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Broch, Hermann (Vienna, 1886-1951, New Haven, USA), of Jewish parentage, entered his father's textile concern in 1908, leaving in his forties to read mathematics, philosophy, and psychology at Vienna University (1928-31). At the same time he completed his first work, and in 1935 decided to devote himself entirely to writing, settling first in the Tyrolean mountains, then in the Salzkammergut (Alt-Aussee). In 1930-2 appeared his remarkable trilogy Die Schlafwandler (transl. by Edwin and Willa Muir as The Sleepwalkers, 1932), a historical Zeitroman on the period between 1888 and 1918 based on his philosophical theory of the disintegration of values (Wertzerfall). He conceived this as a process of cultural decay which had begun with the Renaissance and inexorably led to the fragmentation of the value system on which medieval Europe was founded and which in the period portrayed had lost its raison d'être. Influenced by Kant and Plato, Broch envisaged the eventual emergence of a new system of values which would regenerate Western civilization, an ideal with which he hoped to inspire the German public as a warning against National Socialism and the fallacious image of the Führer. The trilogy is Broch's most direct contribution to the study of the rise of fascism. His reflections on values as defined in Der Zerfall der Werte forms part of his later studies on mass psychology; written in the USA between 1939 and 1948, they were comprehensively edited by P. M. Lützeler as Massenwahntheorie. Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik (1979). Broch knew Canetti but follows a different line of enquiry. Though he briefly diverted from this preoccupation in the novel Die unbekannte Größe (1933), it is evident throughout his creative work and demonstrates his conviction that art must be of service to its own age—a view which he also expressed in several of his numerous essays. It is central to his play Die Entsühnung (perf. in Zurich, 1934), his ‘Bergroman’ Die Verzauberung, begun in 1934, and the novel Die Schuldlosen. Roman in 11 Erzählungen (1950), mainly written in the 1930s. However, despondent at the political ineffectiveness of his creative writing, he turned for a while to a practical project and wrote his Völkerbund-Resolution (1936-7) in the hope that the League of Nations in Geneva would initiate active opposition against the violation of human rights in fascist countries. Although the project failed, his concern about human rights became basic to his conception of democracy and democratic reconstruction. It was this conception that lay at the heart of his studies on mass psychology at the Institute for Public Opinion Research in Princeton, his Erklärung zum Schutz der Menschenwürde addressed to the UNO, and his essay Trotzdem: Humane Politik. Verwirklichung einer Utopie (1950); his ideal of a ‘total democracy’ (Total-demokratie) replacing totalitarianism envisaged an independent system of justice, the central value (Zentralwert) of government, and similar reforms.

In 1938, immediately after the German annexation of Austria, Broch was arrested and spent 18 days in prison, uncertain of his fate. During this period of agony he conceived his major work, Der Tod des Vergil (1945, transl. by Jean Starr Untermeyer as The Death of Vergil, 1945), of which a sketch written for Vienna radio in 1936, Die Heimkehr des Vergil, is a shortened version. Friends secured his release and emigration, first to the Muirs in Scotland, then to the USA (October 1938). After a number of interruptions, mainly devoted to his study of mass psychology, he completed the work in 1944. Unique in its artistry, it contains all the problems that preoccupied him during almost 20 years of study and writing, including literary influences, among them James Joyce, but also Rilke and Hofmannsthal, Th. Mann and Kafka.

Broch's correspondence with Daniel Brody, his publisher and friend who also published the German version of James Joyce, Briefwechsel 1930-1951, ed. B. Hack and M. Kleiß, appeared in 1971, Briefe über Deutschland. Die Korrespondenz mit Volkmar von Zühlsdorff, ed. P. M. Lützeler, in 1986, Gesammelte Werke (10 vols.) 1952-61, and the Kommentierte Werkausgabe (13 vols. in 17), ed. P. M. Lützeler, 1974-81.

(hĕr'män brôkh) , 1886–1951, Austrian novelist. Broch is one of the masters of European modernism. Influenced by Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and the Vienna Circle, his trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1931–32; tr. The Sleepwalkers, 1932) describes the disintegration of social values and of organic coherence in the modern world. Der Tod des Virgil (1945; tr. The Death of Virgil, 1945) is a lyrical, stream-of-consciousness novel stylistically evoking James Joyce. His Hugo von Hofmannstahl and His Time (1964, tr. 1984) is one of the great accounts of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Also a mathematician and businessman, Broch lived in the United States after 1938.

Bibliography

See biography by P. M. Lützeler (1987); studies by T. Ziolkowski (1964) and E. Schlant (1971; tr. 1987).

Quotes:

"The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason."

"What's important is promising something to the people, not actually keeping those promises. The people have always lived on hope alone."

"Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part."

"No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness."

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