Incapable of communicating himself to others, incapable of breaking out of his isolation, doomed to remain the mere actor of his life, the deputy of his own ego – all that any human being can know of another is a mere symbol, the symbol of an ego that remains beyond our grasp, possessing no more value than that of a symbol; and all that can be told is the symbol of a symbol, a symbol at a second, third, nth remove, asking for representation in the true double sense of the word. (p.497)
1. The cast
2. A more accessible layout
3. The plot
4. ‘Modernist’ techniques
5. Broch’s pseudo-philosophy
6. Humourless hysteria
7. Drawing strands together
The Realist (1918) is the third in Austrian writer Hermann Broch’s trilogy, The Sleepwalkers. At nearly 300 pages in the Vintage paperback edition it is almost twice as long as the first two novels put together.
The first two novels started out as realistic accounts of a handful of characters, featuring very vividly drawn settings and events, which slowly became more long-winded and hysterical, bloated with the religio-philosophical speculations of their chief protagonists which are mingled with their psychological obsessions and idées fixes into a complicated and sometimes confusing brew.
The Realist has more characters than the previous books, and more systematically deploys the different styles or registers of Broch’s writing, from the purely descriptive, through the psychological delineation of character, to – at the highbrow end – sections of pure philosophy and cultural critique. First, a look at the characters.
1. The cast
1. The Realist is Wilhelm Huguenau. He was approaching his thirtieth birthday when the Great War broke out. Quickly we skim over the years Huguenau spent waiting to be called up, then his conscription and training in 1917 and his first experiences in the trenches on the Western Front, lined with human excrement and flooded with rain and urine.
This is all dealt with briskly because the point is that on his first evening Huguenau promptly climbs over the lip of the trench and goes absent without leave. He is a handsome, smooth-talking man who grew up in Alsace on the border between Germany and Belgium and so is able to present himself to suspicious peasants and to a devout pastor who puts him up for a while, as an innocent man reluctantly dragooned into the army. He is a chancer with a beaming, friendly face and a ready smile on his lips (p.346). Surprisingly, though, he is stout and short (p.513), ‘a round, thickset figure’ (p.535). Possibly because Broch intends us to despise him as a symbol of the self-centred, go-getting corruption of the modern age.
2. Ludwig Gödicke is 40. He was a bricklayer before he was called up to the Landwehr. He was buried alive in a front line trench by shellfire. When the ambulancemen dug him out they couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead and so had a bet on the matter, it’s only because of the random decision to have a bet that they didn’t fling him back in the hole but instead take him to a field hospital where he hovers between life and death as his soul slowly reconstitutes itself in anguish (p.351). (If this were an English novel he would recover from his ordeal; because it is a German novel by a German author, Ludwig has to reconstitute a soul which was atomised by his near-death experience and rebuild it fragment by fragment, a process described in immense detail.) For even though his body is repaired, it turns out that Ludwig’s soul is an unbuilt house which he must reconstruct one brick at a time. Meanwhile, in total silence he hobbles on crutches around the hospital grounds (p.383).
3. Lieutenant Jaretzki is in military hospital, almost the whole of his left arm swollen and infected by gas. The doctors discuss the need to amputate the arm before the infection reaches his torso, and then go ahead. Jaretski takes it pretty philosophically and discusses with one of the doctors whether to try and get a job in an engineering firm or simply volunteer to return to the front where he can be shot and get it over with.
4. Huguenau has by now travelled south away from the front and arrived at a sleepy little town in the valley of a tributary of the Moselle. He has spent the last of his money on smart clothes and a haircut and sets about coming up with money-making schemes. He visits the ramshackle office of the local newspaper, the Kur-Trier Herald, where the seasoned Broch reader has a surprise. For this ailing local paper is edited by none other August Esch, the former book-keeper who was the protagonist of this book’s prequel, The Anarchist (p.356). Esch inherited the newspaper and the buildings it occupies in a legacy, and it is 15 years since we last saw him (in 1903). But he is just as short-tempered and irascible, blaming the military censorship for preventing him publishing the truth, quick to take offence at anyone or anything. We meet his wife, one-time Mother Hentjen, who we last saw on the eve of their marriage, being joylessly ravaged every evening and who Esch occasionally beat when his anger got the better of him. He is tall and lean, with ‘long lank legs’ (p.513).
