Quotes
Listed here are favorite quotes from The Hothouse. Quotes that inspire, or give a strong visual image, or just admiration of the author's words ..... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ....
These notes were collected in celebration of Wolfgang Koeppen's birthday: June 23, 1906. Koeppen says this book is a purely fictional narrative and has its own poetic truthfulness.
... he had had to go, because he had been a grain of salt, the germ of unrest in their bland and sluggish porridge of a party, a man of conscience and thereby an irritant.
ReplyDeleteTime reached for him, and took him in her toils once again, and he believed that given time, something would become of him. (I wonder why he refers to time in a feminine way?)
ReplyDeleteThe German soldiers stank of rain, earth, sweat and wounds, they stank of many miles of road, of sleeping in their clothes, of victories and defeats, of fear, exhaustion, weariness, and death, they stank of the word "injustice' and the word "futile."
ReplyDeletePractical politics was a jungle, you ran into big beasts.
ReplyDeleteBut actually it was being abandoned that had asphyxiated her, a premonition of eternity and temporarily, space, so confined and so boundless, space with its black light, space, the black baffling backdrop behind the stars
ReplyDeleteCould Keetenheuve be a proponent of party optimism, could he lay out the cabbages in the tidy seedbed of the party line so that they flourished in the sunshine of the party agenda? Phrases leaped from the mouths of his colleagues like croaking frogs; but frogs made Keetenheuve's flesh creep.
ReplyDeleteDemocracy was held in low repute. It failed to galvanize.
ReplyDeleteHistory was a clumsy child or an ancient guide with a blind man in tow, it alone knew the way, and it was in a hurry to get there.
ReplyDeleteThere were unused feelings of tenderness curdling within him.
ReplyDeleteA dead man is no good to his Fatherland, and people die for ideas they are at best incapable of grasping, and whose implications they fail to see. The flogged warriors on the battlefields, the tortured nations, were the victims of quarrelsome, selfish, self-righteous, and completely hopeless thinkers, unable to get clarity in their poor warped brains, and incapable, furthermore, of understanding, or of getting along with one another. Maybe armies were irrational notions of God, unleashed against one another.
ReplyDeleteAll politics were squalid, it was like gang warfare, the means were dirty and divisive; even someone who was on the side of good, might easily become another Mephistopheles, who invariably does ill; for what was good and what ill, in this field that stretched, like a vast empire, far into the future?
ReplyDeleteKeetenheuve had written Elke letters from Bonn, and if they were written with one eye on posterity as well, still Elke had been much more than a postal address; she was the medium that permitted him to speak and put him in touch with the world. Pale as one of the damned, Keetenheuve sat in the Bundeshaus, pale lightnings twitched outside his window, clouds freighted with electricity, charged with the emissions from the chimneys of the Ruhr, steaming broody mists, gassy, toxic, and sulfurous, eerie untamed nature moved stormily past the roof and walls of the hothouse, whistling its contempt and its scorn for the sensitive plant within, the grieving man, the Baudelaire translator ....
ReplyDeleteThe bullet burned in Knurrewahn's heart, the lead that was flesh of his flesh burned, and it was the pain of youth that animated and rejuvenated him.
ReplyDeleteKeetenheuve was the addressee of a nation of letter writers; it drained him, and only the intuition of the moment saved him from the flood that otherwise would have broken over his head. He devised a speech to hold in front of the assembly. He would shine! A dilettante in matters of love, a dilettante in poetry, and a dilettante in politics—and he would shine. Who else could save them, if not a dilettante? The experts, sexperts, texperts, were still following their old paths into old deserts. They had never led anywhere else, and it took a dilettante to stumble upon the Promised Land, the kingdom flowing with milk and honey.
ReplyDeleteHe left the correspondence, he left the files, he left the Baudelaire translation, he left his notes for the debate, and the page from the news agency that Dana had given him, he left everything lying in the neon, which he forgot to switch off, because the sun was still shining, and its light broke in thousand prisms in the mirror of the river and in the droplets on the green leaves on the tops of the trees.
ReplyDeleteThe tangles of lies form themselves into a chorus line in the air over the Rhine, and flash their dirty undies.
