New Edition: Treibhaus Bonn. Die politische Kulturgeschichte eines Romans / Hothouse Bonn. The Political and Cultural History of a Novel
Bonn through the lens of a desperately sad member of parliament: Das Treibhaus (The Hothouse) by Wolfgang Koeppen is one of the most important political novels of German-language literature. Published in 1953, it deals with reconstruction, Cold War and the loneliness of a member of parliament of the opposition. The Hothouse is a gloomy satire on the mission to start a new democracy that in 1945 felt utopian.
The book follows the twisted history of the emerging pluralistic public sphere in the early Federal Republic. Based on Koeppen’s novel on the Bundestag and analysing the metaphor of the hothouse, it reconstructs the debate between journalists and intellectuals on the Hothouse, painting a multifaceted picture of German political culture in the transition from the »Third Reich« to the Bonn Republic.
