of the western world and especially to ancient greek mythology. Its narrative structure is shaped by a delicate use of stream of consciousness and the fragmentation of the plot, icluding its many intricately designed sub-plots.

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.

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.

Koeppen's tribute to Gertrude Stein was a blast from the past for me. I had read this 1951 novel about post-war/ cold war West Germany long ago, but had forgotten how fresh and vulgar and poetic its prose is. I had entirely forgotten that its title is taken from a Stein line and I can't easily see the connection. (pigeons on the grass alas... and later: or is it a magpie in the sky?)
Central character is Philipp, a writer with a seriously troubled and alcoholic wife and a serious writing block. This Philipp is generally considered a self-portrait by Koeppen, who was a highly talented but unproductive writer, a three hit wonder. Philipp, and we with him, sees the ugly world with hesitant eyes. Philipp hesitates by nature, he is a veritable Hamlet.
There is plenty of supporting cast, beginning with a sleazy star actor in his sleazy life (this apparently made a real life actor protest that his private life had been exposed), a few Americans (soldiers stationed in Germany, as well as tourists and others), and all kinds of `locals'.
We are probably in Munich, though it is never said explicitly. Names of people and places point at South Germany, and several indicators point at Munich. Koeppen lived there at the time, though he came from the east of Germany.
The world that Koeppen sees is an ugly one. WW2 memories abound, and WW3 prophecies are derived from news headlines of the time. The action is identifiable in 1951. We have a crisis in Iran and nuclear tests by both US and SU. Koeppen's `locals' have lived through the Nazi time and the war, and have lost much. They turn on the Nazis, with hindsight, for their inability to win, not for moral considerations.
Koeppen's language was built on Doeblin traditions, Alexanderplatz transferred to Munich, with roots in Joyce, including the story's very own Ulysses. It is powerful and addictive. I can't get enough of it, but alas, like the pigeons on the grass, just 3 of them, there is so little of it... Just 200 pages, but compact and brimming with allusions and quotes.

Koeppen says of Philipp: he wrote a novel that was forbidden by the Nazis and forgotten after them. That, alas, was the fate of quite a few writers at the time, e.g. Irmgard Keun. (Not Fallada, he was not totally forbidden, and then not totally forgotten afterwards). Koeppen himself was `hiding' in the film industry during the Nazi time. The novel shows it, it reads mostly like a very compact script.

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.

This novel has been chosen as set text for the school subject "German" for the high-school diploma in Northrhine-Westfalia, Germany.