The Hothouse

by Wolfgang Koeppen

  The Nestor of the foreign correspondents was an old man, and handsome. He was the handsomest of all the handsome and busy old men in politics. With his shining snowy mane and his fresh complexion, he looked as though he'd just come in from the gale that he had caused to blow around his ears. It was hard to tell whether Dana was a personality of his own, or whether he only seemed to be important because he had spoken to celebrities and notorieties, who perhaps had only been able to give the world and themselves the illusion of importance, because Philip Dana had interviewed them on the telephone. At bottom, he despised the statesmen he interviewed; he had seen too many of that ilk rise, glitter, fall, and sometimes dangle from a gallows, which secretly was a more pleasing sight to Dana than seeing them robust and self-justifying in their presidential armchairs, or lying in state with their contented smile of natural death in their fat faces, while their people were cursing them. Dana had been present at every war and every conference that followed the fighting and paved way for a fresh wave of hostilities for forty years now; he had been fed diplomatic lies by the shovelful, he had seen blind men as leaders and had vainly tried to warn the deaf of approaching catastrophe, he had met rabid dogs who wrapped themselves in the flag, and Lenin, Chiang Kai-shek, Kaiser Wilhelm, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin had all stood before him in white angels' robes, with a dove on their shoulder, and the palm branch in their hand, and blessed was peace on earth. Dana had drunk with Roosevelt and dined with Negus, he had known cannibals and true saints, he had witnessed all the insurrections, the revolutions, the civil wars of our era, and invariably he had seen the defeat of ordinary people. The vanquished were no better than the victors; they only seemed briefly more attractive because they were the vanquished. The world whose pulse Dana had taken was now waiting for his memoirs, but it was his present to the world that he wasn't writing them—it would have been one long horror story. And so, mild and it would appear wise, he sat in Bonn, in a rocking chair (he had set it in his office for comfort and for the symbolism of it), and as he rocked he observed the to-and-fro of world politics in a diminished, but still neuralgic, way. Bonn was Dana's last detail; perhaps his grave. It was less taxing than Korea would have been, but here too he could hear the seed of incomprehension sprouting, and watch the grass of discord and inevitability grow. Keetenheuve knew Dana from the old Volksblatt days. Keetenheuve had written a piece for the Volksblatt on the great transport strike in Berlin, in which the Nazis and the Communists had briefly formed a bizarre, expedient, and highly volatile unity front, and Dana had picked this up for his international news-gathering service, and found readers for Keetenheuve all over the world. Later, Keetenheuve ran into Dana in London. Dana was writing a book on Hitler, which he conceived and sold as a best-seller; he turned his revulsion to good account. Keetenheuve's own antipathy to the Browns had merely served to impoverish and unhouse him, and he half envied Dana's diligence, with the caveat that Dana's book on the seducer was nothing but a best-seller, a smooth and canny piece of work.

  God was in a good mood. He passed Keetenheuve a sheet from a news agency with which he stood in regular contact. Keetenheuve straightway spotted the item that Dana had wanted him to see, it was a bulletin from the Conseil Supérieur des Forces Armées, an interview with French and British generals, who were in the process of setting up a European army, and who saw the evolution of the peace, cemented by treaties, portending a perpetuation of the division of Germany; in their eyes, this division was the one positive outcome of the past war. In the context of the Federal Republic this was dynamite. Its kilotonnage would be highly significant if it were detonated at the right moment in parliament. There was no doubt about that. Only, Keetenheuve was no thrower of bombs. With that news, though, he could strengthen and support Knurrewahn, who dreamed of becoming the man of reunification (a common enough dream). But had the newspapers not picked up on the report yet, and run with it, so that the government would be tipped off, and have their denials already in place? Dana indicated no. The press in the Republic would give the interview little space, if any. The delight of the generals was too touchy a matter, a real body blow for the government, and so, at best, it would be tucked away somewhere where it would be overlooked. Keetenheuve had his dynamite. But he didn't care for explosives. All politics were squalid, it was like gang warfare, the means were dirty and divisive; even someone who was on the side of good, might easily become another Mephistopheles, who invariably does ill; for what was good and what ill, in this field that stretched, like a vast empire, far into the future? Keetenheuve looked sadly out the open window at the rain now spurting again like steam. Through the window came the botanical smell of warm dampish soil and plant mulch, and pale lightnings twitched over the hothouse. Even the storms seemed to be manmade here, an artificial entertainment in the restoration businesses of Fatherland & Sons, Inc., and Dana, the mild and experienced old man, had dropped off in spite of the rumble of thunder. He lay back in his sensitive rocking chair, a balanced observer, a sleeper, and a dreamer. He was dreaming of the Goddess of Peace, but unfortunately the goddess came to him in his dream in the guise of Irene, an Annamite prostitute, whom Dana had consorted with a quarter of a century ago, in a brothel in Saigon. Soft had been her arms, frisky as small rushing streams, and her skin had smelled of flowers. Dana had fallen asleep peacefully in the arms of the peaceful Irene, only later to have to take bitter medicine. That's the way it was with the Goddess of Peace. It's a game. We're playing cops and robbers cops and robbers again and again