5. Later, at dinner in the hotel he’s staying in, Huguenau is promoted by devilry to approach the old, grey-haired Major dining nearby, who (he is informed) has authority for the region. For no particular reason, Huguenau finds himself denouncing Esch to the Major, accusing Esch of unpatriotic activities, and claims he’s been sent by higher authorities to carry out an investigation. Intimidated by this smart and confident young man, the old Major blusters and says he’ll introduce Huguenau to some of the local worthies who foregather in the hotel bar on Friday nights. Since Broch is obviously partial to reviving characters from the earlier novels, I immediately suspected that this white-haired and dim old military man might turn out to be Joachim von Pasenow from the first novel, thirty years later… And indeed this suspicion is confirmed in chapter 33 (p.418). Welcome back dim and confused old friend.
6. Hanna Wendler lazily wakes up in ‘Rose Cottage’, stroking her breast under her silk nightclothes before drifting off to sleep again and waking later. She imagines herself as the subject of a rococo painting, or like Goya’s painting of Maja. Presumably these references indicate her social class i.e. educated, upper middle-class. She has a son and several servants. We then learn that her husband, Dr Heinrich Wendling, is a lawyer, and that her listlessness is explained by the fact that he has been absent on the Eastern Front for two years (p.363).
7. Marie is a young Salvation Army girl in Berlin. Her sections are narrated by a first-person narrator who gives eye-witness descriptions of Marie’s life in Berlin in the final months of the war. In chapter 27 we learn that this narrator is Bertrand Müller, Doctor of Philosophy (p.403). That bodes badly. More philosophy, that’s the last thing we need.
8. Disintegration of Values And there’s a recurring section told by another first-person narrator which does nothing but lament the decline and fall of ‘our times’ and ‘the horror of this age’ (p.389) in an irritatingly ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ sort of way. For this moany old devil ‘this age’ is ‘softer and more cowardly than any preceding age’ (p.373) and don’t get him started on ‘modern architecture’! Surely no former age ever greeted its contemporary architecture with such dislike and repugnance (p.389), the architecture of ‘our time’ reveals ‘the non-soul of our non-age’ (p.390).
I got the sense that this narrator or voice is not intended to be Broch’s, it is more self-consciously preening, exaggeratedly that of an aesthete who is happy rattling on about how this or that architectural style reveals ‘the spirit of the age’ etc. These passages might have been immensely useful if they had actually referred to specific buildings or types of architecture current either when the novel is set (1918) or when Broch was writing it (late 1920s). But they don’t. They are very long and curiously empty.
Anyway, we eventually learn that these passages are written by the character Bertrand Müller, and are part of an extended thesis he’s writing (p.439). That explains their über-academic style.
2. A more accessible layout
So that’s the main cast of eight or so characters who are each introduced in the first 20 or so pages, and the next 200+ pages tell us their stories as their lives unfold and, occasionally, intersect.
Apart from being double the length of its predecessor novels, the other immediately distinctive physical thing about The Realist is that it has chapters – lots of them, about 90 chapters, often only a few pages long.
This is in striking contrast to the previous books which were divided into just a handful (4 or 5) of very long acts or divisions. Admittedly these were then broken up into ‘sections’ indicated by breaks in the text, but The Realist is something new. The chapters consciously cut between the characters with each chapter focusing on a different character and on a specific action (or specific topic of waffling burble, in the case of the Disintegration of Values chapters) and is short and focused.
This makes The Realist infinitely more readable than its predecessors with their pages after pages after pages of solid text, sometimes disappearing into such extended passages of religio-philosophy that the reader gets lost and confused.
By contrast, in this book you are never more than a page away from a new chapter and, because they mostly focus on short sharp scenes, the result is much more vivid.
