The Hothouse

by Wolfgang Koeppen

  None of the books I have translated have given me more pleasure than The Hothouse and Death in Rome. I find Koeppen's "hämmernder Sprechstil," as it was described by one critic, his "hammering parlando," completely congenial. I love the way he hides a phrase on a page, and a scene in a book; it takes many readings to become aware of the richness and the breadth of his vision, of his prismatic way with details and motifs. His rhetorical approach to a sentence, improvising and appositional, but wound tight in a mighty rhythm, is quite exhilarating. (You need to read them "aloud" to yourself.)

  Koeppen describes The Hothouse as "a German fairy-tale, but, if anything, too mild." To that end, he has incorporated a lot of talismanic German material (German with a capital "D"). He takes "Wagalaweia" from the Rhine Maidens' song at the beginning of Wagner's Rheingold, and makes it into train noise; Alberich the dwarf, and Hägen, and the Norns (a sort of Nordic Fates) also come from Wagner. Novalis and Hölderlin and Heine all supply hugely famous tags. The historical Musaeus (1735-1787) was a collector of fairy tales (like the Grimms), a satirist, and a tutor to the court pages at Weimar. German politics, especially the short and often sadly compromised history of German socialism (the word is never mentioned in the book), is ransacked by Koeppen to similar effect. This system of allusions—to literature, to mythology, to politics—all serve to amplify the story, give it more, ironic, noise. As if it needed it: a man who emigrated in 1933, returned in 1945, was elected to Parliament in 1949, and drowned himself in the Rhine in 1953. As Karl Korn wrote in 1953: "The Hothouse is literature of a quality that is not often attained."

  Michael Hofmann September 2000

  THE HOTHOUSE

  1

  HE WAS TRAVELING UNDER PARLIAMENTARY IMMUNITY, seeing as they hadn't managed to catch him in flagrante. Although, of course, if it transpired that he was guilty, they would drop him just like that, hand him over with alacrity, the ones who called themselves the Noble House, and what a coup that would be for them, what satisfaction to have him depart under such an enormous and unforeseen cloud, off into the cells, safely to molder away behind the walls of some secure prison, and even in his own party, while they would witter agitatedly about the humiliation they would have been put through on his account (all of them, hypocrites to a man), secretly they would be rubbing their hands and be pleased that he had expelled himself, that he had had to go, because he had been a grain of salt, the germ of unrest in their bland and sluggish porridge of a party, a man of conscience and thereby an irritant.

  He was sitting in the Nibelungen Express. There was a whiff of fresh paint, of reconditioning and renovation; these days, you traveled in comfort on the Bundesbahn; while on the outside all the carriages were daubed blood red. Basel, Dortmund, dwarf Alberich, and the factory chimneys of the Ruhrgebiet; through-coaches to Vienna and Passau, Vehmic murderer Hägen had put his feet up; carriages to Rome and Munich, and there was a flash of ecclesiastical purple through a chink in the drawn curtains; carriages to Hoek van Holland and London, the exporters' twilight of the gods, their dread of peacetime.

  Wagalaweia, went the wheels. He hadn't done it. He hadn't killed anyone. It probably wasn't in him to commit murder; but he might have done, and the mere imagining that he had done it, that he had picked up the ax and brought it down, that vision was so clear and irrefutable to him, that he drew strength from it. Fantasies of murder galvanized his mind and body, lending him wings, lighting him up, and for a brief moment he had the feeling that everything would turn out well now, he would make a better fist of everything, he would assert himself and get his way, he would break through to the world of action and make something of his life—but unfortunately his crime had been purely imaginary, he was still the old Keetenheuve, sicklied o'er by the pallid cast of thought.

