Death in Rome

So what has Koeppen's novel, now appearing in the U.S. for the first time, got to do with Thomas Mann? There are elements of Death in Venice , of obssession under a Mediterranean sun, but Mann's novella was published in 1912 and his compatriot's intelligent, deeply discomfiting novel was written in the much different world of 1954. At the center of the book is Gottlieb Judejahn, a vile, tormented SS general who escaped Germany to train Arab irregulars in the Levantine deserts. He returns to Rome under an assumed name for a problematic reunion with his wife, her sister and his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm Pffafrath, an ex-Nazi administrator who has once again risen to prominence. Judejahn, who once paraded through Rome as the Fuhrer's favorite, is now intimidated and angered by the cosmopolites (``the deracinated ones, international, homeless golden jetsam'') and the clergy--among them his nephew Siegfried Pfaffrath, an avant-garde composer, and his own son Adolf, a deacon. Against the decrepit physical trappings of a toppled Roman Empire and the discredited mental ones of a destroyed German Reich, the narrative cuts between the four men, entwining the militarism, bureaucracy, music and religion of the German soul in a sad quadrille. Perhaps Koeppen's ( Pigeons on the Grass ) writing is not as evocative as that of Grass or Boll, but one clear reason for his relative obscurity is his unsparing portrait of moral fetidness. (Sept.)