I have touched her mouth; I have kissed Sibylle. He sprang up the steps; he hopped across the bridge on one leg; he limped down the other side, and he did many things for Sibylle's amusement.
They took a different way back, stopping in front of every shop window of the commercial street. "Would you like it, the material, the bracelet, the silk scarf, the Nile-smelling handbag of crocodile leather? I'll give it to you. I'll give it all to you!" Sibylle nodded. His gestures were magnificent. He spread all the treasures of the world at her feet.
In the hotel, there was a telegram waiting for Friedrich. It instructed him to go to Ragusa on a certain assignment, and to that end, gave him credit with an Italian bank. "You can go home. You can go back to Bosporus, if you want. You can look for a new engagement. You will play Juliet." He held her hand. Her face was sparkling in so much light. She lowered her eyes, and he kissed her eyelids.
She nodded. She thought for a moment: I could go with him; and she saw herself lying stretched out flat on the white, sand-scrubbed deck of a boat, looking up at the clouds wafting gently overhead. There was a lot of light in her hair as well. It was as though firelight was playing across her. She nodded. "I'll go home. I'll play Juliet." They both laughed, and they knew nothing had changed, and that the wall of glass was still between them, sheer as air and acutely reflecting the image of the other. It was a frontier that they now respected. Sibylle remained destined for him; Friedrich was the human being who belonged to her. Nothing had changed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WOLFGANG KOEPPEN, the illegitimate son of a doctor who took no interest in his welfare, was born in 1906 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast. He was a student for a time, unemployed, and held an array of odd jobs including ship's cook, factory worker, and cinema usher. At the same time, he began to write for left-wing papers and by 1931 was in Berlin, writing for the Berliner Börsen-Courier. Eine unglückliche Liebe (A Sad Affair) (1934) was his first novel, published with the Jewish publisher Bruno Cassirer, followed by Die Mauer schwankt (The tottering wall) (1935). Following the publication of these two works, he emigrated to Holland for a short period in the mid-1930s. Prior to the war, he returned to Germany and spent the war years writing film scripts for UFA that were, as he put it, just good enough to keep him in work, and just bad enough not to be made. The end of the war saw him in Munich.
In 1948, he ghostwrote Jakob Littner's Holocaust memoir Aufzeichnungen aus eniem Erdloch (Notes from a hole in the ground), for which he was paid in food parcels. In 1992, the book was somewhat controversially republished under Koeppen's own name. The controversy was renewed when Littner's original manuscript, having been traced and translated into English by his relative, Kurt Grübler, appeared as Journey through the Night, published by Continuum in 2000. Critics have vindicated Koeppen, analyzing Littner's original text next to both Koeppen's and Grübler's versions. Ruth Franklin, writing in The New Republic, demonstrated that Koeppen remained quite true to the original and in no way betrayed the truth of Littner's account.
In the 1950s, Koeppen completed the three novels that established him, alongside Günter Grass and Heinrich Boll, among the leading contemporary German writers: Tauben im Gras (Pigeons on the Grass) (1951), Das Treibhaus (The Hothouse) (1953), and Der Tod in Rom (Death in Rome) (1954). Although quite separate in terms of character, action, and setting, these three novels, taken together, comprise a kind of trilogy on the state of postwar Germany. German readers and reviewers, however, were wholly unequal to them, taking particular umbrage with The Hothouse, which suggested that ex-Nazis, now acting as politicians in the Bundestag, had merely changed their spots. Pilloried by the critics, Koeppen, either too proud, or too lazy, wrote no more fiction thereafter.
For the remaining forty-odd years of his life, he was a sort of literary pensioner kept by Suhrkamp, his loyal publisher, and by a series of prizes and awards that, guiltily and belatedly, came his way, among them the Büchner Prize of 1962. He wrote three travel books, on Russia, America, and France, and a memoir, Jugend (Youth), that appeared in 1976, yet he never wrote the new novel that was touted and promised over several decades. In 1986, Suhrkamp published his collected works, somewhat surprisingly running to six volumes. He died in 1996, shortly before his ninetieth birthday. In the summer of 2000, a 700-page collection of inédits was brought out under the tide Auf dem Phantasieroß (On the wings of imagination).
After the American and English publications of The Hothouse in 2001, there has been a renaissance of interest in Koeppen's work. "German writers knew Koeppen as an essential bridge," wrote the Wall Street Journal, "as the first postwar voice to speak of things as they are." Nadine Gordimer described it as "lyrically inescapable. . . . Scathingly beautiful in the nightmare landscapes of the failure of materialism's Supermarket to assuage the human inner destructions of the past." And Ruth Franklin (in The New Republic) declared, "It is hard to think of a German writer of his generation who has written more sensitively or more profoundly about the Holocaust and its effects than Wolfgang Koeppen."
Wolfgang Koeppen was born in 1906 and died ninety years later in Munich. He published five novels, two in the 1930s and three in the 1950s. In 1962 he won the Büchner Prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award. He is being posthumously recognized as a giant of European literature.
Michael Hofmann is a poet. He is the translator of eight books by Joseph Roth and was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for translating The String of Pearls (Granta Books).
{1} A reference to Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
{2} "The Beggars' March" from The Threepenny Opera (1928) by Brecht and Weill. The Willett/Manheim translation reads:
Mankind lives by its head
Its head won't see it through
Inspect your own.
What lives off that?
At most a louse or two.
{3} "Fruit of the medlar tree, resembling a small brown-skinned apple with a large cup-shaped eye between peristent calyx lobes. It is eaten only when decayed." (OED) The medlar—like the fig— has strong literary associations with the female sex, cf. Mercutio's lines in Romeo and Juliet, II, i:
Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
O Romeo! that she were, O! that she were
An open et caetera, thou a poperin pear.
A Sad Affair Page 17