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

Fiction

Set in post-Nazi Germany, The Hothouse follows one character's decession into depression as he returns to the city of Bonn The Hothouse refers to the city of Bonn, with its warm damp climate, but it also refers to the political environment of the temporary capital of divided Germany, where politics in the 1950s was about compromises and half measures. The central character, Keetenheuve, is an idealistic politician-intellectual who has returned from voluntary exile during the Nazi period. Now his idealism becomes a trap for him, as he attempts to break with the past and persuade his colleagues to embrace a radical rejection of militarism. The novel traces the final two days in the life of this depressed, isolated man. 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