All posts tagged Hermann Broch

The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch (1945)

The silver lamp next to the couch swung gently to and fro on its long silver chain and outside the window the emanation of the city, ebbing and flowing above the roofs, was dissolved into purple, from purple-violet into dark blue and black, and then into the enigmatic and fluctuant.
(The Death of Virgil, page 47)

The Sleepwalkers

A few years ago I read and reviewed The Sleepwalkers (1931), the masterpiece of Modernist German novelist Hermann Broch (1886 to 1951). The title in fact refers to a trilogy of novels each of which focuses on a troubled individual from successive generations of German society, the novels being titled: The Romantic (1888), The Anarchist (1903) and The Realist (1918).

I reviewed each novel individually but also subjected the magniloquent claims often made about the trilogy to fierce criticism, using evidence from Walter Laqueur’s blistering attack on the failure of intellectuals in the Weimar Republic, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918 to 1933 by Walter Laqueur (1974). I argued that calling the trilogy things like ‘a panoramic overview of German society and history’ were wrong in fact and misleading in implication. The three novels are more eccentric and particular than such generalisations. But then lots of critics make sweeping claims about books they haven’t read.

Broch flees Austria

In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in a move known as the Anschluss. Within days Broch was arrested by Nazi authorities for possession of a Socialist pamphlet and thrown into a concentration camp. A campaign by western writers managed to get him freed and he immediately emigrated to Britain, then moved on to America where he settled in 1939.

Before this happened, in 1937, in Austria, Broch had delivered a radio lecture about Virgil. Over the following years he enormously expanded and elaborated this text to become his other great masterpiece, Der Tod des Vergil or The Death of Virgil. This big novel was first published in June 1945 in both the original German and English translation simultaneously. Symbolically, it appeared in the month after the Second World War in Europe finally came to an end, with the complete destruction of Nazi Germany. A crushing end to all illusions about Germany politics, history and culture.

Schematics

Broch’s imagination is schematic: the three novels which make up The Sleepwalkers trilogy each centre on a character who a) come from successive generations and are in some sense emblematic of them; and who b) are each of a distinct and categorisable type. The same urge to structure the material is immediately evident in The Death, which is divided into four equal parts, portentously titled:

Water – The Arrival
Fire – The Descent
Earth – The Expectation
Air – The Homecoming

Despite these universal-sounding categories the ‘action’ of novel in fact only ‘describes’ the last 18 hours of the Roman poet Virgil’s life in the port of southern Italian port of Brundisium. The year is 19 BC. Virgil had travelled to Greece, according to this novel hoping to a) escape the fevers of Rome b) finally complete the long poem which has been dogging him, and c) be free to pursue his first love, philosophy.

But he was foiled in this ambition when the princeps or proto-emperor, Augustus, returning from the East, stopped off in Athens, called on Virgil and invited/ordered him to accompany him back to Italy. Hence Virgil’s regret at the start of the novel at giving in to Augustus’s insistence and abandoning his hopes of finally being rid or ‘art and poetry’ and devoting his life to meditation and study.

Anyway, on this return journey Augustus, Virgil and others of the party fell ill. Augustus fully recovered, but the novel opens with Virgil lying in a hammock that’s been rigged up in one of the ships, feeling very unwell indeed. Starting from this moment the long novel portrays the last 18 hours of his life.

The central theme or subject of the novel is Virgil’s wish to burn the manuscript of his epic poem, The Aeneid, a wish which is decisively thwarted by his master and ‘friend’, Augustus.

Modernist?

Blurbs about the novel claims it uses well-established modernist techniques, mixing poetry and prose with different styles and registers to convey the consciousness of a sick man drifting in and out of reality and hallucination but I didn’t find this to really be the case.

When I think of modernism I think of the combination of fragmented interiority matched by collage used in The Waste Land, or the highly collaged text of Berlin Alexanderplatz or the tremendous stylistic variety of Ulysses. There’s none of that here: the text is fluent and continuous. There’s no collage effect, no newspaper headlines or scraps of popular song or advertising jingles. Instead the text is continuous and smooth and highly poetic in style.

Modernism is also usually associated with the accelerated rhythms of the western city, as in the examples above or in John dos Passos’s huge novel, USA (1930 to 1936). Quite obviously a novel set nearly 2,000 years, before anything like the modern city had been imagined, could not use, quote or riff off any aspects of the twentieth century urban experience. So in that respect, also, the novel is not modernist.

What is modernist about it, maybe, is a secondary characteristic, which may sound trivial but is the inordinate length of Broch’s sentences. These can be huge and very often contain multiple clauses designed to convey the simultaneous perception of external sense impressions with bursts of interior thought, memory, opinion and so on – all captured in one sentence.

The Jean Starr Untermeyer translation

The 1945 translation into English was done by Jean Starr Untermeyer. I have owned the 1983 Oxford University Press paperback edition of this translation (with an introduction by Bernard Levin) since the mid-1980s and never got round to reading it till now. This edition contains a longer-than-usual 4-page translator’s note by Jean Starr Untermeyer who, we learn, devoted five years of her life to translating this novel. We also realise, within a few sentences, that her English is non-standard i.e. a bit quirky and idiomatic. On the whole I think that is a good thing because it continually reminds you of the novel’s non-English nature.

Untermeyer makes a number of good points about the difficulty of translating German into English. An obvious one is German’s tendency to create new words by combining individual nouns into new compound nouns. A second aspect of German style is that it can often have a concrete practical meaning but also a ghostly metaphysical implication. This doesn’t happen in English which has traditionally been a much more pragmatic down-to-earth language.

Long sentences

The biggest issue, though, is sentence length. Good German prose style has for centuries allowed of long sentences which build up a succession of subordinate clauses before being rounded out or capped by a final main verb.

English is the extreme opposite. English prefers short sentences. Hemingway stands as the patron saint of the prose style taught in all creative courses for the past 40 years which recommends the dropping of subordinate clauses, the striking out of all unnecessary adjectives, the injunction to keep sentences short and unadorned, a process Untermeyer colourfully refers to as ‘exfoliation’.

As Untermeyer points out, Henry James’s use of long, multi-clause sentences was very much against the general trend of 20th century English prose (as was the extravagant prose style developed by William Faulkner a generation or so later, contrary to the Hemingway Imperative).

Untermeyer says that English prose works by placing its thoughts in sequence and separately expressed in short, clear sentences; German prose more often works by seeking to express multiple levels of meaning ‘at one stroke’ i.e. in each sentence.

But Broch not only came from this very different tradition of conceiving and writing prose, but he pushed that tradition to extremes. Untermeyer reckons some of the sentences in the middle of the book might be the longest sentences ever written in literature. (I’m not so sure. Samuel Beckett wrote some very long sentences in Malone Dies and The Unnameable.)

Thought-groups

Broch’s sentences are long, very long, but they don’t have the deliberately confusing repetitiveness, the incantatory repetitiveness of Beckett. They are clearly trying to capture something and Untermeyer explains in her note that the aim can be summed up by one maxim: ‘one thought – one moment – one sentence’.

Each sentence is trying to capture what she calls one ‘thought-group’, the flickering and often disparate impressions and sensations which occur to all of us, all the time, continually, in each changing second of perception and thought. The difference between you and me and Hermann Broch is that Broch spent a lifetime trying to develop a prose style which adequately captures the complexity of each fleeting moment of consciousness.

In English we do have a tradition of hazy impressionistic prose maybe best represented by the shimmering surfaces of Walter Pater’s aesthetic novel, Marius the Epicurean (also about ancient Rome). And a related tradition of deliberate over-writing in order to create an indulgently sensual effect, maybe associated with Oscar Wilde and sometimes dismissively called ‘purple prose’.

Broch’s intention is different from both of those because he is trying to be precise. His sentences are so very long only because he is trying to capture everything that his subject felt in that moment. The superficial comparison in English is with James Joyce’s Ulysses but Joyce wove an intricate web of symbolic and sound associations, at the same time as he steadily dismantled the English language, in order to make his text approximate the shimmering a-logical process of consciousness. Broch goes nowhere near that far. His sentences may be epic in length, but they are always made up of discrete clauses each of which is perfectly practical and logical and understandable in its own right.

And from Pater to Joyce, the English style of long sentences has tended to choose sensual and lugubrious subject matter, from the lilies and roses of Wilde’s prose to the astonishing sensuality of Ulysses. Broch, by contrast, uses his long sentences to cover a much wider range of subject matter, much of it modern, unpleasant and absolutely not soft and sensual.

In the warehouse district

One example will go a long way to demonstrating what I’m describing. Early in the novel the little fleet carrying the emperor and Virgil docks at Brundisium. Virgil is then carried off the ship and carried in a litter by slaves to the emperor’s mansion in the city, led by a young man with a torch who leads them among the warehouses of Brundisium. Here is one sentence from the passage describing this journey.

Again the odours changed; one could smell the whole produce of the country, one could smell the huge masses of comestibles that were stored here, stored for barter within the empire but destined, either here or there after much buying and selling, to be slagged through these human bodies and their serpentine intestines, one could smell the dry sweetness of the grain, stacks of which reared up in front of the darkened silos waiting to be shoveled within, one could smell the dusty dryness of the corn-sacks, the barley-sacks, the wheat-sacks, the spelt-sacks, one could smell the sourish mellowness of the oil-tuns, the oil-jugs, the oil-casks and also the biting acridity of the wine stores that stretched along the docks one could smell the carpenter shops, the mass of oak timber, the wood of which never dies, piled somewhere in the darkness, one could smell its bark no less than the pliant resistance of its marrow, one could smell the hewn blocks in which the axe still clove, as it was left behind by the workman at the end of his labour, and besides the smell of the new well-planed deck-boards, the shavings and sawdust one could smell the weariness of the battered, greenish-white slimy mouldering barnacled old ship lumber that waited in great heaps to be burned. (Pages 24 to 25)

What does this excerpt tell us? It demonstrates both a) Broch’s ability to handle a long sentence with multiple clauses and b) the complete absence of modernist tricks such as collage, quotation etc.

And there is none of the shimmering incoherence of, say, Virginia Woolf’s internal monologues. Instead it is quite clear and comprehensible and even logical. What stands out is the repetition, and the way it’s really more like a list than a wandering thought.

I’ve mentioned that Broch is a systematic thinker and many of these long sentences don’t really meander, they work through all the aspects of a thought or, in Untermeyer’s phrase, thought-group. We are in the warehouse district, a place saturated in the stinks of the goods stored there. And so Broch enumerates them, not in the English style, in a series of short, discrete sentences, but in one super-sentence which tries to capture the totality of the sense impression all together, as it were, capturing one moment of super-saturated perception.

Pigs and slaves

Far from the shimmering impressionism of the English tradition, The Death of Virgil is also capable of being quite hard, almost brutal. Thus the opening passages contain quite stunning descriptions of being on deck of an ancient Roman galley on a very calm sea as it is rowed at twilight into the harbour of Brundisium just as a thousand lamps are lit in the town and reflected like stars on the black water. So far, so aesthetic.

But Broch mingles this soft stuff with over a page harshly criticising the aristocratic guests on the ship whose only interest on the entire journey has been stuffing their faces like pigs. At these moments the narrative is more like Breughel than Baudelaire.

He also devotes a page to a nauseated imagining of the life of the galley slaves, chained below decks, condemned to eternal toil, barely human, a frank admission of the slave society the entire narrative is set among. The theme is repeated a bit later as Virgil watches the slaves carrying goods from the ship once it’s docked and being casually whipped by their bored overseers.

And there’s another theme as well. When the imperial ship docks, it is greeted by roars of approval from the crowd who have gathered to greet their emperor. Suddenly Broch switches to a more socio-political mode, meditating on the terrible evil to be found in the crowds which seek to suppress their individual isolation by excessive adulation of The One – an obvious critique of Nazism.

From far off came the raging, the raging noise of the crowd frantic to see, the raging uproar of the feast, the seething of sheer creatureliness, hellish, stolid, inevitable, tempting, lewd and irresistible, clamorous and yet satiated, blind and staring, the uproar of the trampling herd that in the shadowless phantom-light of brands and torches dove on towards the evil abyss of nothingness… (p.47)

German brutalism

These passages also epitomise what I think of as ‘the German quality’ in literature, which is a tendency to have overgassy metaphysical speculation cheek-by-jowl with a pig-like brutality, qualities I found in the other so-called masterpiece of German Modernism.

The claim about metaphysical bloat is merely repeating the claim of Walter Laqueur, who knew more about Weimar literature than I ever will and found it present in much of that literature. The comment about piggishness is based on my reading of:

Berlin Alexanderplatz, which starts as the protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, is released from prison where he’d been serving a sentence for murdering his girlfriend, Ida, and one of the first things he does is go round and rape his dead girlfriend’s sister, Minna. There’s the scene where the scumbag Reinhold drunkenly smashes his girlfriend, Trude’s, face to a pulp or when Franz beats his girlfriend Mieze black and blue etc.
The surprising crudity of much Kafka, the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle jumping on their female companions without warning, and the visceral brutality of stories like The Hunger Artist or In The Penal Colony.
The crudity of Herman Hesse’s novels, such as The Steppenwolf, in which the ‘hero’, Harry Haller, murders the woman who took pity on him and loved him, Hermine.
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil which I was enjoying very much for its urbane and humorous tone until – sigh – being German, it had to introduce a psychopath, Moosbrugger, who is on trial for murdering a prostitute and chopping her up into pieces, a process which the author describes in gratuitous detail.
In Broch’s own novels, Esch, the piggish ‘hero’ of The Anarchist rapes the innkeeper he subsequently shacks up with, and thinks well of himself because he doesn’t beat her up too much, too often.
Wilhelm Huguenau, the smooth-talking psychopathic ‘hero’ of The Realist, murders Esch and then rapes his wife.
Bertolt Brecht made a point of dispensing with bourgeois conventions in order to emphasise the brutal reality of the ‘class struggle: ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.’

Phenomenology

I’ll quote from my own review of The Romantic:

Aged 40 Broch gave up management of the textile factory he had inherited from his father and enrolled in the University of Vienna to study mathematics, philosophy and psychology. I wonder what kind of philosophy Broch studied because this focus on trying to describe the actual processes of consciousness – the flavour of different thoughts, and the ways different types of thought arise and pass and sink in our minds – reminds me that Phenomenology was a Germanic school of philosophy from the early part of the century, initially associated with Vienna. According to Wikipedia:

In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgements, perceptions, and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience.

‘Through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience.’ That’s not a bad summary of what Broch does in The Sleepwalker novels and does again here. The obvious difference is that whereas The Sleepwalker novels have plots and numerous characters who interact in a multitude of scenes, in The Death of Virgil Broch found a perfect subject – a deeply sensitive, highly articulate poet – to host/inspire/articulate an enormous number of these phenomenological speculations, long passages which not only describe Virgil’s sensations and thoughts, but analyse, ponder and reflect on the nature of thought itself.

Thus the first part of the passage through the warehouses, which I’ve quoted, amounts to a catalogue of sense impressions. But the smells of country produce awaken a yearning in him for the peace he knew back when he was growing up on his parents’ farm, but not some peace described in the English purple prose tradition – instead a highly theoretical and metaphysical notion of ‘peace’, as representing longing for a full integration of the self, a longing-yearning which haunts Virgil but which he is fated never to achieve.

