Pigeons on the Grass (Portico Paperbacks Series) [Paperback]

...is Wolfgang Koeppen's magnum opus and in addition, it is one of the greatest German post war novels to date. The english title derives from the motto of the novel, a one liner by Gertrude Stein, that was quoted by the author in the beginning of the book. The novel is great in creating an authentic, general yet intimate picture of Germany in the years after WW II. The novel shows autobiographical strains and indulges in references to the traditions of the western world and especially to ancient greek mythology. Its narrative structure is shaped by a delicate use of stream of consciousness and the fragmentation of the plot, icluding its many intricately designed sub-plots.

Clearly influenced by ULYSSES, Koeppen describes a day in an unnamed city in the American zone of Germany after WW2. The writing, even in translation, is fine throughout: sometimes quite straightforward, concerned with the streets and bars of the city, sometimes rising to poetic heights with multicultural literary allusions. But on the whole Koeppen's style is simpler than Joyce's, his world less glamorous, and his aim less consciously epic.

The book is a collage of paragraph- or page-long sections describing the actions of a dozen or more German characters from various walks of life -- decadent, downtrodden, or hopeful -- and a smaller number of Americans. There is little plot, but various characters do meet and cannon off each other in a sort of random Brownian motion, leading to a climax of sorts at the end, potentially serious but unresolved. Some of the characters are more fully realized than others -- I was personally moved, for instance, by the affair between a German ex-prostitute and an African American GI, both living on the fringes of their respective societies -- but the book as a whole is more important than its individual parts. It paints a powerful picture of life in that particular post-Hitler limbo, and therein lies its uniqueness for its time (written even before Gunter Grass' monumental THE TIN DRUM).

My four-star rating does not reflect the importance or basic quality of this book, though I do consider it a weakness that several of the characters are less fully realized. It is more a reflection of my own enjoyment. Although short (202 pages), this is not a book to be read quickly; it is difficult to take in its almost musical structure at a single reading; although simple enough from page to page, the book juggles so many balls that it becomes hard to keep track of them. But the subject is important, there is nothing else quite like it, and that alone makes it well worth picking up.

Wolfgang Koeppen's trilogy of novels written in the 1950s -- Pigeons on the Grass, HotHouse, Death in Rome -- were putatively 'forgotten' or ignored through most of the latter 20th Century. Translations into English have been around since the 1980s, but Koeppen remains broadly 'undiscovered' by American readers. That's not unusual; many of the most potent novelists of the mid/late 20th C wrote in German -- Hans Fallada, Alfred Doeblin, Gert Ledig, Irmgard Keun, Joseph Roth, WG Sebald, others -- and remain little known to English readers. We anglophones are the losers here; in the aggregate, German literature of the 20th C towers over English/American in intelligence, originality, and honesty. By all means, read Koeppen now!

The previous reviews by RM Peterson and H Schneider are sufficiently eloquent and enthusiastic, and I won't repeat what they've already provided. I'd like to offer a few responses and addenda, however. Both reviewers connected Koeppen's literary structure to the work of James Joyce; there's nothing false about that connection, but for an American reader, a more revealing comparison would be to the work of John Dos Passos, especially his immense trilogy "USA", which is formatted very much like Koeppen's trilogy. Koeppen acknowledged the influence of Alfred Doeblin's "Alexanderplatz" and Doeblin in turn acknowledged the influence of Dos Passos, so if an American reader wants to know what to expect in "Pigeons on the Grass", the answer is to expect the journalistic collage structure of "USA" or "Manhatten Transfer", but with far finer control of imagery and style. Koeppen is a superb stylist! One of the previous reviewers suggested a lack of discipline and conciseness in "Pigeons on the Grass". To my mind, that's totally inaccurate; this is a very tightly crafted and coherent novel. To paraphrase Mozart's famous sassy reply to the Emperor, 'there's not a note - or a paragraph - too many.'

The previous reviewers paid far too little attention to the women characters in this novel, focusing all their remarks on the despairing German poet Philip and/or the African-American soldier Odysseus Cotton. The women characters range from prostitutes to an alcoholic heiress to an aging women of the highest respectability and Hitlerian sympathy. It seems to me that the women are as much the protagonists of this novel as the men. They are richly developed as characters. Their mentalities are key to the novel's content and social insights. Another American character, the visiting literary celebrity Edwin, is also crucial to Koeppen's portrayal of Germany in its post-war cultural crisis; his desperation is implicitly "ours" in retrospect, and his brilliantly un-portrayed fate in the mean streets of Goethe-land is in fact the climax of the novel.

Racism is also a huge part of this novel, the driving force behind most incidents in the narrative. If the assorted characters of the novel are as incidental and self-bound as 'pigeons' scattered on the grass, all pecking at their own merest survival, then the 'grass' is the poisonous herb of racism. The 'racial anti-semitism' of Nazi Germany has not been mown so short after all, Koeppen exposes, and the extension to occupied Germany of an American racism is not likely to amount to a solution.

Koeppen was clearly no optimist about the "Economic Miracle" in post-war Germany, or about the direction of European culture at large following the War. I would guess that he expected an even sourer and more sordid course of events than "we" have witnessed in the intervening decades. He was, however, an incredibly credible witness of the state of things in Germany at the exact historical moment when modern Europe was born.