Also, whereas in the previous two novels almost all the dialogue was buried in huge blocks of undifferentiated prose, here the passages of dialogue are broken up so that each new bit of the dialogue, even if it’s only a sentence long, has a new paragraph – the standard way of laying out dialogue in most novels.
Sounds trivial but just these two typographic changes make The Realist look and feel much, much closer to the ‘normal’ type of novel you and I are used to reading.
3. The plot
Huguenau inveigles himself with Esch and gets the local worthies to form a business consortium which partly buys Esch out of the newspaper, installing Huguenau as editor and giving him accommodation in Esch’s house where is daily fed by Esch’s wife, the shapeless, silent hausfrau Gertrud (Mother Hentjen of The Anarchist, 15 years on).
Despite this Huguenau also wants to suck up the local military authority, Major von Pasenow. Now we know, from having followed him for 150 pages in The Romantic that von Pasenow is a moron who consistently fails to understand everything around him and this is what happens when Huguenau writes a cunning clever letter to the Major accusing Esch of consorting with traitorous types i.e. going to a beer cellar with a few mates and discussing how the war is going badly and whether it’s likely to end. Huguenau miscalculates because von Pasenow is too dim to be suspicious of Esch but instead is (rightly) suspicious of Huguenau’s motives in sending the letter.
Ludwig Gödicke attends the funeral of a well-liked young soldier who’d been in the hospital as Gödicke. the funeral prompts Gödicke to utter his first words and he tries to climb down into the open grave. Huguenau attends the funeral so the reader begins to realise that all these characters are in the same town.
Huguenau is bored of editing the newspaper which, after all has little or nothing to put in it. He has a brainwave, which is to set up a patriotic charity. That Friday he corrals the local worthies into setting it up, naming it the Moselle Memorial Association. He also has the idea of setting up an ‘Iron Bismarck’ in the town square, the name Germans gave to blocks of wood they set up and then citizens hammered nails into, whilst making a contribution to the fund/charity.
Sucking up to the Major, Huguenau had invited him to contribute an article to the Kur-Trier Herald, so the Major wrote an extended sermon with many quotes from the Bible. This has a powerful impact on Esch, who sets up a Bible Study group and asks the Major to lead it. Here, as everywhere else in the trilogy, there is a complete absence of irony or wit or self-awareness or charity or sympathy or kindness. Esch and von Pasenow bark at each other like dogs.
The young soldier who died in the hospital, his brother is the meek and mild watch-repairer Samwald, who takes to visiting the hospital, repairing watches for the staff and inmates, and strangely drawn to the silent Gödicke. They often sit on a bench in the sun in silence. One day Samwald takes Gödicke by the hand into the town and to the editorial offices of the Kur-Trier Herald, up a ladder in a sort of farm courtyard. Samwald, it turns out, is part of Esch’s Bible Studies group.
A strange scene where the Major, Esch, Frau Esch and Huguenau sit round chatting, described in the format of a play script, in which the Major and Esch talk nothing but religious salvationism / theology, and all four end up singing a Salvation Army hymn.
A Celebration drink and dance in a biergarden, where many of the characters, plus the three or four named doctors who are treating Gödicke (doctors Kessel, Kühlenbeck, Flurschütz) and the nurses (Sister Mathilde, Sister Clara) mix and mingle. I wish I could say there was one shred of humour, banter, repartee or warmth in this scene, but there isn’t.
Major von Pasenow attends the Bible Group led by Esch. Like all the other religious meetings, it is hysteria-ridden, dominated by imagery of death, the grave, the Evil One and so on. Broch’s depiction of German religious believers is terrifying because they are constantly at an extremity of horror and terror.
Basically, Huguenau tries a variety of tactics to incriminate Esch in the eyes of the Major in order, I think, to have him locked up as a traitor so Huguenau can inherit the whole of the newspaper, printing press and buildings. However, this is never going to happen because Esch and von Pasenow share the same morbid, over-excitable morbid Christian hysteria. Here’s a brief look inside Major von Pasenow’s mind.
