Group Read, January 2024: Death in Rome

Our first group read for 2024 is Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen. Please join the read and post any comments on this thread.

I just started this. It’s worthwhile reading the translator’s introduction first — a useful orientation without spoilers.

>2 annamorphic: thanks for this! My request just came in from the library, so I should actually get to this sometime this month.

This is a really harsh book. Like reading gravel. The writing is tough in some way, and it matches the characters as they struggle to deal with their variously Nazi pasts. As the translator says in the intro, you've never read a book quite like this. At least I haven't.

I'm roughly one third through the book, and so far I enjoy it. My copy from the library is in German, but once you get the characters straight it's not too har to understand.

I didn't know Koeppen, not even by reputation, but that's what the list is for.

I finished the book last night and I really enjoyed it - as much as you can enoy a book of such harsh subject matter. It is a damning portrait of West Germany of the early 1950s but it is also a very interesting study of different reactions to the extreme circumstances of dictatorship and war.

The title is obviously inspired by Tod in Venedig by Thomas Mann, and there are some similarities between Aschenbach and Judejahn. Both of them are men of the past, neither of them have understood it.

My review from 2018. I noticed the Death in Venice connections too:

Shortly after WW2 a German family reunite in Rome. The writing at times is dense and switches narrator without warning. However, I got quite caught up in this story of the members of a German family each representing aspects of post-war Germany (the SS general, the government official, the composer, the priest, the ambitious law student). The action takes place in many of the locations I visited recently in Rome which adds personal texture to the read. The title alludes to Mann's Death in Venice and closing lines of this book ("That same evening {the death} had made world news, though the fact of it can have shocked no one") compare with Mann's "Before nightfall a shocked world received the news of his decease". 4/5