  3

  KEETENHEUVE HAD GONE TO HIS OFFICE IN THE NEW section of the Bundeshaus, the annex built onto the Pedagogic Academy. The corridors and the MPs' offices were floored with a waxy, dust-free linoleum. In their gleaming salubriousness, they were reminiscent of the antiseptic wards of a clinic, and maybe the politics that were practiced here on the sick electorate were sterile as well. In his office, Keetenheuve might be a few steps closer to heaven, but he was no nearer to clarity; new clouds and new thunderstorms kept rolling up, and the horizon was draped in brooding black or sulfurous mists. To help his concentration, Keetenheuve had switched on the neon lighting and sat in a kind of twilight where its brilliance encountered the uncertain light of day. His desk was full of mail, full of petitions, full of cries for help; it was full of abuse and insoluble difficulties. Under the neon, Elke was eyeing him. It was just a little picture of her that he had here, a snapshot of her with untidy hair in a street of rubble (but dear to him, because that was how he had found her), but now it seemed to him as if she was as big as a flickering shadow on the cinema screen, and her hair was now brushed, and she was regarding him with friendly mockery, as if to say: "Well, you can have your politics now and your deals, because you're rid of me!" It pained Keetenheuve to hear her talking like that, particularly as it was her voice from the grave that was talking to him, and that could no longer be revised. He picked up Elke's picture and put it away. He filed Elke away, laid her ad acta. But what did that mean, ad acta, to be filed? The files were unimportant, and what was important, whether it appeared in the files or not, was current and pending, was there all by itself, and would remain until sleep, until dream, until death. Keetenheuve put off the moment of dealing with his correspondence, the pleas and the abuse, the letters from professional beggars, moaners, business people, and madmen, the cries of despair—he would have liked to sweep the lot of them off his desk. He picked up a sheet of official stationery, and wrote out "Le beau navire " "The beautiful ship," because Elke had reminded him of that wonderful poem in praise of women, that was how he wanted her to live on in his memory, and he tried to translate Baudelaire's deathless lines from memory, ''je veux te raconter, o molle enchanteresse," I want to say to you, let me tell you, let me confess to you . . . , he liked that, he wanted to confess to Elke that he loved her, that he missed her, he was looking for the right word, the mot juste, he thought, he scribbled, he crossed out, he emended, he sank back in feelings of aesthetic melancholy. Was he lying? No, he
felt it; his love was great, and his sorrow profound, but along with them was an undertow of vanity and self-pity and the suspicion that, in poetry and in love, he was a dilettante. He bewailed Elke, but he also dreaded the desolation he had called for all his life, and which now gripped him. He translated from The Flowers of Evil, "o molle enchanteresse," my sweet, my soft, my warm rapture, o my soft, my smooth, my enraptured word; —he didn't have anyone to write to. There were a hundred letters on his desk, wails, bewildered stammerings, and cursings, but no one was expecting a letter from him, except by way of reply. Keetenheuve had written Elke letters from Bonn, and if they were written with one eye on posterity as well, still Elke had been much more than a postal address; she was the medium that permitted him to speak and put him in touch with the world. Pale as one of the damned, Keetenheuve sat in the Bundeshaus, pale lightnings twitched outside his window, clouds freighted with electricity, charged with the emissions from the chimneys of the Ruhr, steaming broody mists, gassy, toxic, and sulfurous, eerie untamed nature moved stormily past the roof and walls of the hothouse, whistling its contempt and its scorn for the sensitive plant within, the grieving man, the Baudelaire translator and MP in his neon cell the other side of the window. And so the time passed until Knurrewahn sent for him.