Yet strong as was the effort he made to bring his thoughts under control, it was not strong enough to master the contradictory orders and service instructions before him; he was incapable of resolving the contradictions. Chaos was invading the world on every side and chaos was spreading over his thoughts and over the world, darkness was spreading, and the advance of darkness sounded like the agony of a painful death, like a death-rattle in which only one thing was audible, only one thing certain, the downfall of the Fatherland – oh, how the darkness was rising and the chaos, and out of that chaos, as if from a sink of poisonous gases, there grinned the visage of Huguenau, the visage of the traitor, the instrument of divine wrath, the author of all the encroaching evil. (p.582)
Meanwhile, the stories of other characters advance. I found it hard to understand the Berlin scenes. The first-person narrator, Bertrand Müller, appears to be living in a boarding house with various Jews, old and young. He has an antagonistic relationship (as far as I can tell every single relationship in all three books is antagonistic; nobody seems to just get on with each other) with an elderly scholarly Jew, Dr Samson Litwak and also, in some obscure way, appears to be supervising or looking over a burgeoning relationship between the Salvation Army girl, Marie, and a young Jewish man Nuchem Sussin.
And Hanna Wendler’s husband, the long-absent lawyer and lieutenant in the army, Heinrich, turns up on leave. Here Broch is on form, describing the strangeness of her attitude to him, her sense of distance from herself, her sense that everything she experiences is somehow secondary. Plus, they appear to have a classy and erotic sex life (p.539).
History has been ticking along in the background. As in the other novels Broch has subtly indicated the passage of the seasons from spring through a glorious high summer and into autumn. Except this time the year in question is 1918 so we know that the year is not going to end well for the German side and the German characters.
In October Huguenau is finally caught out. His name appears on a long list of deserters distributed to local authorities which ends up on Major von Pasenow’s desk. Pasenow is dim and dense, which is why he is scared and overcome with horror much of the time – he just doesn’t understand the world. So it is characteristic that a) he’s not sure he’s read the list properly b) he is then crushed by indecision as to what to do about it during which – instead of acting decisively, he characteristically invokes the horrors of the universe and the terror of the Antichrist and sees Huguenau as a great devil and traitor who is responsible for Germany’s defeat – in other words exactly the kind of hysterical over-reaction we’ve come to expect from a Broch character.
When the Major finally calls Huguenau in to explain himself, the portly little man immediately goes on the offensive, making up a story that his papers were taken off him when he was chosen for intelligence work in this town and he’s been waiting ever since for them to catch up with him, you know what army bureaucracy is like.
The Major doesn’t really believe this brazen bluff, but he is so ineffectual that he doesn’t know what to do next. After Huguenau has strolled out, bold as brass, Major von Pasenow is so overcome with despair at his role in consorting with a traitor etc, that he gets his service revolver out of a drawer, with thoughts of shooting himself there and then.
This is the kind of hysterical over-reaction which is so typical of Broch’s characters throughout the trilogy.
Meanwhile, back at the printing press some of the workmen Huguenau employs to work the press are a bit surly and mumbling about the low wages he gives them. News of the Bolshevik revolution has of course been in the press for over a year, but now there’s talk of class war spreading among German workers. So that evening Huguenau makes the strategic move of going along to the local bierkellar and tries to ingratiate himself into the workers’ (Lindner, Liebel) good graces.
I think Huguenau is intended to be a cynical, amoralist whose ruthless concern for number one and paring away of all unnecessary moral restrictions is strongly to be deprecated, but I admire his inventiveness and his chutzpah.
Then the war ends and there is anarchy. Broch describes ‘the events’ of 2, 3 and 4 November in the little town, namely attacks by armed workers on the barracks and the prison. Huguenau had been deputised by the military authorities, handed a gun and told to defend a bridge but when a crowd of armed workers approaches, he quickly joins them and leads the attack on the prison. His euphoria turns to nausea when he sees one of the prison warders dragged out of hiding by the mob and set upon, pinned to the ground and beaten with an iron bar. He flees.
