The Hothouse by Wolfgang Koeppen

room.
    The Nestor of the foreign correspondents was an old man, and handsome. He was the handsomest of all the handsome and busy old men in politics. With his shining snowy mane and his fresh complexion, he looked as though he'd just come in from the gale that he had caused to blow around his ears. It was hard to tell whether Dana was a personality of his own, or whether he only seemed to be important because he had spoken to celebrities and notorieties, who perhaps had only been able to give the world and themselves the illusion of importance, because Philip Dana had interviewed them on the telephone. At bottom, he despised the statesmen he interviewed; he had seen too many of that ilk rise, glitter, fall, and sometimes dangle from a gallows, which secretly was a more pleasing sight to Dana than seeing them robust and self-justifying in their presidential armchairs, or lying in state with their contented smile of natural death in their fat faces, while their people were cursing them. Dana had been present at every war and every conference that followed the fighting and paved way for a fresh wave of hostilities for forty years now; he had been fed diplomatic lies by the shovelful, he had seen blind men as leaders and had vainly tried to warn the deaf of approaching catastrophe, he had met rabid dogs who wrapped themselves in the flag, and Lenin, Chiang Kai-shek, Kaiser Wilhelm, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin had all stood before him in white angels' robes, with a dove on their shoulder, and the palm branch in their hand, and blessed was peace on earth. Dana had drunk with Roosevelt and dined with Negus, he had known cannibals and true saints, he had witnessed all the insurrections, the revolutions, the civil wars of our era, and invariably he had seen the defeat of ordinary people. The vanquished were no better than the victors; they only seemed briefly more attractive because they were the vanquished. The world whose pulse Dana had taken was now waiting for his memoirs, but it was his present to the world that he wasn't writing them—it would have been one long horror story. And so, mild and it would appear wise, he sat in Bonn, in a rocking chair (he had set it in his office for comfort and for the symbolism of it), and as he rocked he observed the to-and-fro of world politics in a diminished, but still neuralgic, way. Bonn was Dana's last detail; perhaps his grave. It was less taxing than Korea would have been, but here too he could hear the seed of incomprehension sprouting, and watch the grass of discord and inevitability grow. Keetenheuve knew Dana from the old Volksblatt days. Keetenheuve had written a piece for the Volksblatt on the great transport strike in Berlin, in which the Nazis and the Communists had briefly formed a bizarre, expedient, and highly volatile unity front, and Dana had picked this up for his international news-gathering service, and found readers for Keetenheuve all over the world. Later, Keetenheuve ran into Dana in London. Dana was writing a book on Hitler, which he conceived and sold as a best-seller; he turned his revulsion to good account. Keetenheuve's own antipathy to the Browns had merely served to impoverish and unhouse him, and he half envied Dana's diligence, with the caveat that Dana's book on the seducer was nothing but a best-seller, a smooth and canny piece of work.
    God was in a good mood. He passed Keetenheuve a sheet from a news agency with which he stood in regular contact. Keetenheuve straightway spotted the item that Dana had wanted him to see, it was a bulletin from the Conseil Supérieur des Forces Armées, an interview with French and British generals, who were in the process of setting up a European army, and who saw the evolution of the peace, cemented by treaties, portending a perpetuation of the division of Germany; in their eyes, this division was the one positive outcome of the past war. In the context of the Federal Republic this was dynamite. Its kilotonnage would be