  He had buried his wife. And, not feeling at ease in bourgeois life, the act of interment alarmed him just as baptisms and weddings horrified him, and every other transaction between two individuals that became public and official. Her death grieved him, he felt deep sadness, choking loss when the coffin was lowered into the ground, he had lost the thing dearest to him in all the world, and, while the phrase had perhaps been devalued by appearing on millions of black-bordered death announcements sent by happy heirs, his dearest had been taken from him, his beloved was put in the ground, and the feeling lost lost for ever I'll not see her again neither here nor in the hereafter I'll look for her and never find her might have made him cry, but he felt unable to cry here, even though only Frau Wilms was watching him in the cemetery. Frau Wilms was his cleaning woman. She brought Keetenheuve a bunch of limp asters from her brother-in-law's allotment. For their wedding, Frau Wilms had brought a similar bunch of limp asters. On that occasion, she had said: "What a lovely-looking couple!" Now she didn't say anything. He wasn't a lovely-looking widower. Droll thoughts kept occurring to him. At school, instead of paying attention to the teacher, he had thought of ridiculous things, in the committee rooms and in the chamber, he saw his dignified colleagues as clowns in the ring, and even in situations when his life had been in danger, the grotesque side of it had not escaped him. "Widower" was a funny word, a grimly funny word, a somewhat dusty notion from a staider era. Keetenheuve remembered having known a widower when he was a boy, one Herr Possehl. Herr Possehl, widower, still lived in harmony with an ordered world; he was respected in the little town. He had assembled a widower's—one couldn't say weeds—garb, the stiff black hat, the morning coat, the striped banker's trousers, and later on an always slightly grubby white waistcoat, across which ran a gold watch chain that had a ram's tooth dangling from it, to symbolize that the animal in him had been set aside. And so, when Herr Possehl went to the baker Labahn to buy his bread, he was a living allegory of fidelity beyond the grave, a touching and estimable embodiment of loss. Keetenheuve was not estimable, and nor did he touch anyone. He owned neither a top hat nor any other kind of hat, and he had gone to the burial in his modish flapping trench coat. The word "widower," which Frau Wilms had not pronounced, but which had started up in him at the sight of her limp asters, pursued and embittered him. He was a knight of the sorrowful countenance, or a knight of the comical countenance. He walked out of the graveyard, and his thoughts raced toward his crime.

  This time he did not remain coolly intellectual in his thinking, he acted on impulse, furiously, and Elke, who had always held it against him that he lived with his head between the pages of a book, Elke would have rejoiced now to witness the prompt and unswerving way he went about his business, while yet, like a film hero, remaining mindful of his safety. He saw himself striding through the street of secondhand stalls, saw himself purchasing his widower's raiment in various nooks and basements. He bought the striped trousers, the morning coat, the white waistcoat (grubby, just like Herr Possehl's), the stiff black hat, the gold watch chain, only the ram's tooth pendant proved impossible to find, and so he was unable to celebrate a triumph over the animal in him. In a large department store, an escalator carried him up to the floor where work clothes were sold, and there he bought a white overall of the sort that cattle drovers wear. The ax he stole from a timber yard. It was very simple; the carpenters were having their evening meal, and he saw an ax lying on a pile of shavings, bent down to pick it up, and slowly walked off with it.

  A large and bustling hotel with several exits was the killer's chosen base. He took a room there, Keetenheuve Member of the Bundestag/Possehl Widower from Kleinwesenfeld. He got in disguise. In front of the mirror he slipped into his widower's outfit. Now he resembled Possehl. He was Possehl. Finally he had achieved respectability. In the evening he went out, with the drover's coat over his arm with the ax. In the gloomy street, a green scorpion glowed from the black glass of a pub window. That was the only light around, a marshy light in a grim story. The bakery and the little dairies and greengrocers all slumbered behind their rusty drawn shutters. There was a musty, moldy, sour smell, a smell of dirt, of rats, of potatoes germinating in basements and of rising bread dough.
Phonograph music could be heard coming out of the "Scorpion." It was Rosemary Clooney singing "Botch-a-me." Keetenheuve moved into a gateway He pulled on his drover's coat, he picked up his ax—he was a butcher waiting for the bull.

  And there was the bull dyke, la Wanowski appeared, a coarse frizz of hair on her bull's skull, a woman who struck fear as a pub brawler, and had gained sway over the tribades; they felt a pang of sweetness when she appeared, they called her the mother of the nation. She wore a man's suit, a suit to fit a fat man, the seat bulged tautly around her buttocks, the square padded shoulders were a metaphor for penis envy, laughable and terrifying at the same time, and between the puffy lips under the burnt cork fluff, she was chewing on the sodden stump of a bitter cigar. No pity! No pity for the ogre! And no laughter to dispel the tension! Keetenheuve raised the ax, and smote. He smote the frizzy mat of hair that he supposed covered her all over, he split the skull of the bull. The bull sank to its knees. It rolled over. The drover's coat was stained by the blood of the bull.