Down the pub the workers had mentioned a new lung disease which has carried off several friends. They joke about it being the Apocalypse. We, the readers, know it is the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Now we see sexy and semi-detached Hanna Wendler in bed with a fever. The explosion in the barracks blows in the windows of her house and she takes shelter in the kitchen with the servants and her son.
Esch sets off with his gun towards the prison but sees the mob coming and hides. Then he hears a crash and returns to find the mob have made the Major’s car crash into a ditch, rolling on its side, killing the driver and a soldier. With another soldier he manages to lift the car and extract the body of the Major, still breathing but unconscious. When he comes too, he can’t move but babbles something about a horse which has fallen, broken its leg and needs to be shot. The reader remembers that this refers to an incident from von Pasenow’s boyhood when he had an accident with his brother Helmuth’s horse, which had to be put down (p.611).
Huguenau rushes back to the buildings with his precious printing press and finds it is solid and untouched, but the living quarters he shares with Herr and Frau Esch have been wrecked by the mob. She emerges weeping from the wreckage, they are both unsettled by the chaos around them and before they know it she is unbuckling her corsets and they fall onto the sofa and have sex.
Meanwhile Eash tends the semi-conscious Major, gets one of the soldiers who’d been in the car to help carry him back to his house, the printworks and his rooms in the courtyard. Here Esch carefully carries the Major into a basement, lays him on a rug, quietly closes the trapdoor and sets off back to the scene of the crash to help the other wounded soldier.
He doesn’t know that Huguenau has spied him from up in the house and now follows him silently through the streets of the town, garishly lit by flames from the Town Hall which the rioters have set on fire. Beaten survivors stagger past them. In a dark street Huguenau leaps forward and bayonets Esch in the back. The stricken man falls without a sound and dies face down in the mud.
Oh. Maybe I don’t admire Huguenau’s cheek and chutzpah. He was more sterotypically German than I had realised. He is a brute. He has turned into Mack the Knife.
A looter climbs the wall to break into Rose Cottage but is repelled by the ghostly sight of Hanna Wendler sleepwalking towards him. She is helped back into the house by the servants. Next day she dies of flu complicated by pneumonia (p.616).
Huguenau saw Esch place the Major in the potato cellar. Now Huguenau goes down into it and tends the Major. The latter can’t speak or move, but this doesn’t stop Huguenau delivering a lengthy diatribe about how badly he’s been treated, and tenderly caring for him by fetching milk from a distraught Frau Esch. The tender care of a psychopath.
The final Disintegration of Values chapter asserts that cultures are created out of a synthesis or balance of the Rational and the Irrational. When a balance is achieved, you have art and style (I think he thinks the Middle Ages was just such a period; the author of the Disintegration chapters appears to think the Middle Ages was the high point of integrated belief system and society, and the Renaissance inaugurated the rise of the Individual, individuals who tend to develop their own ‘private theologies’, and it’s been downhill ever since).
Then the two elements expand, over-reach themselves. The Triumph of the Irrational is marked by the dwindling of common shared culture, everyone becomes an atom. This three-page excursus leads up to presenting Huguenau as an epitome, an embodiment of the Disintegration of Values of Our Time.
As if to ram home the Author’s Message, the narrator then goes on to quote a letter Huguenau wrote some time later from his home town, in his ornate, correct and formal way bullying Frau Esch (whose husband he murdered, and who he raped) into buying the shares in the newspaper company which Huguenau had fraudulently acquired off Esch at the start of the novel. He is, in other words, a heartless swine.
And Broch rams home his Author’s Message by pointing out that none of his colleagues in the business community would have seen anything wrong with the letter or the scheming way Huguenau ran his business or married for convenience an heiress and promptly adopted her family’s Protestant beliefs.
Broch appears to think the worst thing about late 1920s Germany was slippery businessmen. Wrong, wasn’t he? Less than a year after this book was published, Hitler came to power.
