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Wolfgang Koeppen—“Poet of Failure”

The German writer’s postwar works were ruthless in their condemnation of a country that, in its inability to reckon with historical atrocity, was beyond reform.

Among the fresh perplexities of our age is the recrudescence of what Thomas Mann defined as the “German problem”: a pact between “the German spirit” and “the demonic.” It is manifested variously: in the genocidal philosemitism of many in Germany’s political and intellectual classes, including the philosopher Jürgen Habermas; the brutal crushing of protesters against the limitless German license to Israeli fanatics; and the electoral resurgence of a neo-Nazi far right boosted by American white supremacists while Germany embarks on its most ambitious rearmament program since 1945.

Suddenly, the myth that postwar German society pioneered an admirable memory culture, allowing it to absorb the right lessons from its criminal past, has been discarded by the mythmakers themselves—Susan Neiman, who wrote admiringly of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“dealing with the past”), now claims that “German historical reckoning has gone haywire.” Germany once again appears an extreme case of political derangement, as Wolfgang Streeck noted in early 2026, shocked by the country’s “stony equanimity in the face of uninhibited cruelty, its studied absence of moral emotion, the icy silence of its political as well as its intellectual class, from journalists to professors, from movie directors and artists to writers.”

Of the many German writers born in the first three decades of the 20th century (Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, Siegfried Lenz, Martin Walser, Heinrich Böll, Uwe Johnson), Wolfgang Koeppen would have been the least surprised by the tenacity of the German problem. “Hitler will remain with us” is the title of an essay he published in 1966, a year before the German press started to project a taboo nationalism on the state of Israel (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung greeted Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 with an editorial titled “Der Blitzkrieg Israels”). The CEO of the Axel Springer media conglomerate Mathias Döpfner today proudly proclaims “Zionismus über alles” (Zionism above all) as his motto, brazenly alluding to the deleted first line of the German national anthem, “Deutschland Über Alles.” Many others warned against the insidious persistence of the ancien régime in Europe. Speaking in 1946 of the “perversions” of “white, Western civilization,” Albert Camus claimed “that we are all united with Hitlerism,” and that its “poison” was carried in “our very hearts.” But the work of no postwar European writer is informed so completely and insistently by this furious conviction.

The suspicion that Hitlerism has survived Germany’s zero hour in 1945 is what sours the political idealism of the protagonist of The Hothouse, who has returned from exile to Bonn, the provisional capital of West Germany: “He wanted to realize his youthful dreams, at the time he had been a believer in change, but he soon saw what a foolish belief that was, people had naturally remained the same, it didn’t even occur to them to change, merely because the form of government had changed, because the uniforms thronging the streets and making babies were now olive-green instead of brown, black, and field gray.”

The Hothouse was the second in Koeppen’s trilogy of novels which, met contemptuously on publication, are now considered masterpieces of German literature: Pigeons on the Grass (1951), The Hothouse (1953), and Death in Rome (1954). Born in 1906, in Greifswald, Pomerania, and shaped by the intellectual excitements of Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Koeppen went into exile in the Netherlands after Hitler came to power in January of 1933. Forced to return in 1938 by penury, he turned into a scriptwriter for films; he was saved from the worst of the war by a series of lucky breaks.

His biography records that the same financial exigencies that forced his repatriation to Nazi Germany made him a hectic producer of literary texts after 1945. But a mind and sensibility as acute as his, and further sharpened by adversity, must have found irresistible the novelistic material of postwar Germany. Reflecting on “the first half of the twentieth century with its political catastrophes, its moral disasters,” in Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt speaks of “a world in which everybody who is publicly recognized belongs among the salauds, and everything that is exists in an opaque, meaningless thereness which spreads obfuscation and causes disgust.” Koeppen worked boldly with the assumption that most men growing prominent in the public sphere were scoundrels. It is easy to see why.

The revelation of Nazi crimes had provoked fresh legal and intellectual interrogations of what Karl Jaspers called “German guilt.” Yet even as Jaspers lectured on the need for self-reflection and Western journalists flocked to the Nuremberg trials, West Germany was given honorary membership of a new Western community called the “free world.” Denazification, grandiosely decreed by the country’s American occupiers, was immediately defanged by cold warriors rushing to find reliable anti-Communists among German Nazis. “Notes were exchanged,” Koeppen writes in The Hothouse, “Treaties signed. The game was on once more. The same old game? The same. The Federal Republic was a player again.” In a mind-spinning ideological reconfiguration, a Germany where stalwarts of the Third Reich occupied senior positions in the civil service, judiciary, and academia, was now mobilized against the Soviet Union, the West’s indispensable ally against Nazism. Oppressed by virulent anti-communism in the United States, but unwilling to settle back in Germany, Thomas Mann noted in 1949 how “everything that after 1945 had for a moment to........

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