ROMAN HOLIDAY

Wolfgang Koeppen's sprawling masterpiece of postwar amnesia and hypocrisy.

- BY BECCA ROTHFELD

In a rare interview, Koeppen described his work as "a monologue against the world."

“Once upon a time, this city was a home to gods,” the enigmatic German writer Wolfgang Koeppen declares in his final novel, “Death in Rome” (1954). The gods in question, the jealously quibbling deities who ruled over the ancients with mercurial fervor, often came down and consorted with their subjects—but, by the time the book begins, they have fled. When the estranged members of a German family unwittingly converge on Rome for two days, they find countless reminders of the old pantheon and countless reminders of its abdication. “The angels from the Angels’ Bridge did not take up the invitation of the old gods,” Koeppen reports. When one character, a deacon studying to become a priest, sits “among the stone witnesses of antiquity,” he is “excluded from their society.” The statues watch “dry-eyed” as he weeps for the bygone world. Their response to the indignities of modernity is only contemptuous silence.

Koeppen’s response was similar. For decades following the publication of “Death in Rome,” rumor had it that he was on the cusp of completing a novel that never appeared. “His silence—which is perceived as such—is one of the loudest things in German literature today,” his English-language translator Michael Hofmann wrote four years before Koeppen’s death, in 1996. On one of the few occasions when Koeppen broke his silence to give an interview, he described his work as “a monologue against the world”—an attempt to dismantle West Germany piece by piece—and his fiction often seems to trade in disavowals and annulments. His informal “trilogy of failure,” of which “Death in Rome” is the third installment, is rife with questions that the text answers in the negative: “Was he afraid? He wasn’t afraid.” “Was it a triumph? It was no triumph.”