The greenhouse

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A later edition by Suhrkamp-Verlag

The greenhouse is a novel by Wolfgang Koeppen from 1953. The novel takes place during the Cold War and the rearmament of the Federal Republic largely in the federal capital Bonn .

action

The main character is Felix Keetenheuve, who was in his forties, a journalist in the Weimar Republic , who was mainly in exile in England during the Third Reich and was used there for radio broadcasts to Germany. After 1945 he returned to Germany and became a member of the Bundestag for the SPD . At the beginning of the novel, Keetenheuve travels by train to Bonn, where the decisive votes on the integration of the young republic into the West are to take place in parliament . He has just buried his young wife Elke. Their parents had killed themselves at the end of the war because their father was a Gauleiter of the NSDAP . Keetenheuve had neglected Elke in favor of politics. That's why she was addicted to alcohol, as he now accuses himself.

Keetenheuve is - not only because of the loss suffered - disturbed and insecure. He is an uncompromising intellectual , a beautiful spirit who can win more from the poetry of EE Cummings and Charles Baudelaire than a bourgeois lifestyle. Because of his exile, he is the figurehead of his party, but at the same time just as isolated there as in the entire parliament: he dislikes the pragmatic work of the members of parliament , he rejects the faction obligation and insists on making decisions on his own responsibility. He sees the old elites from the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era reaching for power again. Ex-Nazis and fellow travelers are already back in the crucial positions.

Keetenheuve is instrumentalized, on the one hand by his parliamentary group leader Knurrewahn (stands for Kurt Schumacher ), who sends him into the debate as a speaker in order to preserve the pacifist facade of the party, but at the same time gives him rules of conduct and the remark that one is not fundamentally against rearmament was. Secondly, however, also from the parliamentary majority and its almost authoritarian ruling Chancellor ( Konrad Adenauer ), the Frost-Forestier, an important member of the government, albeit without an official title ( Reinhard Gehlen ?), Is working on him to make him an ambassador Offering Guatemala and finally sidelining the disruptive factor Keetenheuve. And finally, thirdly, from a journalist colleague who is close to the Western powers, who sends him confidential material for use in his speech, but at the same time hands it over to the other side, so that the moment Keetenheuve makes his appearance, the statement of the West German government is already available just like the statements of the Western powers that support her - and Keetenheuve's speech is no longer worth anything.

At the end of the debate, Keetenheuve knows that he has lost. As on the evening before, he wanders through the city at night and finally reaches the bridge over the Rhine . The novel ends with the sentence "The MP was completely useless, he was a burden to himself, and jumping off the bridge set him free".

Keetenheuve's failure is also due to his private situation. After the death of his wife, he lost ground. So he becomes a victim of his instincts, which lead him again and again (on the verge of pedophilia) to very young women. Shortly before his death, Keetenheuve met sixteen-year-old Lena, who fled Thuringia and is just as uprooted as Keetenheuve. She started an apprenticeship as a “ mechanic ” in Thuringia and is amazed at the reactions to her “unfeminine” desire to be able to practice this profession in the Federal Republic (men with “fat hands” laugh at her and sexually harass her).

In her need she turns to Keetenheuve together with Gerda, a (lesbian?) Salvation Army soldier who she met in the West. The latter definitely wants to help Lena ( "Keetenheuve a good person" ), but considers it her "fate" that he will seduce her (as a "consideration") ( "Keetenheuve a bad person" ).

When Keetenheuve and Lena attempted sexual intercourse a little later on a site in ruins, the deputy becomes aware of the questionable nature of his existence. Immediately after the scene, he drowns himself.

Koeppen's handling of historical reality

At the reception of the first novel in the trilogy of failure ( doves in the grass ), Wolfgang Koeppen and many interpreters made it important that the phrase “the city” is not constantly replaced by “Munich”, although the local color of the Bavarian capital is light in the novel is recognizable. In the case of the novel “Das Treibhaus” it is clear that the then federal capital Bonn is the scene of the action, as its basin location in the Rhine Valley explains the “greenhouse climate” in the literal sense of the book's title. However, the title also refers to the “political landscape”, to the ghettoization of professional politicians, which is noticeable in Bonn just four years after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, with the loss of references to reality and the people.

Meeting of the Bundestag Committee for European Security in 1953

Interpreters proceeding detective point out that Wolfgang Koeppen presented the third, final reading of the Germany Treaty and the EVG Treaty on Thursday, March 19, 1953, and their special accompanying circumstances in his novel . From this it can be deduced that the narrated time of the novel extends to this day and the day before. The answer is that for the greenhouse effect to unfold fully it is necessary for the novel to be set essentially in summer, and many passages in the text show that temperatures are high during the narrated time, which does not fit the date “March”.

This explains what Koeppen means when he says that "the Roman [...] his own poetic truth" did so not as a political roman à clef is to be understood.

However, it can be clearly seen that Koeppen uses historical reality as the starting point for his writing. Bernd W. Seiler therefore criticizes Koeppen's attempt to prevent attempts at decryption: “What kind of imagination would a reader need to have, e.g. For example, he reads about a Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany "who, after years of annoying retirement, surprisingly had the chance to go down in history as a great man" who "looks like a clever fox" who is calling for membership of the European Defense Community in the Bundestag etc. - and who does not identify this man with Adenauer? Is that possible?"