And the book ends with a kind of 16-page philosophical sermon which, as far as I can tell, extensively uses Hegel’s idea of the Dialectic, the opposition of thesis and antithesis – in this case, the Rational and the Irrational – to mount a sustained attack on Protestantism, communism and business ethics as all fallings-away from the true teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, the One True Church, the home of all true values, from which man has fallen into a wilderness of alienation.
In other words, Broch appears to have been as Roman Catholic a novelist as Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, only – being German – his characters are much more brutish, angry and violent and – being German – his philosophical moments are couched in the extraordinarily bombastic and impenetrably pretentious verbosity of German Idealist philosophy.
In the last pages we don’t hear anything more about the various characters – Frau Esch, the Major, Ludwig Gödicke, Lieutenant Jaretzki, the doctors or nurses and so on. The novel ends on a sustained hymn to a kind of Hegelian Catholicism.
4. ‘Modernist’ techniques
All the commentaries on Broch associate him with the high Modernism of James Joyce, and emphasise that The Realist uses funky ‘modernist’ techniques such as having more than one narrative voice i.e. a few of the chapters feature a character speaking in the first person – and that in the classic modernist style it’s a collage including other ‘types’ of texts, including a newspaper article, a letter, all the Disintegrated Values chapters which are, in effect, excerpts from a work of philosophy, and excerpts from a long poem in rhyming couplets which pop up in the Marie in Berlin chapters, and at one point turns into a script with stage directions and only dialogue (pp.497-505).
This sort of thing happens a dozen times but, frankly, it’s chickenfeed compared to Ulysses, it’s barely noticeable as experimentation, since all these techniques were incorporated into novels generations ago – incorporating letters and journal entries was done by Daniel Defoe in the 1720s – a lot of the earliest novels were written entirely in the forms of letters – so we have read hundreds of novels which are at least if not more ‘hypertextual’ without any song and dance. Put another way, the reader barely notices these supposedly ‘modernist’ aspects of the text.
By far the more salient aspect of the book, as of its predecessors, is its inclusion of huge gobbets of religio-philosophical speculation.
5. Broch’s pseudo-philosophy
By this time I had formed the opinion that Broch is at his weakest when he launches into prolonged passages about human nature and the human soul and ‘the soul of the age’ and ‘the spirit of our times’ etc etc. In case you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a little taste of one of the Disintegration of Values chapters:
War is war, l’art pour l’art, in politics there’s no room for compunction, business is business – all these signify the same thing, all these appertain to the same aggressive and radical spirit, informed by that uncanny, I might almost say that metaphysical, lack of consideration for consequences, that ruthless logic directed on the object and on the object alone, which looks neither to the right nor to the left; and this, after all, is the style of thinking that characterises our age.
One cannot escape from this brutal and aggressive logic that exhibits in all the values and non-values of our age, not even by withdrawing into the solitude of a castle or of a Jewish dwelling; yet a man who shrinks from knowledge, that is to say, a romantic, a man who must have a bounded world, a closed system of values, and who seeks in the past the completeness he longs for, such a man has good reason for turning to the Middle Ages. For the Middle Ages possessed the ideal centre of values that he requires, possessed a supreme value of which all other values were subordinate: the belief in the Christian God. Cosmogony was as dependent on that central value (more, it could be scholastically deduced from it) as man himself; man with all his activities formed a part of the whole world-order which was merely the reflected image of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, the closed and finite symbol of an eternal and infinite harmony. The dictum ‘business is business’ was not permitted to the medieval artist, competitive struggle being forbidden to him; the medieval artist knew nothing of l’art pour l’art, but only that he must serve his faith; medieval warfare claimed absolute authority only when it was waged in the service of the faith. It was a world reposing on faith, a final not a causal world, a world founded on being, not on becoming; and its social structure, its art, the sentiments that bound it together, in short, its whole system of values, was subordinated to the all-embracing living value of faith; the faith was the point of plausibility in which every line of enquiry ended, the faith was what enforced logic and gave it that specific colouring, that style-creating impulse, which expresses itself not only in a certain style of thinking, but continues to shape a style characterising the whole epoch for so long as the faith survives.
