A look at a love destined not to be consummated

Like an acrobat poised on a tightrope, or better yet a slack-rope, lurching wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous, German writer Wolfgang Koeppen’s amazing first novel, “A Sad Affair,” written in 1934, tells the story of one man’s obsessive love for an emotionally elusive femme fatale.

The lover is an intensely romantic young student named Friedrich; the object of his devotion, a delicate-looking aspiring actress named Sibylle. Their romance unfolds against the backdrop of pre-World War II Europe, with its cabarets, refugees and looming societal unrest. But in Friedrich’s Sibylle-centric mind, the ominous political atmosphere fades to insignificance beside the blazing colors of his grand passion.

Koeppen’s seriocomic paean to romantic love was viewed by the Nazis as yet another specimen of decadent art and banned in 1936. In the 1950s, Koeppen trained his sights on the larger picture of politics and society with three powerfully satiric novels about postwar Germany, including the matter of former Nazis finding their way into the government.

In a life that spanned almost the entire 20th century, Koeppen, who was born in 1906 and died 90 years later, wrote only five novels. But, as translator Michael Hofmann tells us in his sparkling introduction to “A Sad Affair,” when this mercurial and exasperating author did sit down to write, “the results were unexpected and worth having.”

Koeppen’s hyper-romantic first novel was strongly autobiographical, a roman a clef to which Hofmann obligingly provides the key: Not only may we read Friedrich as based on Koeppen himself, with minor characters corresponding to figures like Erika Mann and Therese Giehse, but also the real-life model for Sibylle was actress Sybille Schloss, now an elderly woman living on New York’s Upper East Side.

The title in German, “Eine Ungluckliche Liebe,” has been translated into English by Hofmann as “A Sad Affair.” But a more literal, and to my mind, more accurate translation would be “An Unhappy Love.” Liebe means love, and the adjective ungluckliche can mean either unhappy or unlucky. (Indeed, even our English words “unhappy” and “hapless” also contain the suggestion of unluckiness: the root word “hap,” meaning chance, fate or destiny, as in Thomas Hardy’s bleak poem of that name. And certainly, Koeppen makes much of the themes of fate and destiny in this novel.)

Young Friedrich has convinced himself that the lovely Sibylle is “destined” for him, even though she refuses to give herself to him. Not surprisingly, he interprets this frustrating state of affairs as an instance of ill-fated love.

Friedrich first meets Sibylle when she is 17 through his friend Beck, who is madly in love with her, although already she is the mistress of a prominent theater critic -- whom she blithely admits that she cheats on. Her blend of angelic, childlike sweetness and naughty promiscuity instantly enchants Friedrich, who is nonetheless gallant enough to champion his friend’s cause: “[Y]ou know,” he informs her, “Beck is crazy with desire for you, so why don’t you add another one to the number of horns you’re making your master wear, and it would be a good deed too?” Retorts the saucy Sibylle: “I don’t want to do any good deeds!”

Soon the youthful trio of Beck, Friedrich and Sibylle are cavorting around town striking poses and playing silly practical jokes on the local burghers. Before long, Friedrich comes to believe that he himself is the one who is “destined” for Sibylle. The two of them seem connected in some strange way: She allows him to tend her when she’s sick, spend the night with her, even to dry her off with towels when she emerges from the bathtub, but not to touch her with his bare hands. By now, it’s Beck who’s giving Friedrich supportive advice: “Take her, why don’t you, take her, she wants to be taken.”

But because he loves her and recognizes her as a human being endowed with free will, Friedrich refuses to touch Sibylle, “even against the appearance of her will.” Understandably, he wants her to feel about him the way that he feels about her, an attitude that is apparently an uncommon one in the circles in which he moves, where rape seems to be merely the default mode of sex.

On it goes, a poignant, perverse, frequently hilarious dance that lures Friedrich over the border into Switzerland and across the Alps into Italy. The extravagance of Friedrich’s devotion is outdone only by the extravagance of Koeppen’s exhilarating style, which simultaneously celebrates and mocks the intensity of his hero’s ardor:

“What was going on behind her brow? It was a fortress, a bulwark, a concrete wall that kept repulsing him. If only he could manage to penetrate the windings of her brain, even once! That must be the key. He suffered from highly specific fantasies and saw an immaterial action as concretely as a blueprint in an educational film. He watched his thinking climb out of his head into hers, and he followed it, as like a red arrow it followed the mazy white tracks of her ponderings.”

Elsewhere, Friedrich imagines himself and Sibylle as two people digging tunnels from opposite directions who are supposed to meet in the middle but who just miss doing so owing to “a serious error of feeling.” His situation, indeed, is almost Kafkaesque, although not without a glimmer of hope as the story winds toward its graceful, bittersweet conclusion. Many writers have sung the joys and sorrows of love, the ecstatic agonies of romantic obsession, but few have done so with the sheer ebullience that animates every page of “A Sad Affair.”