Here’s an excerpt from that scene. To understand it you need to know that the roaring greeting of the mob in Brundisium town square had led Virgil to pretty negative thoughts about humanity in all its crudity. And so, in this sentence, the two themes –yearning, and the mob – are blended.

It was himself he found everywhere and if he had to retain everything and was enabled to return all, if he succeeded in laying hold on the world-multiplicity to which he was pledged, to which he was driven, given over to it in a daydream, belonging to it without effort, effortlessly possessing it, this was so because the mutiplicity had been his from the very beginning; indeed before all espial, before all hearkening, before all sensibility, it had been his own because recollection and retention are never other than the innate self, self-remembered, and the self-remembered time when he must have drunk the wine, fingered the wood, tasted the oil, even before oil, wine or wood existed, when he must have recognised the unknown, because the profusion of faces or non-faces, together with their ardour, their greed, their carnality, their covetous coldness, with their animal-physical being, but also with their immense nocturnal yearning, because taken all together, whether he had ever seen them or not, whether they had ever lived or not, were all embodied in him from his primordial origins as the chaotic primal humus of his very existence, as his own carnality, his own ardour, his own greed, his own facelessness, but also his own yearning: and even had this yearning changed in the course of his earthly wanderings, turned to knowledge, so much so that having become more and more painful it could scarcely now be called yearning, or even a yearning for yearning, and if all this transformation had been predestined by fate from the beginning in the form of expulsion or seclusion, the first bearing evil, the second bringing salvation, but both scarcely endurable for a human creature, the yearning still remained, inborn, imperishable, imperishably the primal humus of being, the groundwork of cognition and recognition which nourishes memory and to which memory returns, a refuge from fortune and misfortune, a refuge from the unbearable; almost physical this last yearning, which always and forever vibrated in every effort to attain the deeps of memory, however ripe with knowledge that memory might be. (pages 25 to 26)

Here we have some choice examples of the German tendency to make up new compound nouns to describe elusive philosophical or psychological categories: ‘world-multiplicity’, ‘self-remembered’, ‘animal-physical’.

And the use of repetition is pretty obvious – I’ve singled out the words ‘yearning’ and ‘memory’. It isn’t really repetition for the sake of either euphony (purely for the sound), or to drive home a point (as in, say, Cicero’s legal speeches). It is more that, with each repetition, the meaning of the word changes. Broch is examining the concepts behind these key words from different angles. Each repetition sheds new light, or maybe gives the word additional connotations. It is a cumulative effect.

An obvious question is: does this kind of thing actually shed light, does it help us to understand the human mind any better? Well, not in a strictly factual sense, but in the way that literature forces us to have different thoughts, sensations, expands the possibilities of cognition, vocabulary and expression, then, maybe, yes. And the epic length of Broch’s sentences are indicative of his attempt to really stretch the possibilities of perception, or perception-through-language, in his readers.

Then again, it isn’t an actual lecture, it’s not a scholarly paper appearing in a journal of psychology; it’s embedded in a work of literature so a better question is: how does it work within the text?

Any answer has to take account of the fact that this is only one of literally hundreds of other passages like it. No doubt critics and scholars have tabulated and analysed Broch’s use of key words and concepts and traced them back to works of psychology, philosophy or phenomenology he may have read. For the average reader the repetition of words and phrases and the notions they convey has more of a musical effect, like the appearance, disappearance, then reappearance of themes and motifs, building up a complex network of echoes and repetitions, many of which are not noticeable on a first reading. I ended up reading passages 2 or 3 times and getting new things from them at every reading.

Last but not least: do you like it? I found The Death of Virgil difficult to read not because of the clever meanings or subtle psychology but because a lifetime of reading prose from the Hemingway Century, compounded by a career working on public-facing websites, has indoctrinated my mind into preferring short, precise sentences. So I found it an effort to concentrate fully on every clause of these monster sentences – that, the sheer effort of concentrating of every element in these long sentences, holding all the clauses in your mind as they echo and modify each other – that’s what I found difficult.

But short answer: Yes, I did enjoy it. Very much. And it grows and adds new resonances with every rereading. It’s a slow read because I kept picking it up after putting it aside to make lunch, water the garden, feed the cats etc, found I’d forgotten where I was (because so many of the pages are solid blocks of text without any paragraph breaks) and so ended up rereading pages which I’d read once and not even realising it, but when I did, deliberately rereading it with a whole new pleasure, hearing aspects of the text, its meanings and implications and lush style, which I’d missed first time around.

Lyricism

Because The Death of Virgil is highly lyrical. Untermeyer says the entire text is in effect a poem because of its sustained lyricism. It certainly overflows with lyrical passages of deliberate sensuality.

Through the open arched windows well above the city’s roofs a cool breeze was blowing, a cool remembrance of land and sea, seafast, landfast, swept through the chamber, the candles, blown down obliquely, burned on the many-branched, flower-wreathed candelabrum in the centre of the room, the wall-fountain let a fragile, fan-shaped veil of water purl coolly over its marble steps, the bed under the mosquito netting was made up and on the table beside it food and drink had been set out. (p.41)

Maybe you could posit a spectrum of the content, with pure lyricism at one end, pure abstraction at the other, and a mix in the middle. So the excerpt above is what you could call entry-level lyricism in the sense that it is concerned solely with sense impressions, sense data, describing the ‘real’ world. Here’s a passage which contains hints of the metaphysical:

Yet in the night’s breath all was mingled, the brawling of the feast and the stillness of the mountains and the glittering of the sea as well, the once and the now and again the once, one merging into the other, merged into one another… (p.42)

And here is the full-on visionary-metaphysical:

Oh, human perception not yet become knowledge, no longer instinct, rising from the humus of existence, from the seed of sentience, rising out of the wisdom of the mothers, ascending into the deadly clarity of utter-light, of utter-life, ascending to the burning knowledge of the father, ascending to cool heights, oh human knowledge, unrooted, eternally in motion, neither in the depths nor on the heights but hovering forever over the starry threshold between night and day, a sigh and a breath in the interrealm of starry dusk, hovering between the life of the night-held herds, and the death of light-flooded identification with Apollo, between silence and the word, the word that always returns into silence. (p.48)

By now I hope you can see how Virgil’s mind is in almost permanently visionary mode. In his last hours he is entirely concerned with huge abstract ideas of human nature and destiny and personal intimations about being and consciousness and awareness, all mixed into a great, prolonged swirl. Every conversation, every new event, stirs a new aspect of this endless flow of thoughts, triggers a new long rhapsody. The novel as rhapsody, where rhapsody is defined as ‘an effusively enthusiastic or ecstatic expression of feeling’.

Plot summary

Part one, ‘Water – The Arrival’, is just 53 pages long. The third person narrator records Virgil’s thoughts about the sea journey, his swinish companions, his regret at being forced to leave Athens, notifies us that he is very ill, all as the fleet of 6 ships pulls into the harbour of Brundisium as night falls.

The emperor’s ship navigates among the many other ships in the harbour, ties up and slaves start to unload it, while Virgil is carried ashore in a litter borne by 4 slaves.

A huge crowd has turned out to greet Augustus in the central square, roaring approval. Virgil is carried through them, overcome with disgust at humanity, led by a youth who has appeared out of nowhere carrying a torch.

This youth leads the slaves bearing Virgil’s litter through the smelly warehouse quarter and then into a very dirty narrow back passage, reeking of poverty, as raddled women hang out their windows yelling abuse at the rich guy in the litter. This is a sort of vision of hell and goes on for some pages, Virgil repeatedly calling it Misery Street.

They finally emerge into a plaza, also thronged, and make their way through the surging crowd to the gates to the emperor’s palazzo. Here they are let through by the guard and handled by an efficient major-domo who escorts them to their room.

The mysterious torch-bearing boy is unaccountably still with Virgil and when the major-domo tells him to leave, Virgil, on an impulse, says the boy is his ‘scribe’ and can stay. When he asks how long the boy slave will stay with him, the boy gives the portentous reply ‘forever’, which triggers a characteristic response in Virgil:

Everlasting night, domain in which the mother rules, the child fast asleep in immutability, lulled by darkness, from dark to dark, oh sweet permanence of ‘forever’. (p.44)

The slaves depart. Virgil is alone in the bedroom he’s been allotted, perceiving the night sky, the plash of the fountain in the gardens outside, overcome with swirling thoughts about peace and youth and sense impressions and memory, as he lies on the bed and tries to sleep. End of part one.

Credit

The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch was published by Pantheon Books in 1945. References are to the 1983 Oxford University Press paperback edition.

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by Simon on September 26, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in German literature, Novel

Tagged ancient Rome, ancient world, Anschluss, Athens, Augustus, Austria, Baudelaire, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bernard Levin, Bertolt Brecht, Breughel, Brundisium, Cicero, collage, concentration camp, Der Tod des Vergil, epic poem, Ernest Hemingway, Esch, European literature, fiction, Franz Biberkopf, Franz Kafka, German literature, German Modernism, German prose, Harry Haller, Henry James, Herman Hesse, Hermann Broch, Hermine, Ida, In the Penal Colony, James Joyce, Jean Starr Untermeyer, John Dos Passos, lyricism, Malone Dies, Marius the Epicurean, Minna, Modernism, Moosbrugger, Nazi Germany, Nazism, novel, Oscar Wilde, phenomenology, prose, Robert Musil, Samuel Beckett, Second World War, Slavery, stream-of-consciousness, the Aeneid, The Anarchist, The Castle, The Death of Virgil, The Hunger Artist, The Man Without Qualities, The Realist, The Sleepwalkers, the Steppenwolf, The Trial, The Unnameable, The Waste Land, thought-group, Translation, Trude, Ulysses, USA, Virgil, Walter Laqueur, Walter Pater, Weimar Republic, Wilhelm Huguenau, William Faulkner

Posted by Simon on September 26, 2022

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The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Part One (1930)

We are in the hands of the thing. We travel in it day and night, and do everything else in it too: shaving, eating, making love, reading books, carrying out our professional duties, as though the four walls were standing still; and the uncanny thing about it is merely that the walls are travelling without our noticing it, throwing their rails out ahead like long, gropingly curving antennae, without our knowing where it is all going…
(The Man Without Qualities, Volume One, chapter 8)

Four problems

Musil’s masterpiece ought to be a difficult read for at least four reasons:

1. It is translated from 1930s German and a) all translation are imperfect and fail to capture the nuances (and pleasures) of the original (as every translator of Kafka unfailingly points out, much to the English reader’s frustration), and b) it must be in a style and phraseology which is nearly 100 years old.

2. It is unfinished: Musil died in 1942 and, to quote Wikipedia:

In 1930 and 1933, Musil published his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), in two volumes consisting of three parts, running to 1,074 pages. Volume 1 (Part I: A Sort of Introduction and Part II: The Like of It Now Happens) and the 605-page-long and unfinished Volume 2 (Part III: Into the Millennium (The Criminals)). Part III did not include 20 chapters withdrawn from Volume 2 of 1933 in printer’s galley proofs.

So the work as a whole is both unfinished, and the structure of what exists is a little difficult to grasp (volume one contains two parts, volume two contains part three) and there exist some 20 additional chapters in various stages of completion, which may or may not be included in the printed editions you come across.

3. The Man Without Qualities is long, very long – well over 1,000 pages in the Picador paperback edition.

4. And not only notoriously long, but also notoriously meandering, with little or no plot.

Tone of voice

All of which explains why it came as a very pleasant surprise to find that, when I actually got hold of a copy and started reading it with some trepidation, The Man Without Qualities turns out to be an extremely pleasurable read.

This is because of the tone of voice and authorial attitude.

The Man Without Qualities is told in the third person and the narrating voice is extremely warm and humorous. The author is wryly amused by the whole world, including his characters.

When a man has set his house in order, he should also take to himself a wife. Ulrich’s mistress in those days was called Leontine and was a singer in a small cabaret. She was a tall, plump girl, provocatively lifeless, and he called her Leona.

‘Provocatively lifeless’, that made me smile, and the narrative is full of perky, unexpectedly humorous, wry and ironic touches like that, throughout.

You quickly realise that it doesn’t matter that the book has little or no plot because it is so enjoyable listening to the narrator’s intelligent, urbane, meandering musings on existence and modern life.

These meanderings aren’t particularly revolutionary – there are rarely any of the flashy ‘modernist’ techniques I’ve recently come across in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers or in Alfred Döblin’s much more overtly tricksy Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Instead there is a warm and gentle tone of mockery and amusement, about everything – modern life, modern love, cities, economies, work, cultural values, history, human nature. You name it, Musil has something wry and amusing to say about it.

Sometimes the ‘ideas’ or insights are worth mulling over, but you get the sense the author doesn’t even care whether you find them original or amusing. He is sublimely indifferent to his characters, his opinions and our opinions of his opinions – and it is this quality of elegantly amused detachment which makes the book so moreish, so quaffable. There aren’t many laughs, but I found myself almost continuously smiling.

There are of course in all ages all kinds of countenance; but there is also one that is exalted by the taste of the time and acknowledged to be the image of happiness and beauty, while all other faces try to approximate to it, even ugly ones succeeding more or less by the aid of hairdressing and fashion; and the only ones that never succeed are those faces born to strange triumphs, those in which the regal and exiled ideal beauty of an earlier age is expressed without compromise. Such faces drift like corpses of earlier desires in the great insubstantiality of love’s whirlwind…

You are in the company of an immensely intelligent, observant and ironical man, a man who has stopped worrying about life or achievement, a man who has realised his own existence is just one more leaf floating in the breeze or in the turbid airs of the huge modern city, and is elegantly amused by the entire charade, up to and including the charade of writing the book itself.

It is characteristic that part one of this epic text is given the very off-hand title, ‘A Sort of Introduction’, and many of the chapter titles are equally languid and ironic. I particularly liked the chapter heading ‘Even a man without qualities has a father with qualities’.

Even when the protagonist is quite badly beaten up, after being mugged, in chapter seven, this only serves as a prompt for yet more urbane reflections about the paradoxes and ironies of human civilisation.

Mankind produces Bibles and guns, tuberculosis and tuberculin. It is democratic but has kings and nobility; it builds churches but universities which educate against the churches; it turns monasteries into barracks, but allots chaplains to the barracks. It provides hooligans with rubber tubing filled with lead to beat a fellow human being’s body black-and blue, but afterwards it has feather beds waiting to receive the solitary, man-handled body, beds such as that enveloping Ulrich at this moment as though it were filled with sheerest respect and consideration. This is the well-known matter of the contradictions, the inconsistency and imperfection of life. One smiles or sighs over it.

‘One smiles or sighs over it.’ Quite so. And the incident is only relevant in the overall narrative because Ulrich staggers to his feet, out into the road and cadges a lift home from a smart lady in a horse-drawn cab who is so impressed by the combination of Ulrich’s beaten-up state and his heady eloquence that she promptly becomes his mistress!

The man without qualities

The protagonist, Ulrich, a thirty-year-old bachelor, has abandoned all thoughts of being a success or making his mark in the ranks of his great nation. Instead, he has decided to take a year’s holiday from the world and from himself – to become an observer of the quirks of modern urban life, and of his own life, which he views with amused detachment.