ReplyDeleteThe corpse of Czechoslovakia rises out of the water, stinking. Destiny is trapped in the belly of the corpse and wanders witlessly back and forth. Three loudspeakers fight it out. One of them yells: According to plan! The second roars: Plan deficit! The third sings the chorus from the Threepenny Opera
ReplyDeleteThe villages wanted their generals back. They felt like rose petals on a black mere. What might not climb up out of the depths? Toads, algae, embryos. Maybe a toad would leap onto a rose petal, hop up to the table, and say: "I'm in charge here." Then it was a good thing to have generals with sabers around.
ReplyDeleteThe High Commission was like a mighty magician's palace, and it was also like a huge beehive, where the neon-dripping windows were like honeycombs. Keetenheuve could hear it buzzing. The bees were busy. Keetenheuve walked boldly into the magic kingdom, plunged into the conjurer's domain. He showed his papers to a guard, and the guard let him in. Elevators rose and fell like the circulation of a living creature. Bustling men and women with little files had themselves pumped up and down, they were the bacteria specific to this body, they kept it alive, they strengthened or weakened it. (It would take a microscope to tell whether they were constructive or destructive particles.)
ReplyDeleteHe had let himself drift today. Like an old boat that had broken away from its mooring, he had slipped away on the variable current of the day. Like an old boat that had broken away from its mooring, he had slipped away on the variable current of the day. He thought. He had better look after himself. What was the mooring that he had lost? He had lost Elke, the Gauleiter's daughter, the war orphan, and he didn't think of her now as a woman, he saw her as a child that had been entrusted to him, and that he had failed to protect. The child or the duty of care he felt for her, they had been his mooring, a fixed point in the flowing stream, the anchor to his vessel in the, it now appeared, sterile lake of his life, and the anchor had sunk down, the chain had snapped, the anchor would remain for ever in the scary, unknown, dismal depths. Poor little anchor! He hadn't kept it clean. He had allowed it to rust. What had become of Elke at his side? An alcoholic. Where had she fallen in her drunken stupor? Into the arms of lesbians, the arms of those thoroughly damned by love.
ReplyDeleteThe Revolution was an offshoot of Romanticism, a crisis of puberty. It had had its time. Its possibilities had not been investigated. And now it was a corpse, a dry leaf in the herbarium of ideas, a dead notion, an antiquated word to look up in the encyclopedia, that didn't come up in daily speech. Only a gushing youth would still enthuse about Revolution for a while longer, and after that it would be nothing but a pash or dream, an odorless bloom—the pressed blue flower of Romanticism.
ReplyDeleteThe time for the tender faith in liberty, equality, fraternity, it was over the morning of America the poems of Whitman strength and genius it was all onanism and the epigone lay down contentedly in the broad marital bed of law and order the night stand with the calendar that marked the fruitful and unfruitful days of his wife's cycle next to the pessary and the encyclical from Rome.
ReplyDeleteThe rainbow was like a heavenly ladder going up and down, spanning the river, and it was easy to imagine that angels were crossing it, and that God was at hand. Did the rainbow signify conciliation, did it signify peace, was it a token of friendliness?
ReplyDeleteBismarck already had known the type: "Every politician is burdened with a mortgage to vanity." They were vain, they were all of them vain, ministers, officials, diplomats, MPs, and even the porter who unlocked the door of the parliament building was vain because he unlocked the door of the parliament building, because he belonged to the government, and because he occasionally got his name in the paper, when a journalist wanted to prove he had really been inside the ministry and had seen the porter.
ReplyDeleteHe was outside the force field of this assembly of twenty thousand. They were united, they were an accumulation, a dangerous aggregation of zeros, an explosive mixture, twenty thousand excited hearts and twenty thousand empty heads. Of course they were waiting for their Führer, their number One, who would face them down, and turn them into a colossal number, a people, the new bastardized golem that was called a people, one Reich, one Führer, total hate, total explosion, total destruction. He was all alone. He was in the same position as the Führer.