  They lived symbiotically, in the way that different creatures lived together for mutual advantage; but they weren't sure they weren't damaging themselves as well. Knurrewahn might have contended that Keetenheuve was bad for his soul. Only, Knurrewahn, an autodidact from the period before the First World War, when he had stuffed himself with a progressive-minded and optimistic literature that even then was no longer new (the riddles of the world had all been solved, and once he'd got rid of his ill-advised god, man needed only to put his house in order), denied the existence of the soul. And so the discomfort he experienced through Keetenheuve was comparable to the irritation that a conscientious noncommissioned officer might feel with a one-year volunteer who doesn't understand the point of training and, worse, can't make himself take it seriously. Unfortunately, though, the army needed its one-year volunteers, and the party needed Keetenheuve, who (Knurrewahn guessed) wasn't an officer at all, wasn't even officer material, but was a straightforward confidence trickster, a vagabond, who for some reason, perhaps bound up with his arrogant manner, was taken for an officer. On this last point, Knurrewahn erred; Keetenheuve was not arrogant, he was merely unconventional, and that struck Knurrewahn as the height of arrogance, and so in the end it was he who took Keetenheuve for an officer, whereas Keetenheuve himself would have been quite happy to admit he was something else, a drifter, for example. He respected Knurrewahn, whom he called a boss from the old school, which was said slightly mockingly, but not unpleasantly, whereas when it was reported back to Knurrewahn's ears, it sounded irritating and conceited. He truly was a man from the old school, though, a craftsman from a family of craftsmen, who had aspired first to knowledge, and then to justice, and once knowledge and justice had turned out to be uncertain of definition and always on a sliding scale, to power and control. Knurrewahn didn't want to make the world do his bidding either, but he did think he could be a force for good in it. And as such, he needed companions and helpers, and he had come across Keetenheuve, who didn't strengthen him, but only confused him. Keetenheuve wasn't the type to make a fourth at cards, and he wasn't a beer drinker, and that excluded him from the circle of fellows that gathered around Knurrewahn of an evening, raising their tankards and slapping down their cards, fellows who decided the fate of the party, but who didn't make up a government in waiting and who couldn't even organize the proverbial piss-up in a brewery.