We are introduced to him in chapter two:

The street in which this minor accident had occurred was one of those long winding rivers of traffic that radiate from their source in the centre of the city and flow through the surrounding districts out into the suburbs. Had the elegant couple followed its course for a while longer they would have seen something that would certainly have appealed to them. It was an eighteenth or even perhaps seventeenth-century garden, still in parts unspoilt; and passing along its wrought-iron railings one caught a glimpse through the trees of a well-kept lawn and beyond it, something like a miniature chateau, hunting-lodge, or pavilion d’amour from times past and gone. More precisely, its original structure was seventeenth-century, the garden and the upper storey had an eighteen-century look, and the facade had been restored and somewhat spoilt in the nineteenth century, so that the whole thing had a faintly bizarre character, like that of a super imposed photograph.

But the general effect was such that people invariably stopped and said: ‘Oh, look!’ And when this pretty little white building had its windows open, one could see into the gentlemanly calm of a scholar’s house where the walls were lined with books.

This house belonged to the Man Without Qualities. He was standing at one of the windows, looking through the delicate filter of the garden’s green air into the brownish street, and for the last ten minutes, watch in hand, he had been counting the cars, carriages, and trams, and the pedestrians’ faces, blurred by distance, all of which filled the network of his gaze with a whirl of hurrying forms. He was estimating the speed, the angle, the dynamic force of masses being propelled past, which drew the eye after them swift as lightning, holding it, letting it go, forcing the attention – for an infinitesimal instant of time – to resist them, to snap off, and then to jump to the next and rush after that.

Smooth and eloquent, isn’t it? Much more enjoyable than Hermann Broch’s tone of strained hysteria, or the thought processes of Alfred Döblin’s brutal, grunting pimps and thieves.

We learn that Ulrich set off in life to be a cavalry officer but, the very first time he was reprimanded (for chatting up the wife of a state official at a ball), he resigned in a huff.

He then trained for a while as an engineer but gave that up and migrated to an interest in pure mathematics. These are given as the reasons why Ulrich likes stopwatches and slide rules and thinks of the city as a set of intersecting vectors and sees everything through a scientific prism.

In other words, the text does feature some passages which give the impression of a ‘modernist’ interest in inserting maths and measurement and a pseudo-scientific view of the world – but not many. Such a relaxed and easy-going text barely needs its own pretexts and explanations. They’re sweet pretexts, but not very compelling

Kakania

The novel is set in 1913, in Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I like the way Ulrich has a nickname for his homeland, Kakania. Even to its inhabitants the Austro-Hungarian Empire felt like a peculiar and ramshackle institution.

The nickname isn’t as random (or as potty-mouthed) as it seems. Because of the uneasy alliance between Austria and Hungary which formed the basis of the ‘Empire’, its ruler, Franz Joseph, was the Emperor of the Austrians but the King of the Hungarians, the two words in German being kaiser and könig, respectively. This led to the anomaly that many official bodies and servants had to be both imperial and royal, at the same time, or in the appropriate situation.

All in all, how many remarkable things might be said about that vanished Kakania! For instance, it was kaiserlich-königlich (Imperial-Royal) and it was kaiserlich und königlich (Imperial and Royal); one of the two abbreviations, k.k. or k. k., applied to every thing and person, but esoteric lore was nevertheless required in order to be sure of distinguishing which institutions and persons were to be referred to as k.k. and which as k. k.

So the nickname Kakania arises naturally from saying these two ks.

It is just one example of the narrator’s finely honed sense of the absurdity of everything. If the state you live in, the capital city, the language and all its institutions are a little laughable, then surely life is laughable, too.

There, in Kakania, that misunderstood State that has since vanished, which was in so many things a model, though all unacknowledged, there was speed too, of course; but not too much speed. Whenever one thought of that country from some place abroad, the memory that hovered before the eyes was of wide, white, prosperous roads dating from the age of foot travellers and mail-coaches, roads leading in all directions like rivers of established order, streaking the countryside like ribbons of bright military twill, the paper-white arm of government holding the provinces in firm embrace.

And what provinces! There were glaciers and the sea, the Carso and the cornfields of Bohemia, nights by the Adriatic restless with the chirping of cicadas, and Slovakian villages where the smoke rose from the chimneys as from upturned nostrils, the village curled up between two little hills as though the earth had parted its lips to warm its child between them.

Of course cars also drove along those roads – but not too many cars! The conquest of the air had begun here too; but not too intensively. Now and then a ship was sent off to South America or the Far East; but not too often. There was no ambition to have world markets and world power. Here one was in the centre of Europe, at the focal point of the world’s old axes; the words ‘colony’ and ‘overseas’ had the ring of something as yet utterly untried and remote. There was some display of luxury; but it was not, of course, as oversophisticated as that of the French. One went in for sport; but not in madly Anglo-Saxon fashion. One spent tremendous sums on the army; but only just enough to assure one of remaining the second weakest among the great powers.

The problem for me wasn’t that the book is long (very long), it’s that I kept finding myself rereading these long lazy paragraphs for the pure pleasure of the rolling rhythm of the language and the diverting ideas.

Es ist passiert, ‘it just sort of happened’, people said there [in Kakania] when other people in other places thought heaven knows what had occurred. It was a peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no equivalent in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought itself.

‘Light as eiderdown, light as thought itself’ – yes, that seems to be the blowing-on-the-wind quality Musil is aiming for.

It all came as a welcome relief from the super-earnestness of Hermann Broch, whose gloomy trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, is designed to pummel into the reader how everything is going to the dogs. On the contrary, Musil’s character humorously concludes that the very notion of ‘everything going to the dogs’ is a trite and easy escape for simpletons who can’t cope with the complexity of the modern world.

In this case, he’s referring to his friend Walter, who everyone expected such high things of, but who is slowly turning into a failure, and was looking for someone or something to blame when he had a brainwave. Of course! Blame the spirit of the times!

But the tangle of clever, stupid, vulgar, and beautiful is precisely in such times so dense and involved that to many people it evidently seems easier to believe in a mystery, for which reason they proclaim the irresistible decline of something or other that defies exact definition and is of a solemn haziness.

It is fundamentally all the same whether this is thought of as the race, or vegetarianism, or the soul, for all that matters, as in the case of every healthy pessimism, is that one should have something inevitable to hold on to… Had it up to then been he who was unfit for work and felt out of sorts? Now it was the time that was out of sorts, and he the healthy one! His life, which had come to nothing, was all at once given a tremendous explanation, a justification, in terms of centuries, that was worthy of him.

Precisely. The decline and fall motif flatters the self-importance of those who expound it. it is not I who have failed – it is these lamentable times. What can a man do?

It’s no coincidence that it’s frustrated Walter who bursts out in the criticism of his old friend Ulrich, which sheds light on the title.

Walter was frustrated. He searched, he wavered. Suddenly he burst out: ‘He is a man without qualities!’
‘What’s that?’ Clarisse asked, with a little laugh.
‘Nothing. That’s just the point – it’s nothing!’
But the expression had aroused Clarisse’s curiosity.
‘There are millions of them nowadays,’ Walter declared. ‘It’s the human type that our time has produced.’ He was pleased with the expression that had so unexpectedly come to him. As though he were beginning a poem, the words drove him forward before he had got the meaning…

Who is Clarisse? Walter’s wife. She married him because everyone said he was a genius and she had a fierce ambition to marry a genius. Now that Walter is turning out not to be a genius, Clarisse is undergoing a crisis, one which the couple’s friend Ulrich is amused to observe, on his occasional visits to their house and on his leisurely strolls with her.

None of this is very earth-shattering, but the characters’ thoughts and feelings and perceptions and opinions of each other are conveyed – in my opinion – with a much lighter and, therefore, much more persuasive touch that Hermann Broch’s attempts to do a similar sort of thing.

Moosbrugger

Alas and alack, however, Musil is a Germanic writer and so he has to include a psychopath in his novel.

I was deeply disappointed when, after a 100 pages of amused insights into ‘modern’ life amid a handful of well-heeled and sophisticated characters, alas and alack, Musil introduces a woman-murderer, the monstrous psychopath Moosbrugger.

The connection is that Ulrich attends the trial of the monster, whose crime (hacking a small, vulnerable prostitute almost to pieces) is sensationally reported in all the newspapers.

Ulrich finds Moosbrugger a fascinating study. And indeed Musil does a very good job of getting inside the mind of a thuggish, uneducated brute, a semi-animal at the mercy of inarticulate desires, not so much for sex, but motivated by an inchoate hatred of the pretty women who always seem to be walking past him in the street, tittering at him behind their hands, mocking him, threatening his sense of stability and self-possession.

And so, we learn that this brute periodically Moosbrugger lashes out (he has, we learn, killed before) not even consciously murdering women, but just trying to get rid of that sense of being followed, mocked and haunted, trying to get rid of the other self which dogs his mind.

Yes, it’s an impressive description of the inside of a low, brutish psychopath but, God, I was disappointed to be turfed back into the same psychological slum described by Hermann Broch in the character of his murderer and rapist Huguenau, or the brutal would-be rapist and murderer Reinhold in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. How these Krauts love their rapists and murderers. Mack the Knife.

The ‘Parallel Campaign’

In the last chapter of this first introductory part, Ulrich receives a letter from his long-suffering father asking him when he is going to pull himself together and get a job.

His father tells him about a plan which has been hatched by senior members of the administration to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the accession of the Emperor Franz Joseph (who became Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Croatia, King of Bohemia, and monarch of many other states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1848 – thus 1818 will mark the 70th year of his reign).

It is nicknamed the Parallel Campaign, because it is in fact copying a German idea (how inevitable, Ulrich ironically reflects) which is to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 (the Kaiser ascended the German throne in 1888).

Ulrich’s father has secured him an interview with the state official planning this celebration and also an introduction to the wife of an influential courtier, who is to play a leading role in organising the social aspects of the celebration.

So the first hundred or so pages of part one turn out to have introduced us to: the central protagonist, Ulrich; some of his small circle of friends, Walter and Clarisse; the ominous figure of Moosbrugger who already, we can guess, acts as a kind of symbol of the dark underbelly of the Empire; to this idea of the Parallel Campaign, which will turn into the central narrative thread of the main central part of the novel – and to the long, leisurely, languid and deeply enjoyable style in which the whole thing is going to be told.

And with Ulrich’s father’s injunction ringing in his ears, part one ends. This is Musil’s own summary of part one.

Part 1 A sort of introduction, chapter listing

1. Which, remarkably enough, does not get any one anywhere.
2. House and home of the Man Without Qualities
3. Even a man without qualities has a father with qualities
4. If there is such a thing as a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.
5. Ulrich
6. Leona, or a change of viewpoint
7. In a weak moment Ulrich acquires a new mistress
8. Kakania
9. First of three attempts to become a man of importance
10. The second attempt
11. The most important attempt of all
12. The lady whose love Ulrich won after some talk about sport and mysticism
13. A race-horse of genius contributes to the awareness of being a Man Without Qualities
14. Friends of his youth
15. Intellectual revolution
16. A mysterious disease of the times
17. The effect of a Man Without Qualities on a man with qualities
18. Moosbrugger
19. An admonitory letter and an opportunity to acquire qualities

Austro-Hungarian literature and history

History

The Good Soldier Švejk

Franz Kafka

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by Simon on May 1, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Books, German literature, Literature

Posted by Simon on May 1, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/05/01/man-without-qualities-robert-musil-part-one/

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (1927)

A wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness. (Steppenwolf, page 22)

Brief summary

Part one Steppenwolf was Hesse’s tenth novel. It starts in a fairly low-key, realistic style and for the first hundred or so pages is an extended exercise in self-pity, as the self-described ‘Steppenwolf’ dwells at length on his unhappiness, his broken marriage, his abandonment, loneliness and social isolation.

Part two However, about half way through the book he meets a woman, Hermine, a fun-loving dancer and courtesan at a popular local bar, and she completely turns his life around. Hermine introduces him to dancing and jazz music, providing him with a wonderfully sensuous lover (Maria) who reveals the hitherto unsuspected glories of sexual pleasure, and introducing him to a super-relaxed jazz player (Pablo), who smiles wisely, says little, and offers a variety of recreational drugs, including cocaine.

Part three And then, in the final forty pages or so, the book turns into a really delirious sequence of fantasy scenes, played out in THE MAGIC THEATRE (“For Madmen Only; Admittance Charge – Your Mind”), where each doorway opens into a new, extravagant, hallucinatory scenario.

The Magic Theatre almost certainly doesn’t exist because the sequence introducing it begins with Pablo, Hermine and the narrator sitting round in a room, after a long night dancing the night away at the town’s annual ball, drinking some of Pablo’s drug-spiked liquor and smoking drug-spiked cigarettes.

After an extraordinary series of fantasies (which include taking part in ‘the war against the machines’; reliving all the love affairs of his entire life but which, this time, are all positive, life-enhancing experiences; and meeting Mozart, who delivers a lecture about eternity and time) the novel ends without the narrative returning us to the ‘normal’ world.

One of the fantasy scenes involved our hero meeting a man sitting on the floor behind an immense chess board with many more squares than usual. This player prompts the Steppenwolf to take out of his pockets not just the two sides of his personality, but the hundreds and hundreds of aspects which Goethe and Mozart and Hermine and all the other wisdom figures in the novel have told him about. The player then arranges these avatars onto his board and plays a complex game with them. Moral: Life is just a game, it’s up to you how you play it.

And that is how the novel ends – not with the character returning sober and hungover to the ordinary, mundane reality it started in; it ends with the Steppenwolf taking up all these multiple aspects of his life, and determined ‘to begin the game afresh’, to live life in the light of everything he’s learned.

And it is this final, mad whirligig of fantasy stories – deeply mixed up with themes and ideas from the rest of the novel about suicide, death pacts, love, sex, the meaning of life, the multiple aspects of the human mind and so on – which, I think, leave a powerful, indeed bewildering impression on the reader’s mind, and whose garish extremity completely eclipses the mundane, realistic opening half of the novel.

You put it down feeling genuinely inspired, thinking, Wow, all these other lives are possible – sex and love and drugs and jazz and dancing and multiple ways of seeing not only the world, but your own life and experience – it’s all there waiting for you ‘to begin the game afresh’.

On the word ‘Steppenwolf’

The use of the single word ‘Steppenwolf’ in the English title makes it sound like a name (with distant echoes, for those of us of a certain age, of the English rock band which called itself Steppenwolf, and whose big hit was, appropriately enough, ‘Born To be Wild’).

But the title in German is The Steppenwolf, which makes it clear that the title doesn’t refer to one person’s proper name, but to a type of animal. In fact, Der Steppenwolf is German for ‘the Steppe Wolf’, also known as the Caspian Wolf, a distinct species of wolf which inhabits the steppes of southern Russia and the Caucasus.

Moreover, although the central character refers to himself as ‘the Steppenwolf’, the treatise about Steppenwolves embedded in the first part of the novel states quite clearly that there are thousands of Steppenwolves i.e. men who consider themselves part-sociable man, part-lonely, haunted wolf.

Part one – Steppenwolf’s self-pity

1. The nephew’s account

The thirty-page introduction is written in a muted, sober, naturalistic style by an unnamed youngish man. The nephew’s aunt rents out furnished rooms and one day, a few years earlier, a scruffy, nervous, 50-year-old man with short cropped hair (p.7) presents himself as a lodger. Against her nephew’s advice, the aunt lets out a bedroom and a living room to this stranger.

