The Trilogy of Failure by Wolfgang Koeppen

Join us for a conversation with Michael Hofmann and Joshua Cohen to celebrate the Trilogy of Failure, three of Wolfgang Koeppen's great lost classics: the Hothouse, Death in Rome, and Pigeons on the Grass.

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On the anniversary of Wolfgang Koeppen’s 120th year, the two remaining works in his postwar trilogy in Michael Hofmann’s spectacular translation.

The Hothouse traces the tragic final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of his country after World War II. Following his self-imposed exile during the war, Keetenheuve returns to the hothouse: the city of Bonn, the capital of that new postwar capitalist nation, West Germany. Until this point he has led a life guided by principle and political optimism. Here, in spellbinding internal monologue and jarring montage, he meets his end. The Hothouse is an existential masterpiece and a portrait of a moral man crushed by an immoral world. Bitterly controversial at home, a cult writer abroad, Koeppen (1906–1996) brought a volcanic modernist style to German literature that remains unparalleled to this day. His uniquely radical voice and breathtaking prose is rendered magnificently by Michael Hofmann.

Bitterly controversial at home, a cult writer abroad, Wolfgang Koeppen (1906–1996) brought a volcanic modernist style to German literature that remains unparalleled to this day. His uniquely radical voice and breathtaking prose are rendered magnificently by Michael Hofmann.

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, a visiting poet, prepares for a reading; Philipp gives himself up to despair; Emilia sells the last of her jewelry; Alexander stars as the Archduke in a new German Super-production; and Susanne seeks out a night to remember. In Michael Hofmann’s words, “in their sum, they are the totality of existence.”

Koeppen spares no one and sees all in this penetrating and intense novel that surveys those who remain, and those who have just arrived, in a damaged society. As inventive as Joyce and as compulsively readable as Dickens, Pigeons on the Grass is a great lost classic.

“In a brilliant translation of this great German novel, Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history. A forgotten masterpiece.”—Evening Standard

Death in Rome tells the story of four members of a German family—a former SS officer, a young man preparing for the priesthood, a composer, and a government administrator—reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome. A chilling account of Nazis after the war, here the older generation is resentful but not repentant. From the old unreconstructed Nazi officer Judejahn (the name has a suggestion of “Jew hunter”) to the young and apparently gay priest, from the supposedly reformed Mayor to the acclaimed but haunted young composer Siegfried, no clear hope emerges. And amid haunting flashbacks and against the shadows of Rome with its imperial echoes, the darkness is alive. Brace yourself: the novel takes place over a two-day period, mostly at night, and it's certain that the present will be governed by the past, if you let it. In Death in Rome, Koeppen amply demonstrates that evil doesn't simply cease once it loses a war—it seeps out, hungry to exist in other forms. And as Siegfried confesses: “In my daydreams and nightmares I see the Browns and the nationalist idiocy on the march again.”

With Pigeons in the Grass and The Hothouse, it concludes Koeppen’s masterful trilogy.

The poet Michael Hofmann's awards for translation include the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (four times), and most recently, the American Academy's Thornton Wilder Prize in Translation.

Photo by Jemimah Kuhlfeld.

Joshua Cohen is the author of six novels, one collection of short fiction, and one collection of nonfiction. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded the 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Photo by Marion Ettlinger.

Event Venue

Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States

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