The Hothouse

by Wolfgang Koeppen

  He wanted to be reelected. Of course, didn't they all. But Keetenheuve wanted to be reelected because he thought of himself as one of the few who used their mandate against established power. But what could he say? Should he paint a ray of sunshine on the horizon, produce the old silver lining that gets pulled out of the bag every time like tinsel at Christmas (which was how the party wanted it), the hope that things would get better, that fata morgana for simple minds that goes up in smoke after every election, as if the votes had been cast in Hephaistos's furnace? But could he afford not to sell himself? Was he really choice goods, a star of the political knockabout? The voters did not know him. He did what he could, but most of it was in the committees, not in the plenary sessions, and the work of the committees was done behind closed doors, and not in full view of the nation. Korodin from the other side, his opposite number on the committee for petitions, dubbed Keetenheuve a human rights romantic, always on the lookout for victims and the oppressed, to relieve them of their chains, people who had suffered injustice, Keetenheuve was always on the side of the poor and the hard done by, he supported the individual, and never the churches or cartels, nor even the parties, not even his own, and that cheesed off his party colleagues, and at times Keetenheuve felt better understood by Korodin, his enemy, than by the grouping with which he sat.

  Keetenheuve lay stretched out under the sheet. Tucked in up to his chin, he looked like an ancient Egyptian mummy. There was stale museum air in the compartment. Was Keetenheuve a museum piece?

  In his own estimation he was a lamb. But he wasn't going to make way for the wolves. Not this time. The trouble was that he was lazy; lazy even when he worked for sixteen hours a day, and not badly at that. He was lazy because he was uncertain, questioning, despairing, skeptical, and his own eager and honest advocacy of human rights was nothing but the last foppish remnant of the spirit of opposition and resistance to the state. His back had been broken, and the wolves would have little trouble taking everything away from him again. What else could Keetenheuve turn his hand to? He could cook. He could keep a room clean. He had housewifely virtues. Should he tend his conscience, write articles, address commentaries to the ether, become a public Cassandra? Who would print the articles, broadcast the commentaries, or give ear to Cassandra? Should he go on the barricades? If he thought about it, he would prefer to cook. Maybe he could prepare the evening meal for the monks in their cloister. Korodin would write him a recommendation. Korodin was a husband and father, he would have grandchildren in time, he had his faith, he had a sizable personal fortune and profitable directorships, he was a friend of the bishop's, and was on good terms with the monks.

  There were some early risers in the capital. It was half past five. The alarm shrilled. Frost-Forestier was already awake. He had no dream, no embrace, from which to free himself, no nightmare had oppressed him, no early mass summoned him, no fear had caught him thrashing in its toils.

  Frost-Forestier switched the light on, and disclosed an enormous room, a magnificent nineteenth-century salon, with stucco ceiling and carved pillars, and this served Frost-Forestier as bedroom, dining room, study, sitting room, kitchen, laboratory, and bath. Keetenheuve remembered the heavy curtains in front of the high windows, they were generalissimo red, and, permanently drawn, made a kind of fire wall against nature. All that was audible was a muffled twittering, the celebration song of the birds waking in the park outside, and what was performed in the salon was the beginning of a factory shift, the starting up of an assembly line, a succession of neat and sophisticated movements, precisely and logically calibrated, and the factory that was thus set in gear was Frost-Forestier. He chased after the electronic brains.

  That was some twiddling and tuning! A large radiogram gave the news from Moscow. Its little brother glowed and bided its time. A coffee machine worked itself up into a froth. The boiler supplied the shower with ample hot water. Frost-Forestier stood under the stream. The plastic shower curtain was left open. Frost-Forestier liked to survey the battlefield while showering. First hot, then cold. He was a fit and well-proportioned man. He rubbed himself down with a rough khaki towel of American manufacture, a male nude in an empty barracks. His skin glowed. All quiet in Moscow. Appeals to the Soviet people. Frost-Forestier turned to the muses, switched on music. Next to the shower cabinet was a high bar. Frost-Forestier got in position; clean hands on clean thighs. He leapt onto the bar, swung himself up and down. Then back in starting position. His expression was serious. His cock dangled, inert, well proportioned, between his muscular thighs. The plug of an electric shaver was inserted into a socket. There was a quiet purring sound as Frost-Forestier shaved himself. There were disturbances to the reception. Frost-Forestier switched off the big radio. The muses had done their bit. He took a ball of cotton wool, and swabbed his face with a pungent aftershave. The cotton wool ball vanished under the patent lid of a hygienic pedal bin. A few pustules stood out on his face. He pulled on a dressing gown, a hair shirt, and tied it round his waist with a red tie. The time of the little radio was at hand. It crackled and sang: "Dora needs diapers." Frost-Forestier hearkened. The little radio repeated: "Dora needs diapers." And that was all the little radio had to say for itself.