Over the first thirty or so pages, this nephew shares with us his impressions of the new lodger, whose name is Harry Haller. Haller refers to himself in conversation so often as ‘the Steppenwolf, that the narrator ends up using that name as well.

The nephew describes various encounters with the Steppenwolf, within his aunt’s house and sometimes in the local town, as he slowly forms an opinion about him. This is that Haller is a rebel. He doesn’t have a job but appears to have independent income. He drinks heavily and keeps anti-social hours (goes to bed late, gets up late). His bedroom is full of bottles of booze, but also of books by fashionably earnest and intense writers such as Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, as well as photos from magazines and watercolour paintings which he himself paints.

The nephew comes to think of the Steppenwolf as a man torn between two extremes – sometimes a savage, angry, ironic loner; but at other times a perfectly sociable and civilised man, who the nephew bumps into attending a classical concert. He is defined by this tearing dichotomy in his soul.

One day the Steppenwolf packs his bags and goes. The nephew and aunt never hear from him again. But he leaves behind a manuscript diary, a sort of journal, and it is this manuscript which makes up the rest of the book, about 220 pages in my Penguin edition.

2. Harry Haller’s manuscript

The bulk of the book consists of this manuscript written by its protagonist, a middle-aged man named Harry Haller, which he leaves to the nephew when he leaves the house, and which the nephew finds himself arranging for publication and writing a short introduction to.

Broadly speaking, as described above, this manuscript is in two parts:

Part one – Haller wanders the town feeling inconsolably sorry for himself
Part two – Haller meets life-affirming Hermine who takes him on a whirlwind journey of self-discovery

In the first half, what comes over at great length is that the Steppenwolf is a loner, an outsider, a man who thinks his mind was made for great heights, for great achievements, who looks down on ‘ordinary’ people and the complacent comforts of the bourgeois middle classes, a man whose penetrating gaze has pierced to the heart of the human condition, no less:

The Steppenwolf’s look pierced our whole epoch, its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man’s life. It said: “See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!” and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey’s trick!

This is from the nephew’s account and shows the nephew falling under the Steppenwolf’s sway, and tending to see the world through the eyes of this super-clever but super-sad loner.

Yet the Steppenwolf is a conflicted man, a man of two halves, for the outcast loner also desperately yearns for all the little bourgeois comforts. He loves the tidy potted plants on the landings of the trim little boarding house, and the clean hallways, and venerates Mozart.

The Steppenwolf’s curse is that whichever mood he’s in – over-educated angst-ridden loner or polite, music-loving bourgeois – the other half of his personality consistently sabotages it. He can never be at rest.

This basic duality, and the Steppenwolf’s inability to settle his curse of being permanently at war with himself, recurs again and again, both in the nephew’s introduction and in the main text:

I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.

You can see why this kind of book would be a Bible to troubled teenagers and students. It perfectly captures that sense of being special, exceptional, blessed with superior wisdom and insight, of living a:

lonely, loveless, hunted, and thoroughly disorderly existence

And despising your comfortably bourgeois parents, poor drones who’ve never read Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche. Whereas you, the special soul who responds to Hesse’s book, have read the entire ‘How to be a tortured existentialist’ reading list, and so are blessed to wake up every morning feeling like a wild wanderer over the wide world, scorned of men and rejected by society.

And yet, and yet… deep down… at the same time… you don’t really want to leave home, where your mum can be relied on to do your washing and ironing and cooking and cleaning, and where there’s a nice hot meal every evening at teatime.

As Harry himself puts it:

‘But though I am a shabby old Steppenwolf, still I’m the son of a mother, and my mother too was a middle-class man’s wife and raised plants and took care to have her house and home as clean and neat and tidy as ever she could make it. All that is brought back to me by this breath of turpentine and by the araucaria, and so I sit down here every now and again; and I look into this quiet little garden of order and rejoice that such things still are.’ (p.20)

The two eras theory and ‘the sickness of our times’

The text is packed with sweeping generalisations about human nature and society, which read well but are of questionable practical use. Typical is a passage where Haller tells the nephew his theory about overlapping ages.

It interested me not because I think it’s true, but because something very like this idea of people tragically caught between two changing eras and marooned between two changing value systems underlies Hermann Broch’s immense trilogy of novels, The Sleepwalkers.

‘A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, every one does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.’

I think this is questionable as a theory of history or historical change or historical eras. But where it is a little useful is as indirect evidence of just how widespread the feeling was in Weimar Germany that society’s values had collapsed:

a whole generation is caught…between two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security…

This isn’t the only time the text confidently expands Haller’s feelings of confusion and unhappiness and projects them onto the whole world:

I see [Haller’s manuscript] as a document of the times, for Haller’s sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.

These records, however much or however little of real life may lie at the back of them, are not an attempt to disguise or to palliate this widespread sickness of our times. They are an attempt to present the sickness itself in its actual manifestation. They mean, literally, a journey through hell, a sometimes fearful, sometimes courageous journey through the chaos of a world whose souls dwell in darkness, a journey undertaken with the determination to go through hell from one end to the other, to give battle to chaos, and to suffer torture to the full. (p.27)

Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men!

This kind of rhetoric sounds good, sounds wonderful if you’re of this kind of mindset, but means almost nothing.

Which generation has not been afflicted by a sense of collapse and confusion? We know this way of thinking was widespread among ancient Greek and Roman writers (‘O tempora, o mores’, meaning ‘Oh what times! Oh what customs!’ lamented the Roman orator Cicero in 70 BC). Anyone familiar with Anglo-Saxon or Norse literature knows that its characteristic genre is the elegy, a sense of irremediable loss of once glorious standards and values. The Middle Ages repeated these laments for a golden age, and any generation afflicted with plague (throughout the Middle Ages, Renaissance and into the early modern period) thought itself especially damned, especially punished for its sinfulness and moral laxity.

If you pick up any of the Victorian novelists or thinkers you will find them packed with laments for the collapse of civilised values (Thomas Carlyle was a leading offender, his 1829 essay Signs of The Times lamented ‘an artificial Morality, an artificial Wisdom, an artificial Society’), and most of the other Victorians lamented living in the sick world of frenetic activity which they find themselves plunged into.

In other words, this mood of lament for ‘the sickness of our times’ is one of the most consistent tropes in all Western literature, right up to and including the present day, with social media awash with laments that Donald Trump is the worst leader anywhere, ever, and the world is experiencing unprecedented horrors.

1. Actual corruption On one level the accusation is, of course, true. The grown-up, adult world is, once you’ve seen something of it, chaotic, confused and corrupt. It’s just that it’s always has been so, and young bookish men, raised on the beautifully clear and lucid works of the philosophers and poets, always end up disgusted to discover just how far short of those wonderful, inspiring works the actual world of marketing and business deals falls. The times are sick and corrupt. Thing is, they always have been.

2. Freudian interpretation Freud makes it simpler. He says everyone who thinks and writes like that is grieving for the lost certitudes of childhood, the warmth and simplicity of the nursery, when mummy and daddy protected you, and maintained a world of infant certainties, all gone, while you mope and moan about the sickness of the times.

3. A psychological interpretation And there is a third way of looking at this time-honoured trope, which is that it really boils down to saying that your times are special and that, as a result, you, the writer, and you, the reader who is aware enough to realise just how sick the times are, well, you also are special – blessed with a superior mind and perceptions but cursed, oh alackaday, to live through such a sick and chaotic era.

The hidden ‘appeal to specialness’ explains why these kinds of passages start off being about this generation or society as a whole, but have a tendency then to focus in on specially sensitive and wise individuals who are set against ‘the sickness of the times’, wise and sensitive souls who are doomed to suffer, precisely because they are so spiritual and superior and wise and noble.

You can see this tendency in the first passage I quoted which starts out lamenting whole epochs in history, and the collapse of values in our time, before moving on to worship an exception – a hero who stands out against it – in this case, Nietzsche, portrayed as an especially sensitive and prophetic soul.

And praise of Nietzsche leads, by an easy transition, into the idea that everyone who reads Nietzsche – reads and really understands Nietzsche – people like you and me dear reader, the elect, the elite, the special ones, that we are especially sensitive, what spiritual souls we are, that we, too are also condemned to suffer, suffer awfully, because of our special and superior sensitivity.

I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him. (p.39)

We – you and me and Nietzsche and the Steppenwolf – are not like ‘normal’ people, ‘ordinary’ people, ‘little’ people, those uninformed, ignorant, narrow-minded philistines who are happy with our fallen age, content in these sick times, quite at home in our degraded society and its paltry pleasures, those little people who, sadly, do not share our superior insights and sensitivity, and whose silly superficial pleasures we cannot lower ourselves to understand. The Steppenwolf is not slow to skewer the little people:

Among the common run of men there are many of little personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate…

I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot understand nor share these joys…

At every other step were placards and posters with their various attractions, Ladies’ Orchestra, Variété, Cinema, Ball. But none of these was for me. They were for ‘everybody’, for those normal persons whom I saw crowding every entrance…

It has always been so and always will be. Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death…

There is much more in this vein, written in a very persuasive melodramatic style. All in all, the first half of the novel is a kind of handbook for troubled teenagers.

But to the older reader, there is also something broadly comic about this self-dramatising, self-pitying, late-Romantic pose. And it is indeed very, very Romantic – Hesse’s phraseology is often drenched in unashamed romanticism which wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1830s or the fin-de-siecle 1890s:

How I used to love the dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter, how eagerly I imbibed their moods of loneliness and melancholy when wrapped in my cloak I strode for half the night through rain and storm, through the leafless winter landscape, lonely enough then too, but full of deep joy, and full of poetry which later I wrote down by candlelight sitting on the edge of my bed! All that was past now. The cup was emptied and would never be filled again. (p.37)

It is as helpless and self-pitying as Shelley.

Treatise on the Steppenwolf (p.51-80)

Only twenty or so pages into what purports to be Harry Haller’s manuscript, he describes following a mysterious street-seller in the midnight streets of the unnamed town where all this takes place, a man who turns and hurriedly stuffs into Harry’s hands a little book, then is gone.

When Haller looks, he sees it is A Treatise on the Steppenwolf – Not For Everyone. (Note the ‘Not For Everyone’ – here as throughout the first half of the book, the implication is that only the special ones, the sensitive ones, the élite, those who know care allowed to share these sensitivie feelings and insights.)

This turns out to be another description of Harry Haller, but presented as if written by some kind of omniscient authority, almost a naturalist. it is, in effect, the third text about him (after the nephew’s description and Harry’s own memoir) and one of the interests of the book is this multi-textuality or multi-dimensionality i.e. the differing perspectives given by a) the nephew’s account b) Haller’s manuscript c) the Treatise, and then d) the mad fantasia at the end.

The Treatise repeats the ideas of the previous sections, that the Steppenwolf is half-beast, half-man, but of a specially superior lofty type. He is explicitly compared with the greatest artists of the ages. He looks down on ordinary, ‘normal’ people.

The Steppenwolf stood entirely outside the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor social ambitions. He felt himself to be single and alone, whether as a queer fellow and a hermit in poor health, or as a person removed from the common run of men by the prerogative of talents that had something of genius in them. Deliberately, he looked down upon the ordinary man and was proud that he was not one. (p.62)

Again and again his individuality and his independence are emphasised, and we know from all his writings that these are the core values which Hesse valued:

With this was bound up his need for loneliness and independence. There was never a man with a deeper and more passionate craving for independence than he…

He was ever more independent. He took orders from no man and ordered his ways to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and to leave undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine impulse bids him seek…

Overuse of the word ‘hell’

All the characters are too free and easy in describing their self-centred depression as ‘hell’. Having nursed a parent with dementia, and then cared for children with mental health issues, I now know that even when I’m feeling depressed or guilty myself, it is very very very far from ‘hell’, and nothing compared to what they were going through.

Thus I couldn’t help despising the nephew and then the Steppenwolf for throwing around this serious word so glibly, for cheapening it:

These records… mean, literally, a journey through hell, a sometimes fearful, sometimes courageous journey through the chaos of a world whose souls dwell in darkness, a journey undertaken with the determination to go through hell from one end to the other [no they don’t]
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap…
Haller belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell.
He who has known these days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like today
Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live. The lives of these infinitely numerous persons [the Steppenwolves] make no claim to the tragic; but they live under an evil star in a quite considerable affliction; and in this hell their talents ripen and bear fruit
And supposing the Steppenwolf were to succeed, and he has gifts and resources in plenty, in decocting this magic draught in the sultry mazes of his hell, his rescue would be assured.
And every occasion when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, was preceded by this hateful vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction and loneliness and unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of lovelessness and despair, such as I had now to pass through once more.
How had this paralysis crept over me so slowly and furtively, this hatred against myself and everybody, this deep-seated anger and obstruction of all feelings, this filthy hell of emptiness and despair.
And since it appeared that I could not bear my loneliness any longer either, since my own company had become so unspeakably hateful and nauseous, since I struggled for breath in a vacuum and suffocated in hell, what way out was left me? There was none.
Then the world would be a desert once more, one day as dreary and worthless as the last, and the deathly stillness and wretchedness would surround me once more on all sides with no way out from this hell of silence except the razor.

Silly man.

The rebel

In this constant sense of being an outsider, Steppenwolf has a lot in common with the writings of Albert Camus, who wrote his classic novel, The Outsider fifteen years later (and mention of Camus makes you realise he is situated smack in the middle of the tradition of literary ‘outsiders’ which flourished, more on the Continent than in England, which would include Kierkegaard and Nitzsche, just for starters.)

According to the Treatise, the numerous ‘outsiders’ of which the Steppenwolf is merely one, play a vital role in maintaining the boring bourgeois world of law and order, as explained in this typically convoluted paragraph:

The vital force of the bourgeoisie resides by no means in the qualities of its normal members, but in those of its extremely numerous “outsiders” who by virtue of the extensiveness and elasticity of its ideals it can embrace. There is always a large number of strong and wild natures who share the life of the fold. Our Steppenwolf, Harry, is a characteristic example. He who is developed far beyond the level possible to the bourgeois, he who knows the bliss of meditation no less than the gloomy joys of hatred and self-hatred, he who despises law, virtue and common sense, is nevertheless captive to the bourgeoisie and cannot escape it. And so all through the mass of the real bourgeoisie are interposed numerous layers of humanity, many thousands of lives and minds, every one of whom, it is true, would have outgrown it and have obeyed the call to unconditioned life, were they not fastened to it by sentiments of their childhood and infected for the most part with its less intense life; and so they are kept lingering, obedient and bound by obligation and service. (p.65)

It’s eloquent, isn’t it? Eloquent and articulate and very readable and plausible and yet, in my opinion, not particularly useful.

I thought of Camus because as well as this hymn to The Outsider, the Treatise also contains an extended section about Suicide and suicides and the suicide mentality (pp.58-59).

According to the Treatise, ‘suicides’ are not defined by the act itself, but by a sensibility for whom suicide is always a realistic option. They have to fight against it as the kleptomanic fights against his urge to steal everything. the thought of suicide is a constant companion and way out which pops up every time the ‘suicide-minded are blocked, frustrated, embarrassed or humiliated.

Compare and contrast Camus’ lengthy essay about suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It’s not the specific of the ideas, it’s the fact that both writers thought it worthwhile devoting extensive though to the subject which is revealing.

