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Hermann Broch | |
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| Born | (1886-11-01)November 1, 1886 |
| Died | May 30, 1951(1951-05-30) (aged 64) |
| Nationality | Austrian |
| Literary movement | Modernism |
Hermann Broch (German:[bʁɔx]; 1 November 1886 – 30 May 1951) was anAustrianwriter, best known for two major works ofmodernist fiction:The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler, 1930–32) andThe Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil, 1945).[1][2]
Broch was born inVienna,Austria-Hungary, to a prosperousJewish family, and worked for some time in his family's factory, though he maintained his literary interests privately. As the oldest son, he was expected to take over his father’s textile factory inTeesdorf; therefore, he attended a technical college for textile manufacture and a spinning and weaving college.
In 1909 he converted toRoman Catholicism and married Franziska von Rothermann, the daughter of a knighted manufacturer.[3] The following year, their son Hermann Friedrich Maria was born. His marriage ended in divorce in 1923. In 1927 he sold the textile factory and decided to studymathematics,philosophy andpsychology at theUniversity of Vienna. He embarked on a full-time literary career around the age of 40. At the age of 45, his first major literary work, the trilogyThe Sleepwalkers, was published byDaniel Brody for the Rhein Verlag in Munich in three volumes from 1930 to 1932.[4][5]
He was acquainted with many of the writers, intellectuals, and artists of his time, includingRobert Musil,Rainer Maria Rilke,Elias Canetti,Leo Perutz,Franz Blei and writer and formernude modelEa von Allesch.
After theannexation of Austria by theNazis on 12 March 1938, Broch was arrested in the small Alpine town ofBad Aussee for possession of a socialist magazine and detained in the district jail from the 13th to the 31st of March.[6] Shortly thereafter, a movement organized by friends – includingJames Joyce,Thornton Wilder, and his translatorsEdwin andWilla Muir – managed to help him emigrate; first toBritain and then to theUnited States, where he published his novelThe Death of Virgil and his collection of short storiesThe Guiltless. While in exile, he also continued to write on politics and work on mass psychology, similar toElias Canetti andHannah Arendt. His essay on mass behaviour remained unfinished. Broch's work on mass psychology was intended to form part of more ambitious project to defenddemocracy,human rights, and human dignity as irreducible ethical absolutes in a postreligious age.[7]
From the 15th of August to the 15th of September 1939, Hermann Broch lived at theAlbert Einstein House at 112 Mercer Street Princeton, New Jersey when the Einsteins were on vacation.[8] From 1942 to 1948 Broch lived in anattic apartment in Eric and Lili Kahler's house at One Evelyn Place in Princeton, New Jersey.[9] Broch died in 1951 inNew Haven,Connecticut. He is buried inKillingworth, Connecticut, in the cemetery on Roast Meat Hill Road. He was nominated for theNobel Prize in Literature in 1950.[10]
Broch's first major literary work was the trilogyThe Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler), published in three volumes from 1930 to 1932. Broch centers the essay "Zerfall der Werte" ("The Disintegration of Values") in the final novel, providing an overarching theory of the trilogy's form and approach to contemporary culture.[11] The trilogy has been praised byMilan Kundera, whose writing has been greatly influenced by Broch.[12]
One of his foremost works,The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil) was first published in June 1945 in both itsEnglish translation and original German.[13][14][15] Having begun the text as a short radio lecture in 1937,[16] Broch expanded and redeveloped the text over the next eight years of his life, which witnessed a short incarceration in an Austrian prison after theAustrian Anschluss,[17] his flight to Scotland via England,[18] and his eventual exile in the United States.[19] This extensive, difficult novel interweaves reality, hallucination, poetry and prose, and reenacts the last 18 hours of theRoman poetVirgil's life in the port of Brundisium (Brindisi). Here, shocked by the balefulness (Unheil) of the society he glorifies in hisAeneid, the feverish Virgil resolves to burn his epic, but is thwarted by his close friend and emperorAugustus before he succumbs to his fatal ailment. The final chapter exhibits the final hallucinations of the poet, where Virgil voyages to a distant land at which he witnesses roughly the biblical creation story in reverse.
Broch's last work to be published before his death wasThe Guiltless (Die Schuldlosen, 1950), a collection of stories.[20] An incomplete novel was posthumously published in German as:Der Versucher in 1953,Demeter in 1967,Bergroman in 1969, andDie Verzauberung in 1976. The first manuscript was translated into English asThe Spell by Broch's son, H.F. Broch de Rothermann and published in 1987.
Broch demonstrates mastery of a wide range of styles, from the gentle parody ofTheodor Fontane in the first volume ofThe Sleepwalkers through the essayistic segments of the third volume to the phantasmagoria in verse form ofThe Death of Virgil.
Complete works in German:Kommentierte Werkausgabe, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–1981.
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