Hermann Broch

For more information on Hermann Broch, visit Britannica.com.

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.

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."

Hermann Broch
Born	November 1, 1886(1886-11-01) Vienna, Austria
Died	May 30, 1951 (aged 64)
Nationality	Austrian
Religious beliefs	Jewish,Roman Catholic

Hermann Broch (November 1, 1886 – May 30, 1951) was a 20th century Austrian writer, considered one of the major Modernists.

Contents 1 Life 2 Work 3 Bibliography 4 References 5 External links

Life

Broch was born in Vienna to a prosperous Jewish family and worked for some time in his family's factory, though he maintained his literary interests privately. He was predestined to work in his father’s textile factory in Teesdorf, therefore, he attended a technical college for textile manufacture and a spinning and weaving college.

In 1909 he married Franziska von Rothermann, a daughter of a knighted manufacturer. The following year, their son Hermann Friedrich Maria was born. Later, Broch began to see other women and the marriage ended in divorce in 1923.

He was acquainted with Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elias Canetti, Franz Blei and his devoted friend and inspiration, writer and former nude model Ea von Allesch and many others. In 1927 he sold the textile factory and decided to study mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna. He embarked on a full-time literary career only around the age of 40. At the age of 45, he published his first novel, The Sleepwalkers.

With the annexation of Austria by the Nazis (1938), Broch was arrested, but a movement organized by friends - including James Joyce - managed to have him released and allowed to emigrate; first to Britain and then to the United States, where he finished his novel The Death of Virgil and began to work, similarly to Elias Canetti, on an essay on mass behaviour, which remained unfinished. He converted to Roman Catholicism.

Hermann Broch died in 1951 in New Haven, Connecticut. He is buried in Killingworth, Connecticut, in the cemetery on Roast Meat Hill Road. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Work

One of his major works, The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil), which he began to write while imprisoned in a concentration camp, was first published in the U.S., in an English translation, in 1945. This great, difficult novel, in which reality and hallucination, poetry and prose are inextricably mingled, reenacts the last hours of life of the Roman poet Virgil, in the port of Brundisium (Brindisi), where he accompanied Augustus, his decision – frustrated by the emperor – to burn his Aeneid, and his final reconciliation with his destiny. The French composer Jean Barraqué composed a number of works inspired by The Death of Virgil.

However, Erich Heller observed that if "The Death of Virgil is his masterpiece... it is a very problematical one, for it attempts to give literary shape to the author's growing aversion to literature. In the very year the novel appeared, Broch confessed to 'a deep revulsion' from literature as such – 'the domain of vanity and mendacity'. Written with a paradoxical, lyrical exuberance, it is the imaginary record of the poet’s last day and his renunciation of poetry. He commands the manuscript of the Aeneid to be destroyed, not because it is incomplete or imperfect, but because it is poetry and not 'knowledge'. He even says his Georgics are useless, inferior to any expert treatise on agriculture. His friend the Emperor Augustus undoes his design and his works are saved." (Erich Heller, "Hitler in a very Small Town", New York Times, January 25, 1987.)

Other important works by Broch are The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler, 1932), and The Guiltless (Die Schuldlosen, 1950). The Sleepwalkers is a trilogy, where Broch takes "the degeneration of values" as his main theme. The trilogy has been praised by Milan Kundera, whose own writing has been greatly influenced by Broch. Broch demonstrates mastery of a wide range of styles, from the gentle parody of Theodor Fontane in the first volume of The Sleepwalkers through the essayistic segments of the third volume to the dithyrambic phantasmagoria of The Death of Virgil.

Bibliography

Selected titles translated into English:

• Die Schlafwandler: Eine Romantrilogie: Pasenow; oder, Die Romantik - 1888, 1931; Esch; oder, Die Anarchie - 1903, 1931; Huguenau, oder, Die Sachlichkeit - 1918, 1932 - Sleepwalkers: A Trilogy
• Die Unbekannte Größe, 1933 - The Unknown Quantity
• Der Tod des Vergil, 1945 - The Death of Virgil (trans. by Jean Starr Untermeyer)
• Die Schuldlosen, 1950 - The Guiltless (trans. by Ralph Mannheim)
• Der Versucher, 1953 Rhein-Verlag,AG, Zûrich; «The Seducer»
• Short Stories, 1966
• Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 1974 - Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time
• Die Verzauberung, 1976 - The Spell
• Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age, 2003

For a more complete listing, see the MLA bibliography

References

External links

• Excellent overview
• IN SEARCH OF THE ABSOLUTE NOVEL - 1985 review of The Sleepwalkers by Theodore Ziolkowski
• - Hermann Broch archive at Yale University
• Some Broch quotations
• Another review of The Sleepwalkers, with useful links
• Review of Geist and Zeitgeist
• Review of Death of Virgil
• A personal page about Broch's writings, and about Broch's son, H.F. Broch de Rothermann

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