The final section of the Treatise berates Harry for being so simple-minded as to think man is made up of just two souls, in his case wolf and man. Man is made up of thousands of parts and pieces, man is a kaleidoscope of confused and clashing wishes, dreams, desires, intentions, plans, moods and memories and emotions.

The author of the Treatise closes by dwelling at some length on Eastern philosophy and Buddhism for indicating the complex nature of the human soul, and how hard it is to fully own and possess it in order to transcend it and encompass the All.

Back to sad Harry

Then the Treatise ends and it’s back to sad Harry.

Granting that I had in the course of all my painful transmutations made some invisible and unaccountable gain, I had had to pay dearly for it; and at every turn my life was harsher, more difficult, lonely and perilous.

Things happen:

Harry wanders round town feeling sorry for himself
he bumps into an old acquaintance, a professor of Eastern philosophy, who invites him for dinner that evening at 8.30pm, throwing him into paroxysms and anxiety and self-loathing and, sure enough, he makes a horlicks of it by getting into an argument about a portrait of Goethe the professor and his wife have which our hero thinks is too sentimental
Harry storms out of their house and wanders the streets, as usual giving into thoughts of shame and guilt and suicide, eventually plunging into a noisy smoky inn
here he sits next to a fancy women (a prostitute?) who quickly gets his measure, within a few minutes she realises that Harry is a helpless baby who needs to be looked after, who needs mothering, who has memorised his Nietzsche and is an expert on despair and hell and inauthenticity, but doesn’t know how to talk to a girl or dance, who knows, in fact, nothing about actual life
Harry falls asleep at the pub table and dreams a dream of Goethe, who starts off lofty and admirable but slowly becomes more fanciful and jokey, the medal on his chest turning into flowers as he explains that one must escape time, time is an illusion, in heaven eternity is a brief moment just long enough to tell a joke (reminding the reader of the reflections about time in Siddhartha)

After a week of anxiety worthy of a 16-year-old on his first date, having washed and dressed in new finery (new shoelaces!) he returns to the Black Eagle pub and meets the pretty flirtatious slender young girl there.

For a moment she reminds him of his boyhood friend Herman and he hazards a guess that her name is Hermine, the female equivalent. She nods delightedly but who knows, she is an experienced prostitute, maybe she’s lying.

[Rereading The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1918-33 ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (2015), I was struck by the way all the essays in it at least mention, if not make their central theme the issue of gender-bending, gender alterity and gender fluidity in Weimar Germany. the book includes numerous photos and paintings of women, especially, dressed in men’s clothing, or with slender boyish figures and bob haircuts, all of which I was reminded of in the short moment when Hermine reminds Harry of a boy. He even asks if she’s a boy, and she jokes that, yes, she might be a boy in woman’s clothing (p.127). And a lot later, towards the climax of the book, at the big town ball, Hermine arrives dressed as a man, in a gentleman’s smart suit and fools even Harry into thinking she’s a male.]

Part two – Hermine

It isn’t formally divided into a new part but in practice, from the moment he meets Hermine, the book takes on a steadily different tone. In a nutshell, Hermine teaches Harry in a hundred and one ways to stop being so self-pitying and self-centred, to come out of himself, to engage with the world, to lighten up, to live a little (the variety of phrases which spring to mind indicate how widespread this injunction has become in the English-speaking world).

Almost immediately Hermine realises that despite all his fancy learning Harry is basically a child. He needs to be mothered. I thought I’d been reasonably clever in spotting this within a page or so but she then goes on to make it super-explicit quite a few times, telling him he’s a baby and needs a mother and she’s going to mother him. She makes him swear he will obey her in all things, so there’s an echo of the mistress-slave relationship in the world of S&M, or BDSM as it’s called nowadays.

Hermine teaches Harry to dance and like jazz. Characteristically, Harry initially hates both and nurses a long-standing dislike of jazz, and is ready at the drop of a hat to pontificate about the greatness of Bach and Handel and Mozart.

[Jazz] was repugnant to me… It was the music of decline. There must have been such music in Rome under the later emperors. Compared with Bach and Mozart and real music it was, naturally, a miserable affair; but so was all our art, all our thought, all our makeshift culture in comparison with real culture…

(In an interesting footnote, Hesse makes his character dislike Beethoven and really dislike both Brahms and Wagner: by their time music had, in his opinion, become too clotted and heavy; he prefers the infinite lightness and grace of Mozart).

Anyway, this is where the saxophonist Pablo comes in. ‘A dark and good-looking youth of Spanish or South American origin’, Pablo is effortlessly cool, rarely speaks but, when the band has finished playing a set comes and sits with Hermine and Harry and listens in silence while Harry rants on about Bach and tonal colour and harmonies.

Finally Pablo breaks his silence and reveals that he knows all about Bach and counterpoint but that is not his job. He is paid to play music which makes people tap their toes, and then their legs, and get to their feet, and start dancing, and lose their inhibitions and be happy.

The text tells us that ‘A new dance, a fox trot, with the title “Yearning,” had swept the world that winter’. Here it is. This is what these wild characters are jitterbugging to, getting drunk, taking cocaine, clasping each other tightly and dancing the night away to:

Hermine may become Harry’s mistress, but she doesn’t have sex with him. That, she says, is reserved for a special day, when he has finally completely fallen in love with her. Meanwhile, Hermine fits Harry up with a gorgeous dancer at the club, Maria, sleek and sexy in her velvet dress. With her Harry rediscovers not just sex – he had sex with his wife – but a magnificent new world of sex, of all kinds of subtle sensualities, of looks and poses and aspects and ways of touching and kissing which are completely new to him.

In other words, his body is brought to life just as much as his soul. The Steppenwolf rediscovers the radical innocence of sex (p.183-4).

The book continues to be packed with ideas and issues except that now he is not mulling them over in isolation and stewing in self-pity. He gets to discuss them with Hermine, with Pablo and with Maria, all of whom shed interesting and unexpected lights on the Steppenwolf’s obsessions. Thus there is:

War An extended discussion about war – we learn that the Steppenwolf was a writer and wrote an article during the Great War calling for moderation and less hatred, and was roundly condemned by conservatives and militarists and subjected to a campaign of hate and vilification. We know from his biography that exactly the same thing happened to Hesse himself, in fact this is straight autobiography. Harry is full of foreboding that all part of sciety – politicians, journalists, business – are greedily galloping towards the next war, which will be far worse than the last. Very prophetic. In fact Hesse left Germany to live in Switzerland precisely because he was a pacifist and wanted to dissociate himself from his countrymen’s crude militarism and lust for revenge. (pp.228ff)

German intellectuals There is a damning page where Harry harshly criticises the entire German intellectual class for their ineffectiveness. (p.159)

Weimar sexuality At their very first meeting, Hermine strikes him for a moment for her boyishness, and this theme recurs for the rest of the book. At the Town Ball Hermine arrives dressed as a man. But at one of the druggy sessions with Pablo and Hermine, Harry feels someone kiss his closed eyelids and knows it’s Pablo and doesn’t mind. In fact Pablo stonedly suggests a threesome, explaining how wonderful it would be, but Harry can’t quite bring himself to go that far. On one of the occasions when Harry discusses Maria with Hermine, Hermine makes it quite clear that she knows Maria is exceptional in bed because… she’s slept with her too. You can almost feel Harry’s mind being expanded. This is an aspect of Hesse I whole-heartedly approve, his completely relaxed, candid and honest attitude to sexuality. It seems extraordinarily ahead of his time, the 1920s. Then again, it was the Weimar Republic, where anything went. (Hesse on Weimar women p.162, and bisexuality p.194, 196.)

Time and eternity For me the best thing about Siddhartha was the profound discussion of time, what it means to be trapped in time, as we all are, and what it might mean to be able to escape time. What life, or existence, would feel like if there was no time. This theme is picked up here again, and is, for me at any rate, a particularly thought-provoking aspect of Hesse’s philosophy.

Part three – The Magic Theatre

As described in my brief summary, the book processes through these successive awakening of Harry’s narcissistic and self-pitying soul – jazz, sex, dancing, flirting, sensuality, relaxing, stopping being aloof but plunging into life – before heading towards the giddy climax of the Magic Theatre.

Harry attends the annual Town Ball in the town hall which has been converted into a catacomb of entertainments, with different bands playing in different rooms. This epic night of dancing and debauchery is vividly describe, it sounds almost like a rave, he makes it sound like London nightclubs I used to go to, where you dance all night long and eventually lose yourself completely in the throng, in the great mass of pulsing bodies, leave your poor pitiful ego behind and join a larger rhythm and music.

Anyway, as dawn comes up and the last of the dancers finally stop shimmying and the band packs away its instruments, Pablo takes Harry and Hermine to a small drab room where he feeds them spiked booze and a jazz cigarette and then… takes them through a doorway and parts a plush curtain to present THE MAGIC THEATRE (“For Madmen Only; Admittance Charge – Your Mind”). It is like the curved corridor which runs behind the private boxes at a grand theatre, except that each door has a motto on it, indicating what you will experience inside, a little like Alice in Wonderland. These include:

ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS
ONE QUARTER IN THE SLOT

JOLLY HUNTING
GREAT HUNT IN AUTOMOBILES

MUTABOR
TRANSFORMATION INTO ANY ANIMAL OR PLANT YOU PLEASE

KAMASUTRAM
INSTRUCTION IN THE INDIAN ARTS OF LOVE
COURSE FOR BEGINNERS
FORTY-TWO DIFFERENT METHODS AND PRACTICES

DELIGHTFUL SUICIDE
YOU LAUGH YOURSELF TO BITS

DO YOU WANT TO BE ALL SPIRIT?
THE WISDOM OF THE EAST

DOWNFALL OF THE WEST
MODERATE PRICES. NEVER SURPASSED

COMPENDIUM OF ART
TRANSFORMATION FROM TIME INTO SPACE BY MEANS OF MUSIC

LAUGHING TEARS
CABINET OF HUMOUR

SOLITUDE MADE EASY
COMPLETE SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL FORMS OF SOCIABILITY.

GUIDANCE IN THE BUILDING UP OF THE PERSONALITY
SUCCESS GUARANTEED

And so Harry indulges in some of them – namely the car hunting one which is set in a future war between machines (cars) and men – All Girls Are Yours in which he relives every feeling and encounter he’s had with a girl or woman except that they all turn into beautiful love affairs instead of occasions for frustration and anger. Then he goes through the door marked:

MARVELLOUS TAMING OF THE STEPPENWOLF

Which isn’t such a good idea because he sees both man and wolf being pitifully tamed and humiliated.

He meets the chessplayer with a super-sized board who explains to Harry that he has not two but two thousand aspects to his soul and proceeds to play vast super-complex chess games with them, demonstrating to Harry that Life is a Game. Make of it what you will.

Finally he is back in the corridor and the next door he sees bears a sign:

HOW ONE KILLS FOR LOVE

This needs explaining. At several moments during their conversations, Hermine had explained to Harry that he must obey her in all things, up to and including the final one – she will command him to kill her. I wasn’t happy with this idea, since it seemed to me to take us back into the melodramatic, late-Romantic world of the Steppe Wolf, but here it is.

In fact before anything happens, Harry sees himself in a vast floor-to-ceiling mirror and sees a wolf. He reaches into his pocket and finds a knife. Ah. Mack the Knife, weapon of choice for the Weimar murderer. In a weird (it’s all beyond weird) twist, Harry ends meeting Mozart and has a lengthy conversation with him about art and music and time and eternity.

But Mozart laughs the cold, icy laughter of eternity, of those who have transcended time and Harry finds himself entering a room to find the naked bodies of Pablo and Hermine sleeping side by side as if after sex.

Beautiful, beautiful figures, lovely pictures, wonderful bodies. Beneath Hermine’s left breast was a fresh round mark, darkly bruised – a love bite of Pablo’s beautiful, gleaming teeth. There, where the mark was, I plunged in my knife to the hilt. The blood welled out over her white and delicate skin. I would have kissed away the blood if everything had happened a little differently. As it was, I did not. I only watched how the blood flowed and watched her eyes open for a little moment in pain and deep wonder. What makes her wonder? I thought. Then it occurred to me. that I had to shut her eyes. But they shut again of themselves. So all was done. She only turned a little to one side, and from her armpit to her breast I saw the play of a delicate shadow. It seemed that it wished to recall something, but what I could not remember. Then she lay still.

Pablo stir and is not greatly upset by what has happened. Maybe because it hasn’t happened. Mozart reappears and laughs at Harry’s stricken guilt. he says Harry must learn to laugh, too. All humour is gallows humour because we are all on the brink of the grave. Harry must learn the laughter of the gods of the immortals, a cold glacial laugh of eternity.

HARRY’S EXECUTION

The final scene is Harry’s trial, where he is convicted of the murder of Hermine but, in an unexpected twist, the court sentences him to live and laugh him out of the court.

At which point Mozart and the court disappear and Harry is talking to Pablo. Pablo, in his wise understated way, is a little disappointed with Harry for bringing the mud of reality and passion into his Magic Theatre but forgives him. None of it is real. The figure of Hermine appears as a toy, a little model. Could things be more trippy?

He took Hermine who at once shrank in his fingers to the dimensions of a toy figure and put her in the very same waistcoat pocket from which he had taken the cigarette. Its sweet and heavy smoke diffused a pleasant aroma. I felt hollow, exhausted, and ready to sleep for a whole year.

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being. One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

Those are the book’s final words, the final words of the manuscript the Steppenwolf left with the nephew and which he promised to publish way back at the start of what is, physically, quite a short book, but one which feels like it’s taken us on a trip right around the universe of human possibilities.

Conclusion

I spent a lot of energy ridiculing the morbid self-pity of the lead character in the first half of the book, only to realise by the end that this was a narrative strategy, that Hesse took the maudlin self-pity he himself was prone too, especially after his second marriage collapsed in the 1920s, and blew it up out of all proportion… in order to make the character’s transformation all the more vivid and memorable.

So the real interest of the book is in the way the Steppenwolf is humanised, literally brought to Life and instructed in how to Live it and Enjoy it, by the beneficent guidance of Hermine, the hermaphrodite healer. The journey is packed with weird and wonderful scenes involving Goethe and Mozart, discussions of suicide and time and eternity and human nature and music and sex, it is a gallimaufrey of intensely felt ideas and insights.

And then the final forty pages take it to a different level altogether, a mad science fiction / horror / drug trip fantasy which in its combination of weirdness and philosophy does something hardly any other book I’ve ever read manages.

What an incredible book!

Credit

Der Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse was published in 1927. This translation by Basil Creighton was published in 1929. All references are to the 1973 Penguin paperback edition.

20th century German literature

Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse (1930)
The Man Without Qualities part 1 by Robert Musil (1930)
The Man Without Qualities part 2 by Robert Musil (1930)
The Romantic (1888) by Hermann Broch (1931)
The Anarchist (1903) by Hermann Broch (1931)
The Realist (1918) by Hermann Broch (1931)
The Man Without Qualities part 3 by Robert Musil (1933)

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse (1943)
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1959)

The Weimar Republic

German history

1 Comment

by Simon on April 22, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Germany, Novel, Philosophy

Posted by Simon on April 22, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/22/steppenwolf-hermann-hesse/

The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch: a summary

On the back of the book, on Wikipedia and in various other locations, large claims are made for The Sleepwalkers, the trilogy of ‘modernist’ novels by Austrian writer Hermann Broch. They are all along the lines of it being ‘a portrait of a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals and reason’.

