For all its concerns with Germany\u2019s future, it is perhaps most fruitfully read as a novel about fathers and sons. Judejahn (the name translates roughly to \u201cJew hunter\u201d), an extraordinary monster of insecurity and wounded pride, greets his semi-estranged son\u2019s religious turn with incomprehension and mockery. Pfaffrath, a politician formerly under the Nazis who is once more on the make, is confused and dispirited by Siegfried\u2019s avant-garde compositions. The two young men \u2014 twinned in the novel, a pair of mirrored rebels \u2014 teeter between nihilism and blurry purpose: \u201cIf God exists,\u201d Adolf reasons, \u201che will also live in dead ends.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are many dead ends in the novel, not least of which is the project of German identity. The four men represent pillars of German accomplishment \u2014 statecraft, soldiery, artistry and theology \u2014 and yet each is a grotesque, unsatisfactory or coldly cerebral analogue to historical greatness. Their interactions \u2014 meals, t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eates over beer or ice cream, conversations in hotels, aimless walks \u2014 create an anguished map across the decaying city. They are always stumbling upon one another in bars and lobbies, music halls, side streets, catacombs and old city walls. They haunt one another as they haunt themselves.<\/p>\n
Their decisions and indecisions move at a fantastic clip, the prose inflected with gorgeous modernist syncopation and lava-like gouts of interior monologue. There is no hope here, finally; only the escape of dream or fantasy. Pfaffrath, the self-serving politician, spells out the futile, cowardly and unbearably sad wish that animates the novel \u2014 to \u201conce more feel without stain, an upright German man.\u201d<\/p>\n
Koeppen himself had a fitful, unconventional career: a provincial youth on the Baltic coast; a brief sojourn as a journalist; two unremarked-upon early novels; prewar exile in Holland; an inexplicable return to Berlin during Hitler\u2019s ascension (he was not a Nazi); various unproduced film projects during the war years; and a final retreat into Munich when his Berlin apartment was destroyed in an air raid.<\/p>\n
The Trilogy of Failure captures a lifetime of inertia, of feckless starts and stops. Beautiful, wise, bleak and unsparing, it wonders what might emerge from history\u2019s devastation. Who will inherit the earth? Koeppen has his guesses, as do we. The novels are prescient, then, but the tragedy is that they might always be so. God save the dreamers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For all its concerns with Germany\u2019s future, it is perhaps most fruitfully read as a novel about fathers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7981,7985,7982,27,7984,7983],"class_list":{"0":"post-10884","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rome","8":"tag-books-and-literature","9":"tag-death-in-rome-book","10":"tag-koeppen","11":"tag-rome","12":"tag-the-hothouse-book","13":"tag-wolfgang"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}