Munich / Manhattan Transfer. The Proximity of America in Wolfgang Koeppen's Tauben im Gras

This essay explores the multiple of images of America in Wolfgang Koeppen's Tauben in Gras , establishing the argument that America and Germany are not distinct countries, limited by their postwar geopolitical roles, but merged entities in this novel. Interspersed with comparisons to Koeppen's Amerikafahrt and to Kafka's Der Verschollene , which was Koeppen's ur-text regarding America, this essay analyzes the America internalized by the novel's German characters and the Germany internalized by its American characters, a fog of confusion hanging over all of them, intensified by the unfinished war, within Europe, and the unfinished racial tensions that Americans have brought with them to postwar Europe. The essay's title invokes a novel of John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer , part of his U.S.A. novel cycle, and the literary borrowings from America that encouraged Koeppen to merge German and American motifs in his own fiction

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