But thought dared to take the step from monotheism into the abstract, and God, the personal God made visible in the finite infinity of the Trinity, became an entity whose name could no longer be spoken and whose image could no longer be fashioned, an entity that ascended into the infinite neutrality of the Absolute and there was lost to sight in the dread vastness of Being, no longer immanent but beyond the reach of man. (pp.146-147)
The infinite neutrality of the Absolute. The dread vastness of Being. They’re certainly what you want to read about in a novel.
There’s more, lots and lots more, hundreds of pages more just like this. I can see four objections to the acres of swamp prose like this.
- Aesthetically, it is out of place to swamp a novel with tracts of philosophy. If you want to write philosophy, put it in a philosophy essay or book. In a sense putting it in a novel is cheating because here a) it’s not going to be judged as pure philosophy by your professional peers b) if there are errors or inadequacies in it you can always explain them away saying that’s a requirement of its fictional setting.
- It destroys the rhythm of the stories of the actual characters, you know, the things novels are usually written about.
- Most damning, it’s not very original. To say that society was more integrated and authentic in the Middle Ages is one of the most trite and hackneyed pieces of social criticism imaginable. Victorian cultural critics from Disraeli to Carlyle were saying the same sort of thing by the 1840s, 90 years before Broch.
- So to summarise, these are hackneyed, clichéd ideas served up in long-winded prose which translates badly into English, and interrupt the flow of the narrative.
In the second book in the trilogy, The Anarchist, I initially thought the religio-philosophical musing belonged solely to the character Esch, but then the narrator began launching into them unprompted and separate from his characters, and I began to have the horrible realisation that Broch himself appears to believe the pompous, pretentious, Christian pseudo-philosophy he serves up, hundreds of pages of it:
Is it this radical religiosity, dumb and striped of ornament, this conception of an infinity conditioned by severity and severity and by severity alone, that determines the style of our new epoch? Is this ruthlessness of the divine principle a symptom of the infinite recession of the focus of plausibility? Is this immolation of all sensory content to be regarded as the root-cause of the prevailing disintegration of values? Yes. (p.526)
Therefore I (initially) liked The Realist because these kinds of passages were hived off to one side in chapters which were clearly marked Disintegration of Values, so they were easy to skim read or skip altogether (after a close reading of half a dozen of them revealed that they had little or nothing of interest to contribute to the book).
6. Humourless hysteria
It is hard to convey how cold, charmless and humourless these books are. The tone is monotonous, departing from a flat factual description only to switch from brutal to homicidal, via paranoia and hysteria.
For example, Huguenau gets his new war charity to organise a drink and dance celebration at the Stadthalle. Most of the characters are present, plus local worthies and their wives, there is drinking, there is flirting, there is dancing. Now almost any novelist you can imagine might have made this the opportunity for humour, but not Broch. For him it is a trigger for the religious hysteria and psychopathic righteousness of Major von Pasenow.
Sitting at his table watching the dancers mooch around the dance floor, the Major has a nightmare vision. Filled with ‘growing horror’ he becomes convinced that the sight of people dancing and having a good time in front of him is a vision of ‘corruption’, every face becomes a ‘featureless pit’ from which there is no rescue. From these grotesquely adolescent immature thoughts arises the wish to ‘destroy this demoniacal rabble’, ‘to exterminate them, to see them lying at his feet’ (p.515).
And all this is prompted by a town dance, a relaxed and happy social event. But in this Broch character it triggers a kind of mad, religiose hysteria.
At times the madness of many of these characters is terrifying, not because they’re scary, but because behind them rise the shadows of Warsaw and Lidice and Oradour-sur-Glane and all the other places and populations which Broch’s humourless, hysterical, hell-bent fellow Germans set about destroying and exterminating just a few years later.
