According to an impelling and artfully concise introduction by the book’s translator Michael Hoffman Death in Rome is the work of a brilliant German novelist caught between two eras; the bestial time of the Nazis and the idiot time of 1945-1960, the ‘blank slate’ when Germans preferred to pretend one could just start from the ‘Year Zero’ of 1945 and lay aside the memory of the preceding period.

From the first few pages it is clear what an exceptionally fine (if under-recognised) writer Koeppen is as the reader is taken up and swirled along in an exciting rush of perfectly-chosen and placed words. Here is the rhythm of a passionate and powerful thought-stream, something like Thomas Bernhard but with a wider scope than the Austrian locales that that author restricted himself to. To illustrate the skill of Koeppen (and his exceptional translator, a successful poet) a barracks scene; ‘There had always been a picture of that twitchy and repressed type, the Führer, with his Charlie Chaplin moustache, looking benevolently down on his herd of sacrificial lambs’ or an old woman feeding members of that tribe of cats that inhabit Italy’s ancient monuments; ‘Severed heads of sea-creatures, dull eyes, discoloured gills, opalescent scales, tumble among the yowling moggy mob’ or, irresistibly, about a cabman’s horse ‘The horse had a fly-net over its head and ears. It looked down on the paving-stones with the empty disappointed expression of an old moral theologian.’

There is more here though than descriptive fireworks as the participants for the first postwar reunion of a powerful German family meet in Rome in the early 1950s. The lynch-pin of this family gathering is a monstrous old brute called Judejahn, former SS-man and now working as a superior officer for an Arab country’s army. He, it emerges, is an utterly brutal and brutalised man, an intimidated little boy inside but one clothed in the black uniform of power. He seems to represent the German soul itself, feeling weak and fearful inside but corrupted by a stifling and vainglorious militarism and nationalism already a hundred years old when Hitler cashed in on it. This state of affairs led in this German author’s view inevitably to the gigantic national disgrace of the Third Reich.

Death in Rome in fact, through the various characters of a German family tells the chilling story of the aftermath of Nazism. An aftermath which, rather than an attempt to atone for recent crimes was the recreation of German arrogance in a society of petty ambitions and fat bellies, portrayed here as already cautiously sniffing around for future ‘glory’. It is also an affectionate portrait of a fabulous city, Rome.

‘I love the Via Veneto, the cafés of Vanity Fair, with their funny chairs and colourful awnings, I love the leggy, slim-hipped models, their dyed hair the colour of flame, their pale faces, their great staring eyes, fire that I can’t touch, I love the happy, stupid athletic gigolos in attendance, traded by the wealthy corseted ladies... I love the old mouldering bathing-ship anchored in front of the Castle of the Angels on the turbid Tiber, and its naked red light-bulbs in the night, I love the small, secret, incense-steeped, art- and ornament-crammed churches... I love the priests in their robes of black, red, violet and white, the Latin Mass, the seminarians with fear in their faces, the old prebendaries in stained soutanes and beautiful greasy Monsignor hats... I love the little shopkeeper in the Street of the Workers, cutting great slices of Mortadella like leaves, I love the little markets, the fruit-sellers’ stalls all green red orange, the tubs of the fishmongers full of obscure sea-creatures and all the cats of Rome prowling along the walls.’ p51-2