  Knurrewahn had been through a lot; but it hadn't made him wise. He had had a kind heart; now it had steeled itself. He had come home from the First World War with a bullet lodged in him, and to the surprise of the doctors he had survived; it was at a time that the medical profession still hadn't known that a man could live with a bullet in his heart, and Knurrewahn had gone from one hospital to the next as a living corpse, until he became cleverer than his doctors, accepted a job in the party, and by diligence and occasionally with the help of his remarkable wound, which made its appearance on election posters, was promoted to member of the Reichstag. In 1933, some veterans appealing to veteran values threw the veteran Knurrewahn, who carried the veteran experience around with him in the form of a piece of lead in his heart, into a camp. His son, who, it had been hoped, would continue the academic ascent of the family, was instead, following an older family tradition, apprenticed to a carpenter, and, embittered about the loss of status, and angry with his father's political misjudgments, and in the deluded belief that he had to prove himself (all over the country there were appalling examples of people proving themselves), he volunteered for the Condor Legion in Spain, where he met his death as a monteur. Keetenheuve too had entertained the idea of Spain, and he too, to prove himself, only on the other side (he hadn't done it, and he sometimes reproached himself for having failed here as well), and it wouldn't have taken much for Keetenheuve in an ack-ack emplacement outside Madrid to bring down Knurrewahns son out of the southern sky. The lines of battle snaked right through the middle of countries, and most of those who were flying or shooting no longer remembered what had caused them to fetch up on one side of the front or the other. Knurrewahn never got it. He was a patriot, and his opposition to the government's nationalist politics was, so to speak, a patriotic opposition. Knurrewahn wanted to be the liberator and the unifier of the divided Fatherland, he could already see himself as the Bismarck statue in Knurrewahn Park, and he forgot all about his old dream of the International. In his youth, this International with its red flags had stood for human rights. In 1914, it had died. The new era marched behind different flags, and whatever was still around and called itself International now were little groupings with numbers after their proud names, factions and sects, which didn't exemplify peace at all, but all too evidently discord, from the way they were forever at one another's throats. Maybe Knurrewahn was right to fear an old mistake. In his opinion, the party's position had been insufficiently patriotic in the first German Republic; it hadn't found any support from the already splintered International, and within the nation it had lost the masses, who had been drawn away from it by the siren words of primitive nationalistic egoism. This time, Knurrewahn meant to make sure the patriotic wind would not be taken from his sails. He was in favor of having an army, the burnt child doesn't always fear the flame, but he was in favor of a troop of patriots (the French Revolution blinded him with folly, and perhaps Napoleon was redivivus), he was in favor of generals, so long as they were socialist and democratic generals. Fool, thought Keetenheuve, the generals weren't as stupid as they looked, they would lead Knurrewahn up the garden path, they would promise him the earth, they would lay down and open their legs for him, they wanted to bulk up their staffs, they kept half an eye on their shopping lists, they wanted their toys and their sandboxes to play with. What happened now, nobody knew. Tailors like to sew. National regeneration was one of those dicey things. Maybe that wind had lost some of its puff. A patriotic government, cleverer and wilier now, might sail under an international breeze, and a nationalist Knurrewahn might find himself becalmed, instead of making the running as an internationalist, a race with new ideals for sails, making for new shores. Unfortunately, he couldn't see them. He could see neither the new ideals nor the new shores. He failed to enthuse, because he lacked enthusiasm himself. He was like the populist figures out of cheap nationalist and socialist pamphlets, he wanted to be a Bismarck cleansed of hysteria and unscrupulousness, an Arndt, a Stein, a Hardenberg, and a bit of a Bebel, all rolled into one. Lassalle{10} was a portrait of the MP as a young man. That young man hadn't made it; the doctors had been right after all, and he hadn't managed to survive the bullet in his heart. The Knurrewahn of today looked good in the homburg he didn't wear. He was a stubborn, ornery so-and-so, not just at cards, he was as stubborn and ornery in his way as Prussia's
old soldier king, or as Hindenburg, and so in politics everything had its wires crossed, the winds paid no attention to the courses the parties were trying to keep, and only weather charts, which no one understood, perplexing lines traced between points that had the same temperature (though they might be far apart in other ways) showed the fronts and warned of the impending storm. In a situation like that, Knurrewahn could no longer orient himself, and he clung to Keetenheuve (his well-intentioned Mephistopheles) that he might take the helm and, in the dark and starless sky, steer the little ship by the seat of his pants.

  It was progressive chez Knurrewahn, in a style that he held to be radical and that corresponded roughly to the aesthetic of a bourgeois art monthly. The furniture was practical, the chairs comfortable; furniture, chairs, lamps, and curtains were all the sort of thing that might have appeared in the window display of an interior designer of moderately progressive outlook, labeled 'The Modern Chief Executive's Office," and the bunch of red flowers bought and tended by his secretary stood in exactly the right place, under the watery Weser landscape on the wall. It tickled Keetenheuve to imagine Knurrewahn reading cowboy stories in his chair, but the head of the party had no time for private reading. He listened to Keetenheuve's report, and at the mention of the generals of the Conseil Supérieur des Forces Armées, glamour and treachery entered the room, the perfidy and arrogance of the wicked world, he could see the foreign military men striding across the German weft of his carpets in their riding boots and silver spurs, the French like odalisques in their baggy red pants, and the Brits ready to beat a tattoo on his desk with their little sticks. Knurrewahn was dismayed. He waxed indignant, whereas Keetenheuve could understand the generals talking about the perpetuation of the division of Germany as a scant gain from the last war from the point of view of their specialization. An expert opinion was always going to be narrow, and in this case it was the opinion of generals, so it was bound to be of limited intelligence as well. Knurrewahn didn't share this view; generals impressed him, whereas Keetenheuve tended to bracket them with firemen. The bullet burned in Knurrewahn's heart, the lead that was flesh of his flesh burned, and it was the pain of youth that animated and rejuvenated him. He felt hatred. It was a hatred, furthermore, that the leader of the socialist peace party could afford to feel, a double hatred, doubly legitimated and doubly founded, it was a hatred of the class enemy and the nation's enemy, which presented itself to him and his rage in the same group of persons. Fundamentally, it was the name of their confraternity that sounded arrogant to his ears, it was the expression Conseil Supérieur des Forces Armées that riled Knurrewahn, and that Keetenheuve had held out to him in elegant and calculated provocation, like the torero his cape.