In his book Die Adenauer-Ära, Kurt Sontheimer places Keetenheuve as a literary figure on a par with the politicians Konrad Adenauer , Theodor Heuss and Kurt Schumacher . "[...] Keetenheuve's encounter with Bonn politics reveals - aptly, albeit often pointed - so many facets of the reality of political life in the German" greenhouse "that the novel is almost irreplaceable for understanding German politics in the Adenauer era. To this day, this literary image of the Adenauer period has not been achieved from the dominant point of view of its restorative tendencies. "

History of origin

The first notes and sketches for the later novel go back to 1947. However, Koeppen did not develop specific plans for the formulation until 1951, after his previous novel Tauben im Gras was published. At the beginning of 1952 he informed his publishing house Scherz & Goverts about the work on the new novel, which showed interest and expected a manuscript by June of that year .

Koeppen postponed the submission of the manuscript, the working title of which at that time was an olive branch on a grave and later oil branches on a grave . Koeppen asked Henry Goverts for a trip to Bonn so he could take a look behind the scenes of the Bonn Republic. In November 1952, Goverts and Koeppen assumed that the novel would be published in the spring of 1953.

Due to an illness, Koeppen had to interrupt work on the novel, and the trip to Bonn was postponed until the beginning of February 1953. Goverts suggested that Koeppen put his friend Kuno Ockhardt , the head of the press office in the Federal Ministry of Economics, at his side for the Bonn visit was under Ludwig Erhard . Koeppen, on the other hand, expressed himself skeptical about this proposal in his letters to Goverts and feared political influence.

After Koeppen had explored Bonn and the suburbs of Bad Godesberg and Mehlem for a few days around February 6, 1953 and had collected material, he began to write the novel. In April and May he moved into a room in a Stuttgart bunker hotel , which was located under the market square and had been converted into a hotel as a World War II bunker . In his windowless room he found the peace and quiet to finish the novel within a few weeks. His ideas for the title of the manuscript ranged from The Golden Rose , The Political Rose , The Artificial Rose to Im Treibhaus and Das Treibhaus, which Koeppen finally decided on.

At the beginning of June 1953 Koeppen handed over the finished manuscript to Scherz & Goverts Verlag. But his fear that the novel would attract the displeasure of the political scene and that this could make publication more difficult was fulfilled: In fact, the publisher hesitated to publish the then shocking work. Henry Goverts suggested Koeppen instead to publish the novel in the rororo paperback series of the Rowohlt Verlag . But since Rowohlt Verlag only wanted to publish the book in the lower-circulation main program and only in the spring of 1954, Koeppen decided to publish a revised version at Scherz & Goverts.

Koeppen instructed his editor, Heinz Seewald, to take some measures to defuse the text, but Seewald did not follow Koeppen's suggestions in all cases. Finally, the revised manuscript Das Treibhaus went into set in September and October 1953 and appeared on November 4, 1953 with an edition of around 12,000 copies. A second and third edition followed in the same year. In 1955 a paperback was published which made some cuts. Most of the later editions of the novel also followed the abridged paperback edition. It has not yet been clarified whether Koeppen agreed to these interventions in the text.

Literary templates processed in the novel

Baudelaire as a common thread

The poem Le beau navire by Charles Baudelaire, which was published in the collection of poems Les Fleurs du Mal in 1853, plays a not insignificant role in the novel as one of the red threads . Keetenheuve tries to translate the poem in memory of his wife, but does not get beyond the first lines in the sequence of events.

Franz Kafka's story The Judgment

The death of the politician Keetenheuve is strongly reminiscent of the death of Georg Bendemann in Franz Kafka's story The Judgment : Bendemann also kills himself at the end of the story by jumping from a busy bridge into a river after realizing that he had lived wrongly.

filming

In 1987 the story was filmed for the cinema by Peter Goedel under the same title . The film was awarded a federal film prize.

Dramatization

In 2008 the story was turned into a drama by Frank Heuel and Stephanie Gräve under the same title and performed with great success by the Städtisches Theater Bonn.

Secondary literature

  • Karl Heinz Götze , Wolfgang Koeppen: "Das Treibhaus" , Uni-Taschenbücher 1347, Munich: Fink 1985, ISBN 3-7705-2261-3
  • Arne Grafe, "Koeppen, but not a little head", "simply brilliant" or "a disgusting book"? A contribution to the relationship between Wolfgang Koeppen and Rowohlt Verlag. Three previously unknown reports on the ›greenhouse‹ manuscript . In: Greenhouse. Yearbook for the literature of the fifties 2 (2006), pp. 78–89.
  • Benedikt Wintgens, Greenhouse Bonn. The political cultural history of a novel, Düsseldorf: Droste 2019, ISBN 978-3-7700-5342-1 . ( Online )

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Josef Quack: Wolfgang Koeppen in discussion . Section III: The Period of the Novel: Dating the "Greenhouse" story . February 7, 2007
  2. ↑ Bernd W. Seiler: The tiresome facts. On the limits of probability in German literature since the 18th century . Stuttgart (Velcro-Cotta). 1983. p. 247
  3. ↑ Kurt Sontheimer: The Adenauer era. Foundation of the Federal Republic. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 2003. pp. 30–31.
  4. ↑ The description of the history of the greenhouse's origins essentially follows Arne Grafe's comment on his study edition of the novel. Arne Grafe: 'Something is rotten in the state of Germany'. Wolfgang Koeppen's novel The Greenhouse. In: Wolfgang Koeppen: The greenhouse. With a comment by Arne Grafe. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2006. pp. 206-210.
  5. ↑ Cf. Karl-Heinz Götze: “A cold, stinking hell”. Why Wolfgang Koeppen was unsuccessful in the 1950s. In: Günter Häntzschel / Ulrike Leuschner / Roland Ulrich: Treibhaus. Yearbook for the literature of the fifties. Vol. 2: Wolfgang Koeppen 1906-1996. Iudicium, Munich 2006. p. 94.
  6. ↑ The film adaptation in the IMDb. Retrieved August 28, 2019 .