A while back someone here was expressing an interest in Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall, and I ran across this:
A German Master’s Modernist Epic of Postwar Amnesia and Hypocrisy
Wolfgang Koeppen’s “trilogy of failure,” written from 1951 to 1954, is a sprawling, polyphonic portrait of a physically and morally shattered country.
The New Yorker, by Becca Rothfeld
Koeppen “wrote his books quickly and in little clusters, or not at all,” and he dashed off those three marvellous novels, Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death in Rome, in a single three-year stretch, from 1951 to 1954. These ribald, irreverent, cutting, rhapsodic, and ultimately devastating portraits of German amnesia and hypocrisy, with their long, torqued sentences and jostling casts of doomed characters, were difficult for Koeppen’s contemporaries to assimilate. Formally, they were a ferment of hallucination, memory, fantasy, confession, and accusation.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/wolfgang-koeppen-book-review