  He tossed the ax and coat into the river, did the widower Possehl, he leaned down over the railing of the bridge, ax and coat sank to the bottom, they were gone, the waters closed over them, water from the Alps snow-melt glacier debris smooth flavorful trout.

  No one had seen him, no one could have seen him, because unfortunately he hadn't committed the act, once again he'd only dreamed it, it had been a daydream and a fantasy, and he had thought it instead of doing it, his old failing, it was always that way with him. He had failed. Failed at every one of life's crossroads. He had failed in 1933 and failed again in 1945. He had failed in politics. He had failed in his profession. He couldn't cope with existence, besides, who could, only idiots, it was like a curse, but this part of it concerned him alone, that he had failed in his marriage as well, and now that he was thinking sadly of Elke, with the widower's genuine and not at all ridiculous pain, Elke lying in the cemetery earth, already given over to the unknowable, to an appalling transformation if there was a void, and something just as appalling if it was more than that, it showed him he was capable of neither love nor hate, everything was just a lecherous fumbling, a groping of surfaces. He hadn't brained the Wanowski woman. She was alive. She was holding court in the "Scorpion." She was ruling, drinking, procuring for the dykes. She was listening to the Rosemary Clooney record, "botch-a-me, botch-a-me"—and then he felt his heart turn over, because he had murdered after all!

  Wagalaweia, wailed the locomotive. Elke had come to him when she'd been hungry, and at a time when he'd had cans of food, a warm room, drinks, a small black cat, and, after a long fast, an appetite once again for human flesh, to use Novalis's phrase for love.

  He had never ceased to feel German; but in the first summer after the war, it wasn't easy for someone who'd been out of the country for eleven years to orient himself. He was a busy man. After leaving him idle for a long time, Time reached for him, and took him in her toils once again, and he believed that, given time, something would become of him.

  One evening found him looking out the window. He was tired. Darkness was falling early There were ominous-looking clouds in the sky. The wind picked up puffs of dust. At that point he saw Elke. He saw her slipping into the ruins opposite. She slipped through a crack in the wall into the caverns of rubble and scree. She was like an animal taking refuge.

  It started to rain. He went out onto the street. The rain and the storm shook him. Dust whirled into his mouth and eyes. He fetched Elke out of the rubble. She was soaked and filthy. Her soiled dress clung to her bare skin. She had no underclothes. She was naked against the dust, the rain and the bare stones. Elke had come out of the war, and she was sixteen years old. He didn't like her name. It made him suspicious. Elke to him was a name out of Nordic mythology, it reminded him of Wagner and his hysterical heroes, a wily, unscrupulous, and violent set of gods, and in fact Elke turned out to be the daughter of a Gauleiter and a governor of the lord.

  The Gauleiter and his wife were both dead. They had swallowed the little death capsules they had been given for all eventualities, and Elke had heard news of their deaths when she was in the forest. She heard the news (and it was no more than news, because Time seemed to have chloroformed that particular day, and Elke felt all the knocks as though she'd been bedded in cotton wool and was being thrown around by rough hands while inside a box lined with cotton wool) from a sniffing and snorting radio transmitter, overexcited by cipher messages and appeals for support, among a group of German soldiers who had surrendered and were waiting to be taken away to a prisoner-of-war camp.

  Two Negroes were guarding them, and Elke could not forget them. The Negroes were lanky, loose-limbed types, who hunkered down in a strange and oddly vigilant kind of squat. It was a jungle posture. The rifles of civilization lay across their knees. Tucked in their ammunition belts, they had long, knotted leather whips. The whips looked altogether more imposing than the rifles.

  From time to time, the Negroes stood up to relieve themselves. They relieved themselves with great seriousness and without taking their round white eyeballs (they looked somehow guileless) off the prisoners. The Negroes pissed in two great high streams into the grass under the trees. While they pissed, their whips dangled against their beautiful long thighs, and Elke thought of Owens, the Negro who had been victorious in the Olympic Games in Berlin. The German soldiers stank of rain, earth, sweat, and wounds, they stank of many miles of road, of sleeping in their clothes, of victories and defeats, of fear, exhaustion, weariness, and death, they stank of the word "injustice" and the word "futile."