ReplyDeleteThere were youths standing outside the cinema. They went to the cinema twice a week, and on other days they stood outside it. They were hanging around. What were they hanging around for? They were hanging around waiting for life to begin, and the life they were waiting for didn't begin. Life didn't turn up for them outside the cinema, or if it did come and was standing next to them, they didn't see it, and the people they could see, that they later ended up sharing their lives with, they weren't the ones they were hoping to see. If they'd known it was only going to be them, they wouldn't have bothered standing around waiting. The boys were waiting in a group on their own. Boredom was in them like a disease, and you could already see in their faces that it would be the death of them.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteShe was like a young colt that had been yoked up, and was frightened and bucky.
(Salvation Army girl with collection can, Gerda)
Up on the street it was raining. It was a slant, lashing rain, coming out of low clouds, out of broody masses of fog that sat like heavy woolly hats on the roofs of the scabby, dirty houses and the tarred warehouses, sucking up the slothful, acrid smoke from the ancient crusty chimneys. The smoke smelled of bogland, it smelled of peat fires in wet bog-land. It was a familiar smell, it was the smell of Macbeth's witches, and in the air was their cry, fair is foul, and foul is fair! The witches had traveled into the city on the backs of the fogs, they squatted down on roofs and gutters, they had a rendezvous with the sea wind, they were touring London, they pissed in the ancient precincts, and then they howled lecherously as the storm buffeted them, as it hurled them onto the bed of the clouds, shook them, and clasped them wildly and lustfully. There was whistling and sighing in every quarter. The beams of the warehouses creaked round about, and the wind-skewed roofs groaned.
ReplyDelete... he thought of parliament, the second reading of the bill, no bill for beauty contests, Mr. Speaker, Ladies and Gentlemen, a decision of immeasurable consequence, we vote in division, I jump through the wrong door, annoy the party, this here is a mutton jump, little sheep to the right, little sheep to the left, the professional Rhinelander, cheery chappie, cheeky chappie, hup two three, hup two three!, waits for the bill to pass into law.
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ReplyDeleteRooms in Berlin, rooms over the courtyard at the back, lightless rooms, expropriated, imprisoned, burned, destroyed, she was part of the whipped froth on the pudding, the crème de la crème, reddish sponge base, golden froth, caramelized, egg yolks rubbed in her blond hair.
(Sophie Mergentheim)
The crucifix, carved by a master out of rosewood, looked in the light of the storm to be doubled over in pain, sick, suffering, rotting. It was an image of torment.
ReplyDeleteHe saw the weepy immortelles of the graveyard in the pale flicker of the lightning. He breathed in the smell of moldy, damp yew hedges, the sweet corruption of rotting roses in funereal wreaths.
ReplyDeleteAll that could be heard was the morning song of the capital in summer: the clatter of lawn mowers, like ancient sewing machines, that were being dragged over the grass.
ReplyDeleteHe wanted to dream of a paradise of earthly contentment, a world of abundance, a planet where toil was no longer necessary, a Utopia without war and without want, and for a time, he forgot that this world too had been cast out of heaven, condemned to whirl ignorantly and mutely through black space, where behind the twinkling familiar stars there might be great monsters.
ReplyDeleteKeetenheuve paid sixty pfennigs and saw himself facing the great marine mammal, the biblical Leviathan, a mammoth of the Polar Sea, a kingly beast, primordial, contemptuous of man and yet a prey to his harpoon, a miserably abused and exhibited titan, a corpse pickled in formaldehyde.
ReplyDeleteAnd from out of holes in the ground rolled the murdered, from craters crept the buried alive, from quicklime tombs crawled the strangled, from their cellars tottered the homeless, from their beds in the rubble came the whores, and an alarmed Musaeus came from his palace and saw misery, and the delegates were convoked in extraordinary nocturnal session on the burial ground from the Nazi years, aptly enough. The great statesman was chauffeured there, and was granted a vision into the workshop of the future. He saw devils and vermin and he saw them creating the homunculus.
ReplyDeleteFrom a rural garden a rocket went up, exploded, fell, a dying star. Keetenheuve gripped the bridge rail, and once again he felt the supports trembling. There was a vibration in the steel, it was as though the steel was alive and wanted to betray a secret to Keetenheuve, the lesson of Prometheus, the puzzle of mechanics, the wisdom of the blacksmith—but the news came too late. The delegate was utterly useless, he was a burden to himself, and a leap from the bridge made him free.
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