This page by Sarah McGaughey
Hermann Broch (1886-1951)
Hermann Broch was raised to become an industrialist. Groomed to take over the family textile manufacturing company and trained as a textile engineer, Broch rebelled against his upbringing by spending his free time attending lectures at the University of Vienna and participating in Vienna’s café-based cultural scene, particularly with those who gathered at the Café Central. Passionate about learning, Broch spent nights studying mathematics and philosophy, rejecting the empiricism of the Vienna Circle and searching for an understanding of the crisis of his times. By the mid-1920s, Broch had established himself as a critic of literature and philosophy in journals such as Moderne Welt, Prager Presse, and Der Brenner, and in 1927, he decided to sell the family factory and devote himself to writing.
Broch developed his commitment to literature late in life, and he remained unsure of its impact until his death in US exile in 1951. His initial turn to literature came when he lost faith in the power of philosophy to reach a broad audience. Yet by the time he published the last volume of his momentous first work in 1932, the trilogy Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers), the German-language literary market was struggling under the effects of the depression. A year later Germany perpetrated the largest mass burning of books in Europe’s history and ushered in a period of extreme cultural censorship. Broch did not have the successful popular literary career for which he had hoped; he lacked a broad audience for his philosophical ideas.
More concerning for Broch, of course, was the political and cultural crisis taking place around him. With an increasing drive to bring international and philosophical influence to bear on a crumbling social and political landscape, Broch penned resolutions and social theories, collaborating with many of the intellectuals of his time in the hopes of stemming the tide of fascism. His fictional work-in-progress of this time, known as Die Verzauberung (The Spell), is an exploration of the forces of charisma and individualism in two Alpine villages. The novel is a challenging one, for it does not find a response to political violence and instead studies the ways in which mysticism and scientific perspectives struggle to withstand the force of mass political forms. It remains a fragment, but it is the source of the novella ‘Barbara’, which was published separately and inspired the 2012 film of the same name by Christian Petzold.
Imprisoned shortly after the Anschluss for receiving a banned political newspaper, Broch became acutely aware that his efforts to fight political realities with political writing and to live from his literary and dramatic work (the published novel Die Unbekannte Größe and two plays Die Entsühnung and Aus der Luft gegriffen oder Die Geschäfte des Baron Laborde) were not just under attack but now embedded within a fascist system. In jail, he turned to his novella Die Heimkehr des Vergil to develop his ideas about the political and social conflicts of literary production in times of crisis – a story that he expanded into the majestic novel Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil) in the 1940s – and he made the decision to leave Austria. Supported by his English and US American colleagues, amongst them Aldous Huxley, Sydney Schiff, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Albert Einstein, Broch emigrated to the US via St. Andrews, Scotland, where he spent a few months at the home of his translators, the Scottish writers Edwin and Willa Muir.
Once in the US, Broch devoted himself to helping others into and in exile. With the support of, and in constant search for, fellowships, Broch expanded upon his political writings of the late 1930s with the goal of crafting a theory of mass psychology. This sociological project, published posthumously as Die Massenwahntheorie (Mass Hysteria), lead to numerous political actions and fruitful discussions with colleagues, including connections to Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti, and others. The correspondence and publications of his exile years show the force with which he dedicated himself to fighting fascism and defending democracy.
As much as Broch might have questioned the power of literature, he never stopped producing it. Playful poems and translations exchanged with friends, fragments and drafts of novels and trilogies, and literary studies of others, such as Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (Hofmannsthal and His Time) were a part of his daily life and work. In the years of US exile, Broch produced two additional literary works: Die Schuldlosen (The Guiltless), a novel in eleven stories, and Der Tod des Vergil, the latter of which was published simultaneously in German and in English translation by Jean Starr Untermeyer. A second well-known adaptation of Broch’s work premiered in Vienna in 1983, a staged version of ‘Die Erzählung der Magd Zerline’ from Die Schuldlosen.
Today, Broch does not often appear in lists of major modernist novelists. As a reader can see in introductions to modernist literature, his contemporaries, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, and Alfred Döblin, are most often considered representatives of international modernism. Whether a canonical author or not, Broch’s approach to modernist literary aesthetics, politics, and culture had an impact in its time – it even garnered a nomination for a Nobel Prize –, and Broch himself saw his Schlafwandler in conversation with Joyce’s Ulysses, André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), and John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer in his understanding of the modernist novel. His work continues to influence authors, artists, philosophers, and musicians, notably Durs Grünbein, Milan Kundera, Barbara Frischmuth, Peter Sloterdijk, and Thomas Bernhard. Scholarly reception of Broch’s work is prolific and broad, for his multifaceted oeuvre of literature, philosophy, criticism, and socio-political study continues to connect to contemporary themes, most recently the study of mass movements, political extremism, and threats to democracy.
Die Schlafwandler / The Sleepwalkers
Broch’s trilogy Die Schlafwandler is a study of the cultural disintegration of Europe at the turn of the century. Broch devotes each novel to a period of ever-intensifying decline.
The first novel, 1888 Pasenow oder die Romantik (1888 Pasenow or Romanticism), is an ironic twist on 19th century realist novels such as those by Theodor Fontane, which follows the title character as he pursues an adult life as a Prussian officer. Pasenow is drifting through this stage of life, unsure whether the social expectations he bears fits a modern urban world. Despite premonitions and some deflection, Pasenow does not stray from expectations. The novel ends with a proper marriage to a woman of similar social standing and assumes Pasenow will have a future of military service and prosperity, even if that future seems less plausible after the events of the novel.
