The New Yorker recently ran a book review that garnered a sharp letter from Dominique Haensell in Berlin. She presented the Koeppen curriculum debate to a US magazine audience. Germany conducted a national debate over whether 17-year-olds in Abitur preparation, the oldest and best-equipped students in the system, should encounter a novel written to indict postwar racism and amnesia unless it came with stronger critical framing.
Becca Rothfeld’s insightful review of Wolfgang Koeppen’s “trilogy of failure” deftly navigates the nuances of how the books were received in postwar Germany (Books, May 4th). A new chapter has been added to the story of their reception: Jasmin Blunt, a Black German teacher, recently initiated a petition to stop the first book in the series, “Pigeons on the Grass,” from being part of the final qualification exam in German secondary schooling.
The petition proves German institutions know how to hold this debate when they choose to, which makes Carl Orff presented to Grundschule children with no framing at all a choice, not an oversight.
An author who confronted the NS past was put under public scrutiny by a single teacher, while the composer who took the Mendelssohn replacement after Egk, Strauss, and even the antisemite Pfitzner had refused to touch it is still being handed to small German children through a false sole-authorship claim that intentionally erases his own collaborators and the Jewish pedagogues who built the field.
The obvious objection is that Koeppen has been mandated exam material while Orff is spread by teachers claiming him as “ordinary classroom culture”, so the cases differ. They do not. Paragraph 1 of the Berlin Schulgesetz binds every level of the school system, Grundschule included, to educate students to oppose NS ideology, and Berlin primary schools already teach this history from Klasse 1. Both texts sit under a mandate. Baden-Württemberg debated the one it assigned to its most prepared students.
Berlin ignores the same statutory duty where it owes it to its least prepared.
The letter from Haensell to the New Yorker explains how the Blunt petition asked for optionality and framing, not removal.
It is important to stress that the petition was not about banning or redacting an undeniably important novel. Rather, it sought to make reading it non-mandatory, allowing people—particularly Black students and teachers—the option to forgo a days-long discussion of a novel that features the German equivalent of the N-word about a hundred times, and that culminates in a pogrom-like attack on a Black jazz bar. More broadly, it was an attempt to acknowledge that German classrooms are diverse, that Black German perspectives exist within them, and that students should not be forced to engage with racist material presented without sufficient critical framing. This is arguably the most prevalent discourse surrounding Wolfgang Koeppen in Germany today.
The letter also calls Koeppen “despite good intentions, likely a product of his time,” a phrase that shows the apologia is a reflex formula rather than analysis, since it gets applied even to an author it cannot describe.
As for the reception of Koeppen, who was, despite good intentions, likely a product of his time…
Koeppen was writing in 1951 against the amnesia of his time, which is the exact opposite of being its product; the phrase is not just weak, it is backwards for this particular author.
The Blunt petition modeled an obvious remedy of allowing context to appear instead of disappear, and it is the same one echtorff.org documents for Orff: a restoration of those being erased, a proper framing. Name Keetman on the cover she co-wrote. Name Mendelssohn in the lesson built on his banned score. Germany has run a debate for an author who told the truth, but it allows the composer whose success depended on erasure of Jews and lies after the war to be presented as a hero to young school children.
