Wolfgang Koeppen

A former Nazi general, now training Arab terrorists, attends a family reunion in Rome, his son being a priest. The novel chronicles his disgust with a degenerate city which he knew as a conqueror and his attempt to get even with the Jews by seducing a barmaid, an attempt that backfires when she turns out to be a Catholic. By the author of Pigeons on the Grass.

"Pigeons on the Grass is told over a single day in Munich in 1948. The first new cinemas and insurance offices are opening atop the ruins, Korea and Persia are keeping the world in panic, planes rumble in the sky (but no one looks up), newspaper headlines announce war over oil and atomic bomb tests. Odysseus Cotton, a black man, alights at the station and hires a porter; Emilia sells the last of her jewelry; Philipp gives himself up to despair; with...