Overview

Death in Rome tells the story of four members of a German family-a former SS officer, a young man preparing for the priesthood, a composer, and a government administrator-reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome. A chilling account of Nazis after the war, here the older generation is resentful but not repentant. From the old unreconstructed Nazi officer Judejahn (the name has a suggestion of ""Jew hunter"") to the young and apparently gay priest, from the supposedly reformed Mayor to the acclaimed but haunted young composer Siegfried, no clear hope emerges. And amid haunting flashbacks and against the shadows of Rome with its imperial echoes, the darkness is alive. Brace yourself: the novel takes place over a two-day period, mostly at night, and it's certain that the present will be governed by the past, if you let it. In Death in Rome, Koeppen amply demonstrates that evil doesn't simply cease once it loses a war-it seeps out, hungry to exist in other forms. And as Siegfried confesses: ""In my daydreams and nightmares I see the Browns and the nationalist idiocy on the march again."" With Pigeons in the Grass and The Hothouse, it concludes Koeppen's masterful trilogy.

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9780811240024

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Reviews

Formidable mastery.-- ""The Independent"" Death in Rome is the most devastating novel about the Germans that I have ever read, and one of the most arresting on any subject. It takes a German family--not a real German family, not even a caricature of a German family, but a prototypical German family that George Grosz would have had the bile but not the wit to invent, and Musil or Mann the wit but not the bile--and brings them to Rome.--Michael Hofmann, from the afterword The reader closes Death in Rome not knowing whether he has just witnessed a murder or the creation of a masterpiece. The answer is: both.-- ""The New York Times""

Author Information

Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996) was born in Greifswald and died in Munich. He worked as a junior chef, a dramaturge, and an editor. In 1951, 1953 and 1954 three novels were published to high acclaim for accurately capturing the atmosphere of the republic under Konrad Adenauer: Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death in Rome. The award-winning translator Michael Hofmann has also translated works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Joseph Roth for New Directions. His translation of Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2024. Joshua Cohen is the author of six novels, one collection of short fiction, and one collection of nonfiction. Called ""a major American writer"" by the New York Times, and ""an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today"" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded the 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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