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Chaos, Control, and Consistency
Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--University College of Swansea, 1991.
Pigeons on the Grass
Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann 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,...
Art and Politics in Wolfgang Koeppen's Postwar Trilogy
This study traces the reception of Wolfgang Koeppen's postwar novels, compares their stylistic aspects, analyzes the social criticism, and shows the thematic unity of a trilogy which warns of the dangers of political restoration and neo-fascism.
Negotiating Positions
This study offers new perspectives on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer too often consigned to the margins of post-1945 literary history. Examining the interaction of the personal and the social in Koeppen's writings, this book demonstrates that the politics of his works are inherent to their form. Through a series of close readings, the book explores the positive and negative aspects of liminality, a dominant trope in Koeppen’s works. Stressing the thematic and formal continuities of his oeuvre, the first section illustrates how his protagonists perpetually establish a space for themselves 'in between' states. The second section examines how Koeppen negotiates with the discourse of 'nation' during two central periods of his career. It shows how his experiences in the Third Reich and his reappraisal of the years prior to 1933 determine his perspective on modernity, modernism and Germany after 1945. Having defined the location of culture in his works, the book concludes by resituating Koeppen's writings within post-war West German literary culture.
Journey Through America
This volume by one of the best known German authors of the postwar period, is one of observation, analysis, and writing, and is based on his 1958 trip to the United States. Here the author presents a portrait of the United States in the late 1950s: its major cities, its literary culture, its troubled race relations, its multi-culturalism and its vast loneliness, a motif drawn, in part, from Kafka's Amerika. A modernist travelogue, the text employs symbol, myth, and image, as if the author sought to answer de Tocqueville's questions in the manner of Joyce and Kafka. It is also a meditation on America, intended for a German audience and mindful of the destiny of postwar Europe under many Americanizing influences.
Youth
Wolfgang Koeppen is the most important German novelist of the past seventy years: a radical, not to say terrifying, stylist; a caustic, jet-black comedian; a bitter prophet. His late, autobiographical work--the short, intense autofiction, Youth, translated here for the first time--is a portrait of the little north German town of Greifswald before World War I, and is a miracle of compression: this is not historical fiction, but a kind of personal apocalypse. Also included here, in Michael Hofmann's brilliant translation, is one of Koeppen's very last works: a short, fragmentary text spoken over a 1990 German television program depicting his return visit to the town of his schooldays.
Death in Rome
Mirroring the social and political upheaval following the fall of Nazism, Koeppen offers the story of four members of a German family reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome.
A Sad Affair
A romantic roman à clef that tells the story of Sibylle, one of the greatest literary femmes fatales since Salomé.
The Hothouse
Grieving over the death of his wife and disillusioned by the political corruption that surrounds him, Keetenheuve, a minor German politician, confronts the political and social turmoil surrounding him in a ravaged, post-war nation.
The Transformation of Failure
This study of Wolfgang Koeppen's two pre-war and three post-war novels demonstrates a continuity both in Koeppen's thematic concerns and in the underlying development of his characters throughout the five novels. Often the novels have been treated as works of pessimistic social and political criticism: by contrast, this detailed analysis of the unique creative inner lives and the corresponding spiritual development of the characters - with the exception of Johannes von Sude in Die Mauer schwankt - demonstrates the narrator's positive assessment of the characters and the increasingly optimistic tendency of the novels."