Having read all three novels quite carefully, the aim of this little essay is to question some of these claims and to put the trilogy into a broader historical perspective. If this seems a questionable thing to do, then bear in mind that the novels – especially the third one – themselves include long passages which take a very highbrow, Hegelian view of history, and which analyse the development of Western culture since the Renaissance right down to the present day.

In other words, rather than applying an alien and academic approach to what are essentially fictions, it’s more accurate to say that I am continuing Broch’s own obsession with the present plight of Western Civilisation and his own lengthy analyses of where Western Man has gone wrong – and applying this approach to his own books.

Critics claim The Sleepwalkers is a panoramic overview of German society and history

The Sleepwalkers is emphatically not ‘a panoramic overview of German society and the collapse of its values’. It is three portraits of tiny groups of characters, each one centring on individuals who are psychologically unbalanced.

Critics claim The Sleepwalkers portray ‘a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals and reason’

1. The books are spread over thirty years, from 1888 to 1918. That’s not ‘a world’, that’s three distinct eras. Imagine saying three novels set in the England of 1988, 2003 and 2018, as describing ‘a world’ – they might be set in the same country but the social setup, the politics and feel of each of those moments would be very different. Same here.

2. None of the books really describe ‘a world‘ – it felt to me like the opposite: each novel describes tiny, unrepresentative groups of characters.

The Romantic is about army officer Joachim von Paselow, his Bohemian mistress Ruzena, his posh fiancée Elisabeth and his suave ex-army friend, Eduard von Bertrand. That’s not a portrait of ‘a world’. That’s a drawing room drama. It barely has enough characters in it to make a sitcom.

Similarly, The Anarchist concerns a relatively small number of characters, namely the book-keeper August Esch, the woman he bullies into marrying him (Mother Hentjen), the brother and sister he boards with in Mannheim, the local tobacconist and a trade union activist who gets locked up, and with three or four theatrical types he goes into business with. About the wider world beyond these ten or so characters we hear very little. Hardly the portrait of ‘a world’. It’s a microcosm.

The closing pages of the third novel in the trilogy, The Realist, are the only place where you have a sense of the wider world and History impinging on the characters, as they describe the anarchy which breaks out at the very end of the Great War, but these final passages leave a misleading impression: the nearly 300 pages which preceded them, once again, focus on a handful of characters: Huguenau the canny deserter, Esch from the second book who we now meet running a small newspaper, Joachim von Pasenow from the first book, who is now an elderly major in charge of the town, and a handful of civic dignitaries and workers. Again this is the opposite of ‘a world’, it is more like a small village.

3. Another sense in which the novels don’t describe a world is the way the lead figures in all three books are psychologically extreme characters. To be a little more analytical, they are highly unrepresentative figures.

– Joachim von Pasenow becomes subject to increasingly prolonged bouts of delusion and almost delirium. He has little or no grasp on the ‘real’ world, as his friend Eduard von Bertrand is quick to point out.

– August Esch is a dim-witted bully, whose malfunctioning mind is overtaken by absurdly grandiose, religio-philosophical psychodramas.

– Huguenau is calm and collected and detached from reality, an early forebear of the hundreds of psychopaths described in thousands of modern thrillers. This feeling is crystallised when he murders Esch in cold blood, stabbing him from behind with an army bayonet in a darkened street.

The third novel is longer and more complex than the others, but follows the same broad arc whereby the central character becomes drowned in their author’s increasingly lengthy pseudo-philosophical and religious ramblings.

So: three fruitcakes, three psychological cases and their close friends and associates do not constitute a world and are not really ‘a portrait’ of anything (if they really build up to anything, it’s a very negative summary of ‘the German character’, see below).

Critics claim The Sleepwalkers is a bold analysis of the collapse of Western values

Even if it were anything like a panoramic overview etc (which it isn’t), portraying the collapse in values in modern Germany (1888-1918) could hardly be called original.

In fact, it would be deeply unoriginal, since this topic of decline and fall was the obsessive subject of most German politics and culture in the decade after the Great War.

The territory had already been well staked out by Oswald Spengler’s classic of gloomy pessimism, The Decline of the West. Spengler’s book depicted the 19th century as a soulless age of materialism which had led to rootless immoralism in the arts (i.e. Symbolism, Expressionism and everything else which Spengler disliked).

The Decline of the West was published in 1922 and was an immediate bestseller, setting the tone for cultural debate throughout the Weimar period.

A 1928 Time review of the second volume of Decline described the immense influence and controversy Spengler’s ideas enjoyed during the 1920s: ‘When the first volume of The Decline of the West appeared in Germany a few years ago, thousands of copies were sold. Cultivated European discourse quickly became Spengler-saturated. Spenglerism spurted from the pens of countless disciples. It was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathize or revolt. It still remains so’. (Wikipedia)

Quite. Lamenting the decline and fall of ‘Western values’ was an intellectual parlour game played by every intellectual, writer, critic, commentator, aspiring politician and pub bore in the Western world.

Therefore, claiming that Broch’s massive novel about ‘the collapse of social values’ was in any way innovative or ground-breaking is ridiculous, seeing as it was published ten years after Spengler’s book had set the tone and defined the age.

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot holds up because (among many other things) it is an excoriating portrait of mental collapse amid what genuinely seemed – in the immediate aftermath of the Great War – to be a continent going up in flames. But it got in early (like the Spengler, The Waste Land was published in 1922) and established a marker for a new technique and tone to describe the world. The Sleepwalkers, on the contrary, was published ten years later, and was more like a tardy latecomer to the debate.

Using Walter Laqueur to critique The Sleepwalkers

1. The Sleepwalkers’ cultural pessimism, far from being innovative, was entirely in line with its time and place

A few years ago I read half a dozen books about the Weimar Republic to coincide with some art exhibitions on the subject. By far the most convincing was Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933 by Walter Laqueur, who had the advantage of growing up during the period (born 1921, he fled Germany in 1938).

Laqueur’s history of Weimar is interesting because, unlike most left-wing academics who tend to concentrate on the communist writers and composers and the gender-bending nightclubs etc, Laqueur gives full weight to the conservative cultural forces of the time.

Above all he makes it all the more clear that so many of the liberal or left-wing, Socialist or communist artists, writers, playwrights etc who infested the Weimar Republic, did everything they could to undermine it and nothing to support it and thus materially contributed to its overthrow by Hitler and the Nazis.

I was continually reminded of Laqueur and his diagnosis as I read the final volume in the trilogy, The Realist. This is divided into short alternating chapters describing – or in the voice of – eight or so key characters.

One of these is (rather inevitably) an academic – not a professor of medicine or physics or engineering or anything useful, but (again, rather inevitably) a philosopher, and it is he who is the author of a series of sections entitled ‘The Disintegration of Values’.

These ‘Disintegration of Values’ sections go on at some length about the horrors of ‘this age’ and the laziness and cowardice of ‘our age’. The author is something of an aesthete and seems to be an expert in architecture. His sections repeatedly make the point, at immense, circumlocutionary length, that the unornamented style of modern post-war architecture bespeaks a deliberate banishment of ‘style’ and ‘beauty’ which is, ultimately, the emptiness of death.

‘Style’ and ‘Beauty’ we are told, reached their heights in the Middle Ages when all Europeans believed in one ideology, Catholicism as promoted by the universal Catholic Church, and everyone shared the same values and so art was accessible to all. But the Renaissance broke this happy balance between public and private, promoting the value of ‘the individual’, and then the Protestant Revolution smashed it wide open, leading to civil war in Europe but, more importantly, to the triumph of the each individual finding their own path to God.

This quest for individualism has led to 400 years of decline, in social life, art and architecture, until we reach the sorry depths described in Broch’s novels, which, he now explains to us, are meant to be detailed descriptions of how older values have been rejected in favour of the current state of soulless materialism and everyone-for-themselves consumer capitalism.

These sections are example of the worst kind of turgid, long-winded, grandstanding German philosophising. The author of these sections is not slow to drop in learnèd tags, like cogito ergo sum and refer to Neo-Kantianism or Hegelian notions of Geist – and confidently makes sweeping generalisations about all Western history interpreted as an interplay between The Rational and the Irrational etc.

But none of this really masks the fact that, deep down, the author is another drunk old bore propping up a bar somewhere telling anyone who comes near enough that the world is going to the dogs. And quite quickly this becomes really tiresome.

2. The Sleepwalkers is a good example of turgid, incomprehensible Germanic philosophising at its worst

Laqueur’s review of Weimar culture gives pen portraits of the works of numerous figures from the era who are now totally forgotten. Quite quickly you realise something almost all of them had in common was that they were:

long-winded and verbose
at the same time, extremely obscure and hard to understand
full of dire cosmic predictions about the collapse of civilisation and the end of the Western world

You notice this because Laqueur goes to some lengths to point it out and emphasise that long-winded, pretentious obscurity is an enduring strand of German culture.

Take the works of Moeller van den Bruck who wrote The Right of Young Peoples and The Third Reich. Laqueur comments that van den Bruck’s two books are almost impenetrably obscure, but nonetheless full of high-sounding rhetoric, ‘poetic visions, enormous promises and apocalyptic forebodings’ (p.96). Well that describes Broch’s huge trilogy to a T. Here are some other Laqueur comments on writers of the period:

The German language has an inbuilt tendency towards vagueness and lack of precision… (p.63)

[Thomas Mann was] Weimar Germany’s greatest and certainly its most interesting writer. But he could not be its spokesman and teacher, magister Germaniae. For that function someone far less complex and much more single-minded was needed. With all his enormous gifts, he had the German talent of making easy things complicated and obvious matters tortuous and obscure. (p.124)

Sounds like Broch.

[The heroes of the most popular writers of the time, neither left wing nor modernist, not much known outside Germany] were inward-looking, mystics, men in search of god, obstinate fellows – modern Parsifals in quest of some unknown Holy Grail. They were preoccupied with moral conflicts and troubled consciences, they were inchoate and verbose at the same time, very German in their abstraction, their rootedness and sometimes in their dullness. (p.139)

Quite. That sounds exactly like the thought processes which come to dominate the characters Joachim von Pasenow and August Esch – long-winded, verbose, over-the-top, full of pretentious, world-shattering generalisations which, on a moment’s reflection, mean nothing.

3. The Sleepwalkers revels in the corruption it portrays without offering any positive vision

What I came to dislike over the ten days I was immersed in these three heavy, turgid novels, is the way Broch’s vast trilogy revels in psychological collapse. It glories in the hysteria and confusion of its characters. It smiles with glee as they hallucinate, scheme and panic.

The Sleepwalkers enjoys its descriptions of corruption. It takes 150 densely-written pages to dissect the character of the loathsome, stupid and mentally ill army officer Joachim von Paselow, and a further 150 glutinous pages to plumb the depths of the wife-beating dimwit, August Esch.

The books dabble their fingers in the damaged Germanic soul, relishing every minute of their portrayal of deeply disturbed characters, and periodically inserting lengthy descriptions of their confused pseudo-philosophical obsessions.

Like so much Weimar Art, The Sleepwalkers trilogy didn’t build, but destroyed. It didn’t make positive suggestions, but carped and cavilled at every aspect of modern society, which their author regarded as going hopelessly downhill. Just like more or less every other author of his day (compare with the lengthy laments about the ‘sickness of our age’ throughout the first half of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf.)

It has no positive suggestions to make, it offers no solutions. It despises industrialism and social democracy and politics as much as it ends up appearing to despise pretty much all human beings and their pathetic attempts to find meaning.

I know that Broch was himself arrested by the Nazis in 1938, not least because he was a Jew, and so he was no friend at all of the regime – but that doesn’t alter the fact that the tendency of these three novels is entirely destructive of what you could call the sensible, democratic middle ground.

They don’t really describe or analyse this supposed ‘collapse of values’ (I actually found it impenetrably difficult to understand just what ‘values’ were being discussed in any of the novels: for example the concept of ‘romanticism’ which is referenced half a dozen times in the novel of the same name is nowhere really explained; not clearly).

What the novels do do, is enact and promote the very decadence and corruption which they claim to be lamenting.

Their nihilism was just one more contribution to the overall artistic nihilism of Weimar, and if this didn’t exactly open the door to Hitler, it ensured that when the moment came, the artistic, cultural and intellectual community lacked the intellectual means or the will to resist him.

The hopeless German-ness of the Germans

I’ve been moving from the specificness of the individual novels, up to a higher-level look at their place in Weimar culture as a whole. Now let’s step outside German culture altogether.

Stepping right back and viewing it from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, it seems to me that the entire analysis carried out by The Sleepwalkers is wrong because it is trapped inside German culture and can’t get out.

It is a truism that people often get stuck in hopeless, repetitive and self-destructive behaviour and eventually need help from therapists or counsellors. This is because the therapist is outside the situation the patient is stuck in and consequently can see it with a clearer perspective, and can offer what often turn out to be relatively simple solutions and ways out.

In the same way, all the works of cultural criticism and gloomy pessimistic German fiction which Laqueur describes, and of which Broch’s trilogy was a notable example, are trapped inside the prison of being German.

They were all addressing a simple problem made up of the following parts:

1. They take it as axiomatic that at some point in the past, say the era of Goethe and Schiller, German culture was fine and good and healthy, that the Germans had at some stage in the past had a wonderful soul and beautiful art and matchless music.

2. But then something seems to have gone wrong. Nietzsche in the 1870s was warning that something was wrong with German culture and after him a flood of writers, philosophers and so on produced thousands of variations on the same theme, from the tortured German Expressionist artists, through Gustav Mahler and his obsession with Death, through Spengler’s pessimism and thousands of nihilistic Weimar artists and writers, through to the Granddaddy of German unhappiness, and friend of the Nazis, the high priest of incomprehensible, long-winded laments that the modern world has lost its soul and authenticity, Martin Heidegger.

3. And this ‘problem’ had gone into overdrive in the aftermath of the First World War because the Germans, from all classes, at all levels, up to and including the loftiest intellectuals, couldn’t understand why the Germans had lost the war.

Why did we lose the war? What is wrong with us? What is wrong with Germany?

Questions which prompted thousands of agonised screeds about Seele and Geist and God and the Absolute – when the answer was perfectly simple: the Germans lost the First World War because the combined industrial and agricultural resources of Germany and Austria were no match for the combined industrial and agricultural resources of Britain, France and, especially, America.

Any therapist or counsellor outside their situation could have told them that this was the brute, blunt, material reason why they lost – but, unfortunately, this was precisely the kind of pragmatic, bathetic ‘fact’ beloved of the despised ‘nation of shopkeepers’ and of vulgar Yankee carpetbaggers that lofty and high-falutin German professors of philosophy just couldn’t handle, process or accept.

It was too simple, too obvious – lacking in true Germanic dignity and Geist and God and Sacrifice and Volk and Blut.

Thus, from the lowest bar-room drunk to the cleverest writers in the land, the Germans, as a people, looked for the reasons for their defeat in a huge variety of reasons and excuses – all except for the blindingly obvious one staring them in the face.

They attributed their defeat to a lack of honour, or patriotism, or duty or sacrifice, in a ‘collapse of values’, in the viciousness of modern culture, in its sexual decadence or its mercantile corruption, in the machinations of big business or the financial conspiracies of the Jews or the betrayal of the Army by civilian politicians or betrayal of the Volk by liberals and Jews – in a hundred and one reasons and excuses all of which managed to mask and conceal from themselves the blindingly obvious reality that, as a nation, they ran out of manpower and resources.

