Pigeons on the Grass

by Wolfgang Koeppen, Michael Hofmann (Afterword)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229180
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996) was born in Greifswald and died in Munich. He worked as a commis chef, a dramaturge, and an editor. In 1951, 1953 and 1954 three novels were published to high acclaim for accurately capturing the atmosphere of the republic under Konrad Adenauer: Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death In Rome.

The award-winning translator Michael Hofmann has also translated works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Joseph Roth for New Directions.

Editorial Reviews

"Koeppen’s prose, as deftly channelled 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."

TLS - Dustin Illingworth

"Among the earliest, grandest, and most poetically satisfying reckonings in fiction with the postwar state of the world."

Michael Hofmann

"Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history... a forgotten masterpiece."

The Evening Standard

"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."

The New York Times - Peter Filkins

"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."

The Independent

"Those who haven't read this novel cannot claim to know German literature after 1945."

Marcel Reich-Ranicki

"There are rare writers who inform and enthrall, even terrify. The gifted German enigma Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1990) is one such witness: candid and strange, allusive, unsettling. Time and again Koeppen stage-manages an unforgettable scene."

Irish Times

"Wolfgang Koeppen, a remorselessly brilliant German writer of the 20th century, has long remained scandalously obscure in the Anglophone world. His reputation can finally begin to flower with Michael Hofmann’s fine translation of Pigeons on the Grass, an acute and disquietingly contemporary novel about a society disfigured by racism and historical amnesia."

Pankaj Mishra

"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."

London Review of Books

"Germany’s greatest living writer."

Gunter Grass

"Scathingly beautiful—lyrically inescapable."

Nadine Gordimer

★ 2020-09-16
A kaleidoscopic narrative that follows a disparate cast of characters whose lives accidentally intersect during a single day in Munich, Germany, in 1948.

First published in 1951 and now available in an inspired new translation, this deeply sardonic, profoundly compassionate novel takes the reader onto the ruined postwar streets of Munich and inside the minds of the city’s inhabitants, their heads "still confused by hunger and explosions.” What seems at first to be a random parade of characters, each portrayed in alternating sections that seamlessly shift the novel’s third-person point of view—from that of a child to a psychologist to an old Nazi to an American soldier and so on—gradually coalesces to form a flawless, interconnected pattern of private dramas and chance meetings. Stories and lives overlap at an accelerating pace yet each protagonist is clearly defined, just as each is at the mercy of fate. Desperation fills the air. Doctors “queued to sell their blood…the only thing they had to sell.” But there is also, among some, a bewildered nostalgia presented with a garnish of irrepressible ironic wit. “Things were different, under Hitler!” one character hears her father lament. “Things had some gusto then.” The novel reaches its crescendo with the onstage appearance of a famous intellectual, the theme of whose lecture is “the deathless soul of the West.” When he arrives, the author notes, “photographers dropped on one knee like archers”—an image typical of the gems scattered liberally throughout the novel. And what follows is indeed a comical skewering of pomposity. At the critical moment, technology—the hope of the future—fails and great thoughts turn into electronic squawks, leaving an adoring crowd mystified.

This portrait of despair and endurance amid postwar ruin is nothing less than a miniature masterpiece.

Kirkus Reviews