Author(s): Wolfgang Koeppen (tr Michael Hofmann)

Fiction

A powerful novel about family and society in post-war Germany. In Rome, four members of a German family are reunited by chance. A young composer, Siegfried; his estranged father, Freidrich, who held office under the Nazis and is once more making his way in public life, this time as a democratically elected buromaster; Siegfried's uncle, Judejahn, an unrepentant former SS general; and Jude jahn's renegade son, Adolf, who is preparing himself for a Catholic priesthood. The four men recount their separate experiences in music, bureaucracy, arms and religion- taken together they personify the German soul. Death in Rome is a history book, a family book, a book about the battle over who gets to represent the authentic face of post-war Germany. It is a devastating and brilliant provocation of an entire nation. About the Author: Wolfgang Koeppen was born in 1906 and died ninety years later in Munich. A journalist for left-wing papers in Weimar Berlin, he spent the early Nazi period in the Netherlands, returning in the war years to work for the film company that produced Fritz Lang's Metropolis . He published five novels, two in the 1930s and three in the 1950s.