It was this failure to properly and responsibly analyse the stark economic and material reasons for their defeat, and instead the addiction to attributing defeat to a wild collection of fanciful philosophical or religious or psychological failings, which helped to create a paranoid victim culture – which emphasised psychological or moral or spiritual failings, rather than the more mundane practical realities – which helped Hitler’s rise to power.

Seen in this broad cultural context, Broch was just one more German writer crying out that his culture was profoundly, horribly diseased. Stepping right back, he was one among a huge chorus of cultural producers in Weimar Germany who were all lamenting how rotten and corrupt their culture was.

Well, they shouldn’t have been all that surprised when a strong leader stepped forward and offered himself as the cure to everything which was wrong with German society, starting with rejuvenating its rotten debased ‘values’ and re-instilling a sense of Pride and Patriotism and Confidence.

They wanted it. They got it.

The gross failure of German political culture between 1870 and 1945

Above the intrinsic economic and industrial strength of a nation obviously sits the class of people who manage them, who manage the economy, who run the country – the politicians.

And here again, Broch wasn’t experiencing some ‘collapse of values’ – or no more so than anyone in any Western country which had thrown off its Victorian straitjacket, had swapped its ankle-length skirts for flapper fashion and was dancing the Charleston.

No, what he was experiencing – as every other German between the wars did – was the complete and utter failure of German political class to manage its nation.

In the years leading up to 1914, and then again in during the 1930s, the men who came to the top of the German political system turned out to be completely incapable of running a modern state, without itching for war.

This is made crystal clear in all the histories of the Great War which I read during its recent centenary. In 1914 the men at the top of the German political system – Kaiser Wilhelm and the German Chiefs of Staff – took a calculated gamble that they could exploit the crisis which erupted after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

This is a summary of the argument made in a recent book about Germany and Austro-Hungary in the build- up to, and during, the First World War, Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson (2014):

The conspirators – Elements in the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry and military had been waiting for an opportunity to suppress little Serbia, located just on the empire’s border and endlessly fomenting nationalist unrest. When Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated on 28 June in the Serbian capital, Sarajevo, the Austrians blamed Serbia and spent most of July devising an ultimatum so extreme that they, and everyone else in Europe, knew that it could not be fulfilled. Germany, not that concerned at this point, gave Austro-Hungary unqualified support, the so-called ‘blank cheque’. Both countries changed their tune when they realised that Russia was mobilising to support the Serbs, their fellow Slavs.
War of existence – Why was the Austro-Hungarian hierarchy so harsh on Serbia? Watson gives a review of the many tensions tearing the Austro-Hungarian empire apart. ‘The actions of Austro-Hungarian rulers in the summer of 1914, although secretive and aggressive, were motivated less by belligerence than a profound sense of weakness, fear and despair’ (p.14).
The miscalculated risk – The pressures on German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg reflected a nation anxious about the growing might of Britain and France and the industrialisation of Russia, but also well aware of the risk of world war. German Chancellor Hollweg gambled that a) the Austrians would defeat Serbia quickly, within a week and b) that Russia would be so slow to mobilise that the conflict on the ground would be over in the Austrians’ favour before the whole thing got handed over to international mediation (as had a number of other recent international disputes e.g. the Balkan Wars of 1912-13). He was wrong on both counts.

As the situation deteriorated and the German High Command began to fear a possible war on two fronts, they decided to implement the Schlieffen Plan which called for the rapid invasion of France in order to knock her out of the war in a brisk six weeks, so that the Germans could then turn their attention to Russia who, they expected, would take at least six weeks to mobilise.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Germany’s political and military leaders made a huge military gamble and were wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. World class wrong. All the catastrophes of the twentieth century stem from this one catastrophic miscalculation, not only the war itself but the overthrow of the Tsarist regime by the Bolsheviks, the rise of communism in Russia, Stalin, millions murdered in famines and gulags, the catastrophic triumph of communism and the rule of Mao in China, the entire Cold War with all its deaths and distortions.

From that one miscalculated gamble.

Once they’d committed they couldn’t back down, and when the ‘lightning’ attack through Belgium that was designed to capture Paris and knock France out of the war failed, the world was condemned to four years of meat-grinding deadlock.

This was the simple truth that everyone living in Germany through and after the war appeared to be unable to realise or accept. Instead, they were told by their leaders that they were fighting a war of civilisation against Western decadence (France) and Eastern barbarism (Russia).

They were fed cultural and spiritual and moral reasons for a war which was characterised as a crusade. And so an entire generation of Germans appears not to have grasped its much simpler geopolitical reasons (Germany’s paranoid fear of its rivals France and Britain, combined with paranoid fear of attack from the East, combined with a really fatal military miscalculation).

Back to Broch

Thus Hermann Broch’s big trilogy of novels, The Sleepwalkers, can be read, not as any kind of analysis of ‘a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals and reason’ and so on, but as one more instance of the German intellectual class’s complete failure to grasp the realities of the geopolitics, political leadership and economics which determined the world they lived in.

Broch was just one of many, many, many over-educated intellectuals and philosophers and academics and writers and commentators who couldn’t accept the simple truth that they lost the First World War because their leaders fucked up, and so wrote thousand-page novels blaming it all on the Renaissance or the Reformation or the Romantic movement or the imbalance between Reason and The Irrational or the falling of God from Infinity into the Absolute, and so on and on and on and on.

Conclusion

To summarise: in my opinion, Broch’s entire project of attempting to explain his country’s plight in terms of a collapse of so-called values:

is not an accurate description of what the books are actually about
is, in any case, crushingly unoriginal and indebted to much more influential cultural forerunners such as Spengler
and in any case completely misses the point – it wasn’t the Germans’ social values which were at fault, it was the failure of their political culture to be able to manage a large modern state without resorting to the Kaiserprinzip or the Fuhrerprinzip and aggressive wars of conquest, which was at fault

What German ‘culture’ meant to its neighbours

Because if you happen not to have been born in Germany in the 1880s, if you happen to have been born in, say, France, the most obvious thing about Germany was not its lamentable collapse into ‘a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals and reason’ – the most obvious thing about Germany was the way it kept on bloody invading you – in 1870 and in 1914 and in 1940.

The most obvious thing about German culture was that it produced the febrile and unpredictable Kaiser Wilhelm II and his military high command who started World War One, and then the febrile and mad Adolf Hitler, who started World War Two.

‘World tormented by its loss of faith, morals and reason’ be damned – this was a nation which plunged the world into a catastrophe in 1914, and then did it again, 25 years later, so that the destruction they caused during the second one surpassed the most destructive capacity of all humanity in all preceding history put together.

That is why to this day the Germans are forbidden from having an army. Because nobody trusts them to have one. Think about that.

To this day the Germans are not to be trusted with an army because the whole world has seen what happens if you let Germany have an army. They wreak havoc, death and destruction on an unprecedented scale (read the mind-boggling descriptions of the destruction the Germans wrought all across Europe in Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe; read Primo Levi about Auschwitz.)

Because Death is a master from Germany.

Thus, stepping right back from the specifics of plot and character, The Sleepwalkers can be read as just one among many long-winded, melodramatic and pretentious refusals by German intellectuals to acknowledge the reality of German culture and history – to deny, to refuse to acknowledge what Germany had been in 1870 and 1914 and would be 1939 – a force for unbridled savagery and aggression.

Which part of the siege of Paris (1870) or the burning of Louvain:

From the first days they crossed into Belgium, violating that small country’s neutrality on the way to invade France, German forces looted and destroyed much of the countryside and villages in their path, killing significant numbers of civilians, including women and children. (August 25 1914)

Or the systematic demolition of Warsaw or the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane

The women and children were locked in the church, and the village was looted. The men were led to six barns and sheds, where machine guns were already in place… The SS men began shooting, aiming for their legs. When the victims were unable to move, the SS men covered them with fuel and set the barns on fire… The SS men next proceeded to the church and placed an incendiary device beside it. When it was ignited, women and children tried to escape through the doors and windows, only to be met with machine-gun fire… (Oradour-sur-Glane massacre)

Did German ‘intellectuals’ not get?

All of it. They refused to acknowledge any of it as their fault or responsibility. Germany’s intellectual class continued to worry about Goethe and Beethoven and the World Spirit while their sons and nephews murdered, raped and burned their way across Europe.

How to cure Germany

Only the complete destruction of their country, the mass rape of their women, the seizure of their borderlands by Poland and the permanent encampment of the Soviet Union in the eastern half of their country for 45 years, along with the expulsion of over ten million ethnic Germans from every one of their neighbours, finally, at last, completely and utterly convinced the Germans that maybe they weren’t a Master Race blessed with special insight into Culture and Spirit and Being.

Only the utter devastation of all their cities, of their infrastructure and economy managed to finally convince the German population that all their verbose, melodramatic, self-indulgent rhetoric about ‘morality’ and ‘values’ and ‘reason’ concealed a people who would shovel millions of Jews into crematoria and set out to exterminate the entire Slav population of Eastern Europe (Generalplan Ost).

In the final book of the trilogy, The Realist, Broch goes out of his way to attack modern, money-minded commercial culture. The central figure of the book, Wilhelm Huguenau, is a successful, respectable businessman who is also show to be an amoral murderer and Broch repeatedly emphasises the direct connection between money-minded entrepreneurism and heartless murder. Broch despises modern business and business methods and business men.

But this didn’t stop Broch when push came to shove i.e. when the Nazis came to power, like so many of his left-wing, socialist or communist fellow Weimar intellectuals, from fleeing to the heartland of consumer capitalism, the epicentre of modern business methods, America, where he sat out the Second World War in comfort, holding a number of academic posts, benefiting from the largesse and the protected by the enormous military machine, generated by precisely the kind of modern capitalist society he went out of his way to anathematise in his novels.

This combination of factors goes some way to explaining why Broch came to dislike and then actively despise ‘the novel’ as an ‘art form’.

Because it was not The Novel he was reviling, not the novels of, say, Virginia Woolf or Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner or Evelyn Waugh – it was his own novels:

– long pretentious tracts which claim to be analysing an entire society through the lens of half a dozen freakish characters

– larded with weighty rhodomontades about Sacrifice and Truth and Reality and Mind and Spirit and a whole load of other capitalised and empty words

– misleading and windy ‘analyses’ which concealed the true nature of the German plight / condition / situation, and so proved utterly useless in preventing the rise to power of the most evil regime in world history

– none of which prevented the rise of the Nazis, their aggressive foreign policy, the outbreak of war and the complete collapse of European civilisation

When you put like that, I think you can see why Broch would come to despise his own efforts as long-winded showing off, as showy grandstanding which, in the end, changed nothing.

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

A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)

The Weimar Republic

German history

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by Simon on April 11, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Germany, Literary criticism, Novel, Philosophy, Politics

Tagged Adolf Hitler, Alexander Watson, Archduke Ferdinand, August Esch, Auschwitz, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Broch, Catholicism, Death is a master from Germany, Eastern Europe, Eduard von Bertrand, Edwin Muir, First World War, France, Generalplan Ost, German history, German society, Hegel, Hermann Broch, Hitler, Holocaust, Jews, Joachim von Paselow, Kaiser Wilhelm, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Keith Lowe, Modernism, Moeller van den Bruck, Mother Hentjen, Neo-Kantianism, novels, Oradour-sur-Glane, Oswald Spengler, Paris, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Protestantism, Ring of Steel, Russia, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, Schlieffen Plan, Serbia, SS, T.S. Eliot, The Anarchist, the burning of Louvain, The Decline of the West, The Disintegration of Values, the Great War, the Middle Ages, the Nazis, The Realist, the Renaissance, The Romantic, The Siege of Paris, The Sleepwalkers, the Soviet Union, The Third Reich, The Waste Land, Thomas Mann, Walter Laqueur, Warsaw, Weimar: A Cultural History, Western Civilisation, Western culture, Wilhelm Huguenau, Willa Muir, World War One, World War Two

Posted by Simon on April 11, 2020

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The Realist (1918) by Hermann Broch (1931)

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

20th century German literature

A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)

The Weimar Republic

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by Simon on April 8, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Christianity, Germany, Great War, Literature, Novel, Philosophy, World War One

Posted by Simon on April 8, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/08/the-realist-hermann-broch/

The Anarchist by Hermann Broch (1931)

Introduction to Hermann Broch

Here’s a brief biographical sketch from a New York Times review of the paperback reprint of The Sleepwalkers

Born in 1886, Broch was a product of that fin-de-siecle Vienna that he analysed devastatingly in his brilliant study Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time‘ (recently available in English). The dutiful son of a Jewish textile manufacturer, he attended the local technical institute, took his engineering degree at a textile school in Alsace-Lorraine, traveled to the United States to observe milling procedures and in 1907 patented a cotton-milling device. When his father retired in 1915, Broch took over the business and in the next 10 years became what he cynically termed a captain of industry.

At the same time, he nurtured ambitions for an intellectual career. For years he sporadically attended courses in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Vienna and wrote essays and reviews for various liberal journals. In 1927 he dismayed his family by selling the plant and declaring his intention to pursue a doctorate. But within a year, disenchanted by the disdain for ethical questions displayed by the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, he gave up his academic plans and turned to fiction. As he wrote in a ‘Methodological prospectus‘ for his publisher, he had become convinced that those realms of experience rejected by contemporary philosophy can best be dealt with in literature.

The Sleepwalkers (1931 to 1932) is a thesis novel with a vengeance. According to Broch, sleepwalkers are people living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems, just as the somnambulist exists in a state between sleeping and walking. The trilogy portrays three representative cases of ‘the loneliness of the I’ stemming from the collapse of any sustaining system of values. (In Search of the Absolute Novel by Theodore Ziolkowski)

The Anarchist is the second in the trilogy of novels which Broch published simultaneously under the umbrella title The Sleepwalkers in 1931. An English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published in 1932 which, as far as I can tell, remains the only English version. Some English editions have an introduction; mine doesn’t. What the book is really crying out for is notes of some kind but I suspect that sales of it are so minuscule that any annotation project would never be viable.

The Anarchist

It is March 1903 and Broch throws us straight into the fray. 30-year-old clerk August Esch (‘lean and robust’, p.208, ‘a strong fellow and not in the least afflicted by nerves’, p.219; with ‘short stiff hair, dark head and tanned ruddy skin’, p.231) lives in Cologne.

He has just been fired from his job as a clerk at Stemberg and Company, wholesale wine merchants, due, he believes, to the machinations of the hypocritical head clerk (p.201) Nentwig, who he will spend the rest of the book doggedly hating. Esch was caught out in some minor error of the accounts while he believes Nentwig to be guilty of much larger scale frauds, though he can’t prove it. This grudge will fester through the entire novel and form the core of Esch’s slowly mounting sense of global injustice…

Esch walks along the canal to the low-rent bar-cum-restaurant run by Mother Hentjen, a fat 36-year-old woman once married to Herr Hentjen whose portrait hangs on the wall. Sometimes the rowdy boozy male customers take the serving girls Hede or Thusnelda home and sleep with them, it’s that kind of place.

Angry Esch shares a beer and a bratwurst with Martin Geyring, the cheerful crippled socialist agitator and member of the Social Democratic Party, who walks with crutches. Geyring tips him off about a vacancy for a clerk in the Central Rhine Shipping Company in Mannheim. Esch goes back to Stemberg and blackmails a good reference out of the vile Nentwig. He applies for the Mannheim job and gets it and a few day later sets off by train.

