Death in Rome

 My latest serendipitous find on the bookshelves of my favourite charity shop was a novel called Death in Rome by a German novelist I had never heard of, Wolfgang Koeppen. It looked interesting, and when I read the blurb on the back, I knew I had to have it. Death in Rome is described by its translator, Michael Hofmann (the man who has Englished most of Joseph Roth's oeuvre), as 'the most devastating novel about the Germans that I have ever read, and one of the most arresting on any subject'. Who could resist? Not me.
  The principal characters in Death in Rome are four members of a German family who find themselves more or less unintentionally reunited in the Eternal City: 'Once upon a time,' the opening sentence reminds us, 'this city was a home to gods.' No longer. This quartet of German visitors consists of Judejahn, a wholly unrepentant SS general who managed to escape after being sentenced to death at Nuremeberg, and is now working with the military in an unnamed Arab country; his brother-in-law Pfaffrath (Koeppen likes grotesque names), the ultimate bureaucrat who is thriving under democracy just as well as he did under Nazism; and the two lost, damaged souls – Judejahn's son Adolf(!), who is trying to escape the past by training for the priesthood, and Pfaffrath's son Siegfried, a discontented composer of twelve-tone music. These four, Hofmann points out chillingly in his Introduction, represent 'the four principal areas of German achievement, or the four quarters of the riven German soul: murder, bureaucracy, theology and music'. Each of them, as he wanders around Rome, experiences a different city, a different world, none of them easy to take (except for the complacent Pfaffrath senior). Their different perceptions and voices are choreographed like a complex, macabre ballet. Tenses and persons shift (only Siegfried habitually uses the first person), viewpoints switch vertiginously, and the uneasiness present from the start builds into a terrible sense of foreboding as events head towards an inevitable bloody climax. The novel ends with a blunt version of the last sentence of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice ('And before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease'), the ghost of which hovers over Koeppen's novel. Unsurprisingly, when Death in Rome was first published in Germany in 1954, it had a hostile reception and was dismissed with remarks such as 'Is this really what we need at such a time in our history?' A time, that is, when the German nation had willed itself into a state of profound historical amnesia. Death in Rome was just the kind of wake-up call that was not wanted. 
  I hesitate to recommend this novel; it makes unsettling and sometimes painful reading, and this blog is supposed to be a hedonic resource. However, I have to say that it is, by any measure, an extraordinary piece of work. So, if you're feeling strong...