  The coffee machine trembled and steamed. A whistle hastened through its puckered mouth, the factory siren announced the beginning of the day shift. Frost-Forestier poured the coffee into a cup. The cup was of old Prussian porcelain, an ornamental cup for amateur collectors. Keetenheuve remembered the cup, its handle was broken. Frost-Forestier scorched his fingers when he picked it up. When Keetenheuve had been to see him, Frost-Forestier had scorched his fingers too. Every morning he scorched them. The cup had a colored picture of Frederick the Great on it. The king looked out into the room from his cup with the expression of a melancholy greyhound. Frost-Forestier took a paper handkerchief, folded it around the porcelain and the king, and began to sip his hot black morning beverage. All in all, less than fifteen minutes had elapsed since the alarm had gone off. Frost-Forestier opened the combination lock of his safe. Keetenheuve was amused by the safe. The safe was a gift to the insatiably curious. Documents, files, vitas, letters, drafts, films, and tapes waited here how sweet the preserves in his old aunt's cupboard smelled to the boy{3} and there were plenty of people who wouldn't have minded helping themselves. On the rough wooden table, a long piece of board on four trestles, there were tape machines. There were two cameras as well, one miniature, the other standard. Thieving equipment! One no longer stole the thing itself, that was left alone, one stole its shadow. And one could steal the voice of a man in the same way Keetenheuve always left so many things lying around. He was untidy Frost-Forestier, a man in a political job, sat down at his desk. He began to think, he began to work. He had three hours ahead of him, the most important hours of the day, he concentrated, he got through a lot of work. He fitted a tape into the magnetophone, and switched it to play. He heard his own voice and another voice speaking. Rapt, absorbed, Frost-Forestier listened to the voices. Occasionally, they prompted him to write something down. Frost-Forestier had notebooks in red, green, and blue. He wrote down a name in one of them. Was it Keetenheuve's name? Frost-Forestier underlined the name. He underlined it in red.

  General Yorck signed the agreement of Tauroggen. His king rehabilitated him. General Scharnhorst was recruiting. General Gneisenau was reforming. General Seeckt reminded himself that the sun rose in the east. General Tukhachevski wanted to roll up the carpet of the world. General de Gaulle asked for tanks, no one paid him any attention and he was right. General Speidel went to his allied colleagues. General Paulus was still stuck in Russia. General Jodl was in his grave. General Eisenhower was now President Eisenhower. Who was the great informant to the Red Choir? Frost-Forestier liked to remember his time in the Army High Command. He was fond of military expressions. Once he said to Keetenheuve: "I have a feeling in my water." What feeling did he have in his water? That they would get together?

  The morning barged throu
gh the blind. Keetenheuve pushed back the sheet. He felt a draft—Freud or Civilization and Its Discontents. In the cafés in Berlin they talked about the different psychoanalytical schools. Tulpe was a Communist. Keetenheuve was a moderate. It was the time when moderates and Communists still talked to each other. Fine. Futile. No point. Struck with blindness? Struck with blindness. It was Erich who had first brought Keetenheuve along to a trade union house. Erich had wanted to treat him, and Keetenheuve was forced to accept his invitation, even though he wasn't hungry. A small, worried-looking man with a mighty mustache that was much too powerful for his shriveled face, brought them charred potato pancakes and fizzy lemonade that tasted like pudding out of packets. When Keetenheuve had eaten the pancakes and drunk the lemonade, he felt revolutionary. He was young. The town was small, dull, narrow-minded, and the union house had a reputation for being the citadel of dissent. But the popular rebellion the lads dreamed of never came about, never never never, what there was and what kept coming back, repeatingly, were the charred potato pancakes of poverty and the pale pink drink of evolution, a lemonade brewed from synthetic syrups, effervescing when you unscrewed the top, and causing you to eructate after you'd drunk it. Erich had been killed. In the little town they had named a street after him; but the populace, dull, narrow-minded, and forgetful as ever, continued to refer to it as Short Street. Keetenheuve kept asking himself whether Erich had really died for his convictions, because it seemed likely that he would have lost them by then. But maybe at the moment of his death, Erich had returned to that hope, purely because the people of that small town were so god-awful in those days. It was lawlessness that caught up with Erich on the marketplace, but what brought about his death was his own disgust.

  Keetenheuve raised the lid of the washstand, water flowed into the basin, he could wash, could undertake—once more—the cleansing of Pontius Pilate, of course he was also innocent, he wasn't to blame for the course of the world, but precisely because he was innocent, he was confronted by the immemorial question, what is innocence, what is truth, o ancient governor of Augustus. He looked at himself in the mirror.

  The eyes, without their spectacles, had a good-natured expression, and good-natured imbecile was what his colleague on the Volksblatt had called him, that last evening, the last time he saw the man. That was twenty years ago, on the day that the commissar had taken over the running of the newspaper. The Jewish editors were sacked on the spot, clever people, adroit leader writers, exquisite stylists, but they had misread the signs, done everything wrong, clueless calves in the abattoir compound; the others were given a few weeks to prove their worth. Keetenheuve declined the opportunity.

  He took his back pay and went to Paris. He was free to go, no one stopped him. In Paris, though, people asked him in bewilderment: What are you doing here? Why have you come? Not until German troops were marching down the Champs-Elysées did Keetenheuve have an answer. But by then he was en route for Canada; together with German Jews, with German anti-fascists, German national socialists, young German airmen, German sailors, and German shop assistants he was way down in the belly of a ship bound for Canada from England. The captain of the vessel was a just man; he hated them all equally. And now it was Keetenheuve who was asking himself: What am I doing here, what's the point of this, is it just to avoid taking part, so that I can wash my hands in innocence, and is that enough?

  Keetenheuve's head was in its usual place, no one had detached it from his trunk. Did that speak against Keetenheuve, or did it, as some thought, speak against the guild of the world's executioners? Keetenheuve had plenty of enemies, and there was no treason of which he was not accused. That's the way George Grosz would have painted me, he thought. His face already had the proud cast of the ruling class. He was a member of parliament and belonged to the loyal—oh, so loyal—opposition to the Chancellor.

  Half-nude of a manager—that's what the mirror gave back. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, he was fleshy now, out of condition, the muscles slack, the skin matt white with a bluish tinge like watery skim milk in wartime, fat-free milk they called it now, a cute coinage of state euphemism, he belonged to the moderates, made his peace, accepted the situation, advocated cautious reforms in keeping with tradition, he was plagued by desire and circulatory disorders (kiss me) you will go. He was an imposing man. He displaced more air than he had ever expected to. What was the smell around him? Lavender water, a souvenir of the Empire, the long corridors of This-is-England (kiss me) you will go. Keetenheuve was no typical instance of the parliamentary elite. With those eyes, he couldn't be; they were too good-natured. Who wanted to be called good-natured and be thought of as something of an imbecile? And the mouth—the mouth was too thin, too pursed schoolmaster schoolmaster it wasn't garrulous, it was disquieting, and so Keetenheuve was never altogether demystified; "he was a handsome man / and what i want to know is / how do you like your blue-eyed boy / Mister Death." Keetenheuve was a reader and devotee of contemporary poetry, and it sometimes amused him, while listening to his colleagues' speeches in parliament, to wonder who else in the room would have read Cummings. That set Keetenheuve apart from the party, kept him young, and caused him to lose out in the ruthlessness stakes. The little magazines, no sooner started up than wound down, the journals that devoted themselves to poetry, rubbed shoulders with the official files in Keetenheuve's briefcase, curious, yea verily, curious, to have the poems of the experimental poet E. E. Cummings scraping against the color-coded cardboard folders of a German parliamentarian marked Confidential, Urgent, Secret (kiss me) you will go

  Keetenheuve went out into the corridor. Many ways led to the capital. There were many travelers toward power and livings.

  They were all on their way, delegates, politicians, civil servants, journalists, party lobby fodder and party founders, interest groups by the dozen, unionists, publicity managers, jobbers, the corrupters and the corrupted, the fox, the wolf, and the sheep of the security services, the news hawkers and news fabricators, all the string pullers, the stage managers, the pact makers, the splinter groups, all those who wanted to strike it rich, the brilliant cineastes of Heidelberg on the Rhine on the Heath in the tub for Germany at Dragons Rock, the spongers, swindlers, moaners, placemen, and Michael Kohlhaas was sitting in the train, and the alchemist Cagliostro, Hägen the Vehmic killer sniffed the dawn, Kriemhild wanted her pension, the lobby riffraff kept their eyes and ears peeled, generals still in their Lodenfrey suits came marching in to be reactivated, numerous rats, numerous panting dogs and plucked fowls, they had visited their wives, fucked their wives, murdered their wives, they had bought ice cream for their kids, they had watched the ball game, they had followed the priest in their chasubles, they had served as deacons, they had been chided by their bosses, received encouragement from their backroom staff, they had come up with an idea, drawn up an itinerary, they wanted to pull a fast one, they made plan B, they had drafted legislation, spoken in their constituencies, they wanted to get up the greasy pole, stay in power, keep their noses to the grindstone, their snouts in the trough, they made their way to the capital city, the tiny capital lowercase hamlet that they liked to poke fun at, and they failed to understand what the poet had meant when he said that the real capital of any kingdom was not in any case behind high walls and could not be stormed.

  Make way for the peoples representatives,{4} dime-store jibes, the joke already had a beard in the Kaisers time a lieutenant with ten men writing Germany awaken on the latrine wall, by now the beard was so long you couldn't even see where the joke had been. What did the people want, and what did it mean anyway, the people? Who was it on the train, on the street, at the station? Was it the woman in Remagen pushing the beds over to the window, beds for birth, copulation, or death, then the building was hit by shrapnel, was it the maid with the milk pail staggering to the cowshed, up so early tired so early, or was he, Keetenheuve, the people? He distrusted the simplifying collective. What did it mean, the people, was it a herd to be fleeced or shod or led, was it comp
osed of groups, to be brought into action by the planners according to their terms and their needs, sent into battle, driven to their graves, the German boy in action, the German girl in action, or was the people millions of individuals, each one different, each one thinking for himself, separately, away from any center, toward God, or toward a void or madness, impossible to lead, to direct, to bring into action or to shear? Keetenheuve hoped it was the latter. He belonged to a party that believed in majority rule. So what did the people mean? The people worked, the people funded the state, the people wanted to live off the state, the people complained, the people muddled along.

  It wasn't given to talking about its representatives much. The people was not as mannerly as the people in school textbooks. It didn't share the author's notion of civics. The people was resentful. It resented the title of its deputies, their seats, their immunity from prosecution, their diet, their free travel passes. The dignity of parliament? Laughter in the bars, laughter in the streets. The loudspeakers had humiliated the parliament in people's front rooms for too long, the representation of the people had been a male voice choir for too long, a simple chorus to beef up the dictators solo. Democracy was held in low repute. It failed to galvanize. And the repute of the dictatorship? The people said nothing. Was it silent because it was still afraid? Or was it silent out of unabating adoration? The jury acquitted the men of the dictatorship on all charges. And Keetenheuve? He was engaged on the work of rebuilding, and he was traveling on the Nibelungen Express.

  Not all the parliamentarians traveled on the sleepers of the Bundesbahn. Others came to the capital by car, claimed the mileage allowance and the depreciation, and did very well out of it; they were the sharper cookies. On the Rhine highway, the black Mercedes roared downstream beside the water. Downstream washed the ooze, the driftwood, the germs, the excrement, and the industrial discharges. The men sat next to their drivers, or they sat behind their drivers, and they nodded off. Their families had taken it out of them. Sweat poured down their bodies, under their coats and jackets and shirts. The sweat of exhaustion, the sweat of memory, night sweat, death sweat, sweat of rebirth, sweat of being driven somewhere or other, sweat of naked panic fear. The chauffeur knew the road and hated the scenery. The chauffeur's name might be Lorkowski and he might have come from East Prussia. He came from the pine forests; there were dead bodies in the pine forests. He remembered the lakes; there were dead bodies in the lakes. The member of parliament had a soft spot for displaced persons. I thought it was supposed to be pretty here, thought Lorkowski, I shit on the Rhine. He shat on the Rhine, Lorkowski, parliamentary' driver from East Prussia, Lorkowski, hearse driver from the POW camps, Lorkowski, ambulance driver from Stalingrad, Lorkowski, National Socialist Motorized Column driver from the old Kraft durch Freude days, shit the lot of it, corpses, parliamentarians, and cripples all one and the same load, load of shit, he shat everywhere not just on the Rhine.