The Hothouse

By Wolfgang Koeppen
Translated by Michael Hoffmann
With a contribution by Pankaj Mishra

"A triumph, a gem of postwar German literature that has remained obscure in the Anglophone world for too long... Ribald, irreverent, cutting, rhapsodic, and ultimately devastating portraits of German amnesia and hypocrisy." — Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker

"The prose, at least as it comes to us in Hofmann’s worked magic, is simultaneously wild, fluid, often flat-out gorgeous, and uncannily precise. Reading, one feels at the center of a living thing rather than looking on from a safe distance—receiving thoughts and sensations just as they’re hatching into the articulable."— Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books

The Hothouse traces the tragic final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of his country after WWII. Following his self-imposed exile during the war, Keetenheuve returns to the hothouse: the city of Bonn. Until this point he has led a life guided by principle and political optimism. Here, in spellbinding internal monologue and jarring montage, he meets his end. The Hothouse is an existential masterpiece and a portrait of a moral man crushed by an immoral world.

Bitterly controversial at home and a cult writer abroad, Koeppen (1906– 1996) brought a volcanic modernist style to German literature that remains unparalleled to this day. His uniquely radical voice and breathtaking prose is rendered magnificently by Michael Hofmann.

Paperback
240 Pages
New Directions, 2026
Originally published in 1953
5 x 8 inches
ISBN 9780811240000
Fiction, Post-WWII Germany