(And it’s a reminder why The Romantic, the first book in the trilogy which focuses on Joachim von Pasenow’s increasingly hysterical religious mania, is such a hard read. And also why these books are emphatically not ‘the portrait of a generation’ or an entire society, but cameos of a handful of religious nutcases and psychopaths.)
7. Drawing strands together
The volume containing all three novels is a long book. The reader has to process much information, and information of different types – from descriptions of individual landscapes and scenes, to the cumulative impression made by characters major and minor, through to the two major obstacles of 1. extended descriptions of the weird, deranged psyches of major characters e.g. both von Pasenow and Esch, and 2. in the Realist, extended passages of philosophical speculation and/or cultural criticism (about the artistic bankruptcy of ‘our age’).
I’ve tended to emphasise the problems and the longeurs, but there are many many pleasurable moments to be had, moments of subtle psychological insight and descriptions of rooms, city streets and landscapes.
And one of the pleasures is that Broch has gone to some pains to sew threads into the text, to litter it with reminiscences and echoes. Having slogged through all three books, recognising these is like seeing stars in the sky.
For example, at a musical concert, the elderly Major von Pasenow mentions the music of Spohr and we remember that it was a piece by Spohr which his wife-to-be, Elisabeth, played when Pasenow visited her and her parents in the summer of 1888 in the first novel (p.93)
In another fleeting moment Pasenow uses a phrase about love requiring a lack of intimacy and familiarity, which we recall his cynical, worldly friend Eduard Bertrand using in the first novel.
A little more than fleeting is the major echo event when the (as usual) confused and perplexed von Pasenow has his interview with Huguenau during which he fails to know what to do about Huguenau being a deserter, collapses in self-loathing and despair and gets out his service revolver to shoot himself. First he tries to write a suicide note but, characteristically useless even at this, presses the pen so hard he breaks the nib, and when he next tries to dip it in the ink pot, spills the pot releasing a stream of black ink all over his desk (p.585).
The reader remembers that this – trying to write a letter, breaking the nib and knocking over the ink pot – is exactly what his father did in his fury when Joachim refused to come back from Berlin and take over the running of the family farm in the first novel (pp.104-5). The echo extends even to the words: old Herr von Pasenow in the first book is found spluttering ‘Out with him, out with him’ about his son, while 500 pages and thirty years later his son is found spluttering exactly the same words, about Huguenau, ‘Out with him (p.584).
These moments remind you that, beneath the philosophical verbiage and tucked between the characters’ often hysterical over-reactions and blunt aggressive dialogue, there is actually a novel, a work of fiction about characters.
If Broch submitted this to a modern editor I suspect they’d tell him to delete all the philosophy. But the philosophical sections and the regular philosophical meditations on the thoughts and ideas of his characters, are largely what characterise the book.
The problem is that almost all the ‘philosophy’ is bunk. It rotates around ideas of God and the Infinite and the Absolute which might resonate in a country with a strong tradition of Idealist philosophy (i.e. Germany) but which means nothing to an Anglo-Saxon reader. E.g:
‘Hegel says: it is infinite love that makes God identify Himself with what is alien to Him so as to annihilate it. So Hegel says… and then the Absolute religion will come.’ (p.624)
I reread the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre not so long ago. Sartre starts from a not dissimilar position from Broch, his characters plagued with an unusual, hallucinatory, highly alienated relationship with reality. The difference is that out of his intensely alienated relationship with ‘reality’ and language, Sartre created an entirely new worldview, expressed in a difficult-to-understand but genuinely new philosophy.
Broch, through his characters and his long-winded investigations of alienated mental states, starts from a similar place but his philosophy reaches back, back, back, to the German Idealist tradition and, above all, to a kind of troubled Catholic Christian faith which he and his confused characters circle round endlessly, like moths round a flame.
Sartre is forward-looking, Broch is backward-looking. As a result, Sartre is still read, quoted and studied; Broch is largely forgotten.
Credit
The English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir of The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch was first published in 1932. All references are to the Vintage International paperback edition of all three novels in one portmanteau volume, first published in 1996.
20th century German literature
The Weimar Republic
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