1903 Esch oder die Anarchie (1903 Esch or Anarchy) begins with its title character facing an ethical dilemma after detecting embezzlement in his job as accountant. Esch’s attempt at whistleblowing ends with his unemployment and begins a period of his trying to find a stable life in instable times. He embarks on a variety of business ventures, including theatrical wrestling events, expands his circle of friends with his mobility between Cologne and Mannheim, and like Pasenow, ends up marrying and setting up house. This second novel maintains some of the realism of the first, but here Broch begins to intensify the presence of philosophical thought in the trilogy and includes extensive excursions and dream sequences in which the narrator considers the larger forces at play in a destabilizing world.
The final instalment of the trilogy exhibits the most innovatively complex form of the three. 1918 Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit (1918 Huguenau or Objectivity) follows the title character as he defects from the Prussian army in WWI and seeks prosperity in a small Alsatian town. Unlike Pasenow and Esch, Huguenau has no friends or family, and the structure of his narrative is characterized by isolated units. In chapters, Broch presents readers with a philosophical essay titled “Der Zerfall der Werte” (The Decay of Values) as well as stories about various figures in the Alsatian town, including an older Pasenow and Esch, and a philosopher and his community in Berlin.
Broch’s trilogy is a formal experiment in depicting the history and contemporary state of European culture in the early 1930s. Based on his own extensive theory of the novel as a polyhistorical form which carries an ethical and moral responsibility to understanding the contemporary, Broch’s trilogy presents a totalizing view of the disintegration of modern culture. The result is a deft weaving of metaphors, character, plots, and symbols across the three novels. For Broch, the current crisis in Europe is a result of the loss of a central value system, and the only possible future was the return of such a value system. Scholars are in conflict, however, over whether the end of the trilogy provides insight into how such a central value system might arrive or whether it simply signals hope for such a future. Broch studies focus on the role of Broch’s theoretical writings within the trilogy as well as how various themes and forms of the trilogy are embedded in literary, cultural, and philosophical contexts.
Der Tod des Vergil / The Death of Virgil
The breadth of formal and linguistic experimentation in Broch’s literary work reaches its height in Der Tod des Vergil. The plot of the novel would seem quite simple; it follows the poet Virgil on the last evening of his life as he arrives in the port city of Brindisi where the emperor Augustus is waiting for him. The lyrical novel threads its narrative along the conscious and unconscious and follows Virgil’s reflections on his life, loves, and creative production at a moment of political crisis, echoing the contemporary condition in the last years of WWII. Virgil’s thoughts appear in both states of alertness and states of semi-consciousness, as he succumbs to illness. Like with Die Schlafwandler, Broch executes his theory of the novel, and in its striving for totality, key themes and symbols are woven throughout, such as the elements of fire, water, air, and earth; musical composition; and colour. Broch’s novel is an adaptation of Virgil’s work, a historical novel of the shift toward authoritarian power to the Roman empire at the outset of a period of peace under Augustus, and a response to the question of the function and impact of literature. With this novel, Broch is no longer anchored in the language and culture of his time and produces transcendent and illuminating language that reaches across centuries. The result is a novel that is hard to summarize succinctly and compelling to read.
The novel was published simultaneously in English and German with intense work between Broch and his US American translator, the poet Jean Starr Untermeyer. Untermeyer’s translation is known as a premier example of how a translation becomes a work of art on its own, most notably thanks to George Steiner’s After Babel (1975). The novel inspires poets, musicians, artists, and philosophers, including Karl Ove Knausgård and Dragica Rajčić, but as with Broch’s other literary work, continues to challenge critics and readers alike, garnering strong emotional and intellectual responses from its audience.
Selected Works (with dates published in original and in English translation):
Die Schlafwandler (1930/32), The Sleepwalkers (1932)
Die Unbekannte Größe (1933), The Unknown Quantity (1935)
Die Verzauberung (1976), The Spell (1987), other versions of the work published in German as Der Versucher (1953), and Demeter (1967). A volume of all versions of the manuscript appeared as Bergroman (1969)
Völkerbund-Resolution (1937, no translation)
Der Tod des Vergil (1945), The Death of Virgil (1945)
Die Schuldlosen (1950), The Guiltless (2000)
Massenwahntheorie (1959, 1979, no translation)
Introductory Resources
Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galin Tihanov (eds.), A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019.)
David Horrocks, ‘The Novel as History – Hermann Broch’s Trilogy Die Schlafwandler’, in Weimar Germany: Writers and Politics, ed. by A. F. Bance (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982), pp. 38-52
Michael Kessler and Paul Michael Lützeler (eds.), Hermann-Broch-Handbuch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015)
Paul Michael Lützeler, Hermann Broch: A Biography, trans. by Janice Furness (London: Quartet, 1987)
Bibliographies for Further Study
Jonas, Klaus W. in collaboration with Herta Schwarz. “Bibliographie Hermann Broch“. In: Bertold Hack and Marietta Kleiß eds. Hermann Broch und Daniel Brody. Briefwechsel 1930–1951. Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1971. Pp. 1081–1168.
Jonas, Klaus W. „Bibliographie der Sekundärliteratur zu Hermann Broch 1971–1984“. In: Paul Michael Lützeler, ed. Hermann Broch. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986. Pp. 333–357.
McGaughey, Sarah. „Hermann-Broch-Bibliographie (1985–2014)“. In: Michael Kessler and Paul Michael Lützeler, eds. Hermann-Broch-Handbuch. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Pp. 552–626.
McGaughey, Sarah. “Selected Bibliography”. In: Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galin Tihanov, eds. A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019. Pp. 237-256.
Websites in English