Wolfgang Koeppen’s Trilogy Redux

In a promotional email, the publisher New Directions is hyping the idea that Wolfgang Koeppen’s great trilogy of novels written in the early 1950s “has finally returned in Michael Hofmann’s breathtaking translation.” What New Directions really means is that Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death in Rome are all finally being published as a uniform set by a single publisher for the first time. Originally written in German in 1951, 1953, and 1954, respectively, these captivating post-war novels, which each reflect back on the Nazi era in different ways, were actually translated by Hofmann in 2020, 2001, and 1992. The Hothouse and Death in Rome had previously been published by W.W. Norton & Co., while New Directions somehow got the rights for Pigeons on the Grass in 2020 when no other publisher seemed to have an English translation.

The upside of the republication of these novels by New Directions is the attention and new readers they are drawing. Already there have been major reviews in The New Yorker (April 27, 2026) and The New York Times Book Review (April 28, 2026), where Dustin Illingworth called the trilogy “one of the great reading experiences of my life. . . Taken together, the novels compose a grand taxonomy of resentment, one of the most cleareyed ever written.”

A little more than six years ago, I wrote about each of these three books. Take a look!

In Pigeons on the Grass, this wonderful, often antic but deadly serious novel, we follow the actions of approximately two dozen characters through a single day in post-war Munich. The Germans, along with a handful of their American “conquerors” who now occupy the city, shop, have coffee, run errands, pawn their valuables, and generally go about their daily lives. Everything is leading up to one main evening event: a lecture by an important American visiting poet, Edwin.

The Hothouse follows a few days in the life of Herr Keetenheuve, a member of the postwar Bundestag. In 1933, just as Hitler rose to power, Keetenheuve, who describes himself as an ascetic, a Buddhist, a disciple of Zen, and a pacifist, fled Germany to Canada. He then returned at the end of the war, optimistic and “eager to reinvent the nation as a liberal democracy.”

Death in Rome funnels everything toward one culminating event, a performance of a new piece of symphonic music by the young German composer Siegfried Pfaffrath, which will take place in a concert hall in Rome sometime in the years shortly after World War II. Siegfried doesn’t know it yet, but his parents, one of his brothers, and an uncle are also in Rome for a unique kind of family reunion. The most prominent of these relatives is Gottlieb Judejahn, a former SS general who has been convicted and sentenced to death in absentia at the Nuremberg Trails, but who now runs the military of an unnamed Arab nation under an assumed name. The family hopes to convince Judejahn to return to Germany to help revive the struggling National Socialist cause. Unbeknownst to everyone, Judejahn’s son Adolf is also in Rome, waiting to be ordained as a Catholic priest. Throughout the novel, we will follow these family members as they explore the Eternal City, meet in various combinations, plot, sin, and discover family secrets.