  And on forest paths behind the guarded enclosure, peeking shyly out of the bushes, still terrified of the soldiers, still suspicious of the Negroes, there emerged ghosts, famished bodies, broken skeletons, starved eyes, and anguished brows, they came crawling out of the caves where they had been hiding, they broke out of the death camps, they roamed as far as their bony, beaten feet could carry them, the cage was open, they were the persecuted, the harried, the prisoners of the government, who had given Elke her privileged upbringing, games on Daddy's gubernatorial estate, butterflies flittering over the flowers on the terrace, a female prisoner sets the table for breakfast, prisoners rake the gravel, the stallion is led up for the morning gallop, Daddy's top boots cleaned to a mirroring shine, a prisoner brushed them, the saddle leather creaks, the beautifully turned out, well-fed stallion whinnies and paws the ground—Elke couldn't remember how she had gone on from there; now with one refugee column, now another.

  It was Keetenheuve's little kitty-cat that won Elke’s trust. They were both young, the girl and the cat, and so they played together. Their favorite game was balling up Keetenheuve's loose manuscript pages and batting them to and fro. Each time Keetenheuve returned from one of his many avocations, which took up more and more of his time, and left him more and more disillusioned, Elke would call out: "Master's home!" Keetenheuve probably was master, to both of them. But soon the cats companionship began to pall on Elke, she grew bad-tempered when Keetenheuve sat over his papers of an evening, still obsessed with the notion of helping, reconstructing, healing wounds, providing bread, and since their friendship had run aground, they decided to get married.

  Marriage complicated everything. In all the questionnaires—a thing devised by the National Socialists, and now perfected by the occupying powers—Keetenheuve now appeared as the son-in-law of the dead Gauleiter. That alienated a lot of people, but he was unconcerned, he was opposed to clannishness in all its forms, and that included his wife's clan. What was worse was that marriage was deeply alien to his own nature. He was a bachelor, a loner, maybe a voluptuary, or then again maybe an anchorite, he wasn't sure, he swung between the two types of existence, but one thing was certain, that in getting married he had let himself in for an experience for which he had not been intended, and which was a further burden to him. He had, moreover (and happily), married a child, someone young enough to be his daughter, and, in the face of her youth, was forced to recognize
that he was not grown-up himself. They were a match for love, but not for life. He could desire, but not educate. He had no great opinion of education, but he could see that Elke was unhappy in her excessive freedom. She didn't know what to do with freedom. She lost herself in it. Her life, apparently without duties, was like an immense body of water, that washed around Elke without hope of land, an ocean of emptiness, whose unending featurelessness was only ever animated by the riffling breeze of lust, the froth of excess, the wind of bygone days. Keetenheuve was a signpost that had been pitched beside the way of Elke's life, but only, it appeared, to lead her astray. Next, Keetenheuve made the acquaintance— it was a new experience for him, and, again, not one for which he had been intended—of a mortal fatigue and sadness after many conjunctions, the believer's sense of mortal sin. But first of all, he sated his appetite. Elke needed plenty of loving. She was a sensual creature, and, once awakened, her demand for tenderness was powerful. "Hold me tight!" she said. She directed his hand. "Feel me!" she said. Her thighs grew hot, her belly burned, she used uncouth expressions. "Take me!" she cried. "Take me!" And he was thrilled, he remembered his own hunger, the time he'd spent wandering the streets of the foreign cities into which the hatred of Elke's parents had exiled him, he thought of the thousandfold seductions of shop windows, the blandishments of the dummies, their crudely lascivious poses, the displays of lingerie, the poster models who tugged their stockings up to the tops of their thighs, the girls whose language he didn't speak and who passed him like ice and fire in one. Authentic passion had so far manifested itself to him only in dreams, in dreams he had felt eros, in dreams, and only in dreams, the myriad pleasures of the skin, the becoming one, the altered breathing, the rank heat. And the brief moments of pleasure he'd experienced in cheap hotels, on park benches, in doorways of old towns, what were they, in comparison with the exhaustive seduction of the string of seconds, the chain of minutes, the run of hours, the wheel of days, weeks, and years, the constant opportunity vouchsafed by the marriage vows, an eternity of seduction, which out of horror at so much time, spurred the imagination on to the unthinkable?