Hermann Broch: an introduction

Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil is seen as one of those great, yet unread, novels of the 20th century. As we prepare to discuss the novel here, I thought it might be helpful to discuss Broch’s life, his philosophical and aesthetic interests, the milieu of his early years, and his later turn away from art and toward psychology.

Broch was born in 1886 into a Viennese family made wealthy through the manufacturing of textiles. Apparently his own grandfather was the last member of the family to be actively involved in the business, but Broch nevertheless studied textile engineering at university (graduating in 1906). Despite his rather vocational education, his real interests were more esoteric, especially the work of Schopenhauer and Kant. And in his philosophical pursuits he found a ready place in the intellectual wars of early 20th century Vienna. Was there ever a city–since Athens or Rome–home to such an astonishing group of people? In music, Mahler and then Schoenberg, Webern and Berg; in literature, Musil, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Kraus, and Schnitzler; in architecture, Wagner and Loos; in painting, Klimt; Freud; Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle in philosophy. This is just for starters! The legacy of Nietzsche, and, as noted, Schopenhauer and Kant, remained controlling for Broch’s generation, and powerful too was the perceived collapse in values both documented and abetted by the first two of these thinkers and seemingly proven by the disaster of the Hapsburg Empire and the dual monarchy. For Broch, the First World War only made more imperative his desire to understand the writhing of the world around him.

While still nominally attached to the textile business, Broch began his literary career as a critic in the mold of Karl Kraus. In the years before World War I, Broch wrote several essays (some of which he later disowned) on aesthetics and philosophy. Some of these are collected in Geist and Zeitgeist, published near the end of his life. Broch’s essays are reputedly as dense as any student of German could expect. But if critic was his first incarnation (or perhaps second–remember the textile engineering), it would not be the last–not the last by a long shot, as Broch’s adult life can be characterized by physical rootlessness and intellectual restlessness. According to Michael P. Steinberg, whose introduction to Broch’s Hofmannsthal and His Time is one of the best sources of information on the writer, Broch had decided by 1922, at which time he was 35 years old, to devote his life to the study of the Western world’s dissolution of values. To that end, he published nothing between the time of this apparently momentous decision and 1935. Broch instead devoted his time to study, enrolling in university to study with Rudolf Carnap and pursue the antipositivist program of the Vienna Circle.

The apparently fallow years of Broch’s life were not, even though without publication, devoid of substantive accomplishments. During this time, Broch became convinced that the novel alone was a form in which the artist could construct an entire world–a world to replace the dissolute one of his real life. Whether a source of Broch’s commitment to the novel or merely its consequence, there can be no doubt that Joyce was of particular importance for the aspiring novelist. Almost immediately upon its publication, Broch heralded Ulysses as the most important work of the modern era. It was not only the use of myth in Ulysses–although this was very important to Broch as The Death of Virgil shows–but also the novel’s innovative language that was found so appealing. For Broch, the marriage of innovative language and story-matter is exactly what gave the novel-as-novel its “worldmaking” capacity.

In 1936, Broch published The Sleepwalkers. The book is really a trilogy, with each section of the collected novel named after its protagonist. The first section, set in 1888, is called “The Romantic” and discusses the life of a soldier who holds honor above all other virtues. It is widely seen as a parody of Theodor Fontane (see the current New York Review of Books for a discussion of this 19th century writer). The second section centers on the quest of “The Anarchist” for some sense of life’s meaning and is set in 1903. The final section, based in 1913, is about “The Realist.” While the first two sections are fairly conventional, it is the last that is most often commented upon. “The Realist” mixes straightforward narrative with odd poems and often lengthy philosophical essays that are reminiscent of no one so much as Hegel. Milan Kundera, a great Broch fan, would call this third part of The Sleepwalkers one of the great innovations in the novel. Also commenting on book three, William Gass has said that Broch remains the quintessential philosophical novelist and, in Temple of Texts, listed The Sleepwalkers as one of the twenty or so books he found truly meaningful and essential.

Broch’s next project was The Death of Virgil. He would, like so many, find it difficult to complete in the pressure of Hitler’s rise. On the very day of the Anschluss, Broch was arrested, being released only after two weeks in jail. He began a frantic quest for a visa, reaching out to many of the major literary figures of Europe, including Joyce. Joyce did arrange for a visa, although with no real urgency, and Broch found a visa elsewhere. Scotland beckoned him (where he would assist in the translation to English of The Sleepwalkers) and later the United States; throughout World War II he nursed Virgil with the same obsession that characterized Joyce in crafting Finnegan’s Wake (this obsession was apparently openly acknowledged by Broch). He published the work, finally, in 1945, having made it to the US, where he hoped in vain for an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

I will try to summarize Broch’s aesthetic concerns in a subsequent post. But, suffice to say, The Death of Virgil was, for its creator, both triumph and swansong. Prefiguring Broch’s real-life turn, Virgil is about the great Roman’s poet’s last day of life, the fugue of death having long arrived, and on which he wants to burn the Aeneid, having decided the epic not to be “true knowledge.” And, like his fictional creation, in his remaining years in the US, Broch himself turned away from art and devoted his time to the study of psychology and, it seems, mathematics, before falling into silence altogether. The fragmentary product of these last years of life has been published as Mass Psychology, an investigation into the social roots of totalitarianism that has attracted scarce notice. Hermann Broch would die in 1951, having disavowed the basis of his own achievement. His papers were given to Yale University.