Wolfgang Koeppen
Wolfgang Köppen (1906-1996) was born in Greifswald and died in Munich. He worked as a junior chef, a dramaturge, and an editor.
Wolfgang Köppen (1906-1996) was born in Greifswald and died in Munich. He worked as a junior chef, a dramaturge, and an editor.
Koeppen’s prose, as deftly channeled 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.
A modernist tour of Munich over the course of one eventful day in 1948. The novel’s roving consciousness deliberately blurs the boundaries between the characters’ minds, turning Munich into one large, pulsing brain—exhilarating and original.
Now available in an inspired new translation, this portrait of despair and endurance amid postwar ruin is nothing less than a miniature masterpiece.
Hofmann’s brilliant translation finds pathos in the characters’ quest for meaning and significance in a world of randomness and chance. Koeppen’s masterwork soars.
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.
Scathingly beautiful—lyrically inescapable.
Germany’s greatest living writer.
Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history… a forgotten masterpiece.
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.
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.
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.
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.