He arrives at the premises down on the docks and is shown to his unglamorous offices, a glass-partitioned box at the end of a long row of sheds (p.173). He is informed that the proprietor, a Mr Bertrand, a ‘renegade officer’, is a decent sort (p.187). Now, anyone who’s read the first book in the trilogy knows this must refer to Eduard von Bertrand, who was a major character in it, and a successful businessman back when that book was set, in 1888.

Anyway, August finds accommodation with a brother and sister who rent rooms, a customs inspector from the docks named Balthasar Korn and his ‘elderly virgin’ sister, Erna (in fact she’s not a virgin, p.210, but is much later described as ‘that skinny sallow little thing’, p.329). Erna is looking for a husband so she loses no opportunity to flirt with Esch, to hint at her fine collection of lingerie, to press her thigh against him when the trio go to bars or restaurants.

One day, down at the docks, Esch comes across a gentleman complaining that the stevedores are unloading his luggage in a clumsy way which might damage it. Esch steps in to reprimand them and the gentleman introduces himself as Herr Gernerth, new lessee of the Thalia Variety Theatre (p.177).

Gernerth gives Esch free tickets and Esch takes along Korn and Erna. Among the other acts is a gripping performance by a knife thrower and his beautiful assistant who adopts a crucifixion pose against a back backcloth while he sends razor sharp daggers whistling past her body.

Entranced and haunted by the deep feelings this sight awakens, Esch returns repeatedly and eventually is introduced to the couple, Herr Teltscher, whose stage name is Teltini, and Ilona, both of them Hungarian by birth (p.184). He is also, apparently, Jewish (p.206), Jewishness and anti-Semitism forming a small but persistent hum in the background.

They all go for a meal together. It becomes clear Korn is hitting on Ilona big time, putting his arm round her shoulder, while Esch is irritated by the old ‘virgin’ Erna continuing to press up against him.

A new character is introduced – Fritz Lohberg, a prim and innocent young tobacconist who Esch buys his cigarettes from. Lohberg’s shop is light and pleasant and the smell of tobacco gives it a lovely manly feeling of good fellowship. That said, Lohberg is a bit of a milksop: he is a member of the Salvation Army and keeps pamphlets on his counter promoting vegetarianism and against alcohol.

Korn follows Esch and also becomes a fellow of Lohberg’s shop, though Esch resents his big bearish vulgarity and Lohberg is terrified of him.

Korn finds out that Lohberg is going to an evening rally of the Salvation Army and insists they go along. To his surprise, Esch finds the Army’s singing and the religious sincerity very moving and comes within an ace of singing along himself. He realises how lonely he is. He has darker, brooding thoughts, about life and death and our essential loneliness, which remind the reader of some of the darker thoughts of the protagonist of the previous novel, The Romantic.

Esch has presentiments and feelings which he can’t bring into focus or define but which are mixed up with smells of the city at dusk, of fresh air out under the trees, or the dense cigar smoke of beer-cellars.

That night, driven by something like spiritual yearning, he finds himself loitering outside Fräulein Korn’s bedroom, making a bit of a noise, and hearing responding noises inside, until he is emboldened to go in. She is not naked but not wearing much and happy to flirt and encourage him. However, as things become serious, she suddenly calls a halt and utters those philistine, bourgeois, narrow, provincial words: ‘When we’re man and wife’ – and Esch recoils, not only as an homme moyen sensual who has been balked of the physical pleasure he was psyched up to enjoy, but also because he was in the midst of a kind of spiritual transport, and hardly anything in the world could have disgusted him more than the bathetic and banal linkage of coitus with the legal forms demanding by petty-minded and the conventional.

From that moment he hates Erna with a passion, and Erna returns the scorn with knobs on. She takes great delight in confirming Esch’s growing suspicions that someone else is padding around the house late at night, and that it is none other than Ilona, who has started to sleep with her crude, bearish brother.

Martin the trade union activist had popped in to see Esch every time his work took him through Mannheim, and now tells him he’ll be addressing a political meeting and invites him. Esch goes along to the meeting in the public room of a small tavern, although he recognises one of the policemen on the door who warns him to keep away.

In the event there is a lot of barracking from the floor when Martin utters unpatriotic sentiments, at which point a load of police enter the premises, go onstage to announce that it is shut down and they must all disperse, and arrest Martin for sedition (p.204). In sympathy with the arrest of their trade union representative the transport and dockers union goes on strike, meaning loading and unloading on the docks where Esch works comes to a standstill and he is increasingly at a loose end.

One night Esch is sitting in Gernerth’s seedy office at the theatre when Teltscher enters, sweating and beaming after his act. But when he demands payment, Generth goes into a familiar obstructive routine about overheads, rent, expenses and so on, and the pair of them wish that if only they could come up with an act which had next to no overheads but would really pack the punters in.

Out of the blue Generth suggests women wrestlers!

Korn makes his entrance into the office to meet Ilona, who is by now hopelessly infatuated with him, then they go off for the night. Gernerth, Teltscher and Esch discuss the women wrestler idea some more and Esch volunteers to pay a call on the theatrical agent, Oppenheimer, on the scheduled trip back home to Cologne he was due to make in a few days (p.206).

It’s a deal. If Esch can drum up some women wrestlers and, even better, some financing, then he can buy into the business and take a share of the profits. Suits Esch. Since the dockers strike started, there’s been nothing to do except hang round the docks, bored.

There’s a comedy of manners scene where Esch invites the weedy religious Lohberg to tea with Erna, the man-eater, who decides that, to spite Esch, she will match Lohberg’s investment in the women wrestling scheme i.e. invest 1,000 Marks. During the rather stiff and formal tea, Erna wonders if Lohberg is a virgin. She wonders if he cries during sex. Esch watches her and is disgusted.

Driven by his obscure yearning for purity or atonement, aroused by attending the Salvation Army meeting, Esch makes the irrational decision that he will serve the new women wrestling scheme. He has no money to invest, but he will devote time to making it happen, in fact he decides to quit his job at the wine importers. In some obscure way, he feels that serving like this will pay his debt. It’s something to do with being a book-keeper and wanting to keep tidy accounts where debts match credits, something to do with Martin being in prison while he is still a free man…

So returning from Mannheim back to Cologne, Esch visits Mother Hentjen, bringing her a nice present of a model of the Schiller Memorial outside that Mannheim theatre, but she inadvertently lets slip some remarks about her mysterious past, and disappears in a huff.

Esch goes to the office of the legendary theatrical agent, Oppenheimer, only to discover it is a messy shambles and that Herr O keeps irregular hours, according to the scornful neighbours.

(America In case I haven’t mentioned it before, Esch is obsessed with the idea of emigrating to America, something he discusses with both Lohberg and Korn. It reminds me that Kafka’s first attempt at a novel, begun in 1912, describes a young man emigrating to America in search of a better life. It reminds me of Bertolt Brecht’s obsession with America, its gangsters and its place names, none of which he had visited in the 1930s. It reminds me of the descriptions in George Grosz’s autobiography of his boyhood obsession with America. Was it a widespread movement at the turn of the century, this German romantic ideal of emigrating to the New World?)

The women wrestler idea progresses: Oppenheimer rustles up a variety of women from the music halls of Cologne and gives them exotic performers names. Esch attends an ‘audition’ where they try to persuade them to put on tights and wrestle, although some of the women flatly refuse and walk out.

Meanwhile, in a different part of his mind, Esch grows steadily more obsessed with the injustice of his friend Martin Geyring the trade union activist being locked up in prison. He discovers that Martin was locked up as a result of a deal done between Bertrand, owner of the major import-export firm in the area, and the police. Hmmm, so not such a decent guy after all.

After some thought, Esch writes an article or letter decrying the injustice of Martin being in gaol and delivers it in person to the Social Democrat paper, The People’s Guardian. Here he is humiliated by the editor’s blasé and patronising attitude, politely pointing out that they wrote all the articles about Martin that they needed to at the time he was arrested, not weeks later (p.228 ff).

The editor lets slip that Bertrand is a sodomite, although only ‘down in Italy’ (p.230). To the reader of the previous novel, The Romantic, this is a dynamite revelation because it sheds a new light not only on Bertrand’s dandyish personality, wit and irony, but on the odd, teasing relationship he had with The Romantic‘s lead female character, Elisabeth.

Anyway, in this novel Bertrand slowly comes to symbolise to Esch all the wickedness and corruption in the world, which he feels oppressed by but is too thick and uneducated to analyse coherently.

Thus, by half way through the novel, Esch is describing Bertrand as ‘the Antichrist’ (p.237). This seemed such an excessive thought that I wondered whether the novel might be leading up to Esch assassinating Bertrand. This is typical of hundreds of sentences describing Esch’s thoughts:

It was a matter of striking a blow at the whole thing, or at least at the head of the offence. (p.243)

In fact a constellation of feelings begins to coalesce in his mind: Esch felt a powerful sense of yearning for something higher when he attended the Salvation Army meeting; he is disgusted by Korn and Ilona’s affair; he sublimates or vents this in mounting antagonism to the fact that Teltscher and Oppenheimer are Jewish. When he sees Teltscher and Oppenheimer walking towards him chatting about the wrestling project, Esch bursts out in anti-Jewish insults and Oppenheimer is prompted to say ‘he’s an anti-Semite’ (p.238), although, a little puzzlingly, they continue on pretty good terms.

All this combines with the powerful but incoherent sense Esch has that things are in chaos, that the whole world is ruled by the corrupt (the sodomite Bertrand), that there is injustice everywhere (his friend Martin in gaol). In particular this offends his book-keeper’s ‘upright soul’ and sense that there must be order – every debit must be balanced by a credit. (p.242)

So by this stage, half way through the novel, I wondered whether the novel is meant to be the portrait of a nascent fascist, a proto Nazi…

More plot

Since many summaries of the novel I’ve read describe it as a rollicking account of Esch and his troupe of women wrestlers, I was struck by how little description of them the book contains. There’s a page or so on the process of hiring the women wrestlers, training them and organising them. There’s a bit about sending out posters and publicity, a paragraph describing Teltscher supervising the unloading of the state sets at the Cologne docks, but then – in a glaring omission – no description of the Grand Opening Night. And only the briefest paragraph cursorily describing one fight. You might have expected at least a page about the actual art of wrestling, the different holds and manoeuvres, the rules maybe, explaining how they were staged and arranged, who the best ones were, and so on.

None of that is here. Instead Broch takes it as read that they become a regular nightly attraction at the Alhambra theatre, and gives us one description of Esch proudly walking among the packed tables at the cabaret theatre, and beginning to enjoy the profits he is sharing.

In other words, Broch is more interested in the ongoing evolution of Esch’s character than in external events, per se, and certainly than the women’s wrestling which is all but ignored. Shame. Could have been interesting, in its way, and possibly very funny. But Broch isn’t that kind of writer.

Esch is at Mother Hentjen’s looking at the wine list when it dawns on him that he should use his expertise to improve it or to get her better deals. Looking through a newspaper he reads about wine auctions held at a place called Saint-Gaor up the Rhine.

So he persuades a reluctant Frau Hentjen to accompany him, and Broch describes at length a day trip down the Rhine wherein the interest is, as usual, in the changing moods of the two characters, closely connected with the time of day and the setting (on the ferry up the Rhine), walking through the shadowy streets, climbing the dusty path up the Lorelei. By the end of the trek, Mother Hentjen is so exhausted that, plumped back in her seat on the train home she makes no complaint when Esch brushes her cheek then kisses her – because she is too exhausted to notice.

Back at her restaurant in Cologne she livens up a bit, but bids him her usual brisk goodnight, treating him the same as all the other punters, but Esch loiters, then goes up to her room, inflamed with conviction that the kiss was a promise and also overcome with the same kind of overblown semi-religious, world-saving fervour we’ve seen mounting in his character throughout the story.

Thus he overcomes Mother Hentjen and rapes her, not in her bedroom but in an out-of-the-way alcove which contains two spare beds, although she keeps on shaking her head, No, till the end.

Esch settles in to be Mother Hentjen’s lover but in a very peculiar way, and Broch devotes a couple of pages of characteristically long, impressionistic sentences describing the strange trance Hentjen goes into whenever Esch approaches. He comes to her in her afternoon siesta or at night after closing time and how she submits to his embrace from a great distance, from a place where she doesn’t even acknowledge herself any more, so that the more furiously Esch labours in vain to prompt an animal grunt of lust from her, the more determined she becomes to stay silent.

Nonetheless, Mother Hentjen accepts his animal lusts on her body, and they become an item – for this reader, at any rate, an odd and disturbing item.

Esch continues his obsession with emigrating to America. He goes into a bookshop (something he has rarely done in his life – an indication of his low level of education and intelligence) and buys a book about America, poring over the sepia photos and memorising facts and figures about this marvellous country. In his simplicity he imagines it as a place of justice and honour where innocent trade union organisers aren’t locked up (like Martin) at the behest of perverted company owners (like Bertrand).

Gernerth comes up with the idea of hiring a negro woman wrestler. Already the wrestling women have been given (entirely fake) names and are claimed to be from different countries. In each bout care is taken that the German girl ends up triumphant.

Esch repeats his suggestions of emigrating to America. Teltscher says he’ll stand no chance in America where they already have women’s wrestling, but in Mexico or South America there’s a shortage of women, so if the wrestling doesn’t turn a profit, the women can always go back on the game. But blondes, they must be blondes. Latinos like blondes.

So Esch, naively in this as in all his other endeavours, returns to scouring the bars and brothels of Cologne, this time looking for blondes. In an obscure wish to avoid Mother Hentjen’s reproaches, and to show that he isn’t using the services of prostitutes on his investigations, Esch goes out of his way to also visit the homosexual brothels.

This is a rather cack-handed plot device which allows Broch to take us into gay brothels circa 1903. Here Esch quickly discovers that Bertrand is a legendary sodomite, possessed of vast riches, a luxurious house and a steam yacht crewed by handsome young men, and that he enjoys picking up rent boys, for a while.

Esch discovers one such boy, Harry Köhler who, he discovers, had a brief relationship with Bertrand. Over drinks in a bar Esch hears Harry repeat Bertrand’s notions about love being based on detachment, which the reader of the first novel remembers Bertrand elaborately explaining to the sceptical Elisabeth 15 years earlier. Clearly it is his established spiel.

Anyway, it is Mother Hentjen’s birthday and we are surprised to be reminded, from the way she is described as fat and old and dried-up, that she is just 37.

She has gotten used to Esch turning up towards closing time, and taking her to the alcove (not her private bedroom) where on the spare bed he spears her stiff, unyielding and silent body. On the night of her birthday she is, for once, slightly responsive, but Esch realises she is consumed with jealousy over his involvement with the women wrestlers, and suspects he has a woman in every town he travels to. With indeterminate seriousness, she threatens to ‘do him in’ if she finds him being unfaithful to her. By this stage I was finding the petty-minded, stupid behaviour of a lot of these characters rather tiresome.

Esch, driven by increasingly obscure but powerful urges to ‘do the right thing’, whatever that is, decides it is time to extract from the wrestling business the initial investment and profits due to Fräulein Erna and Lohberg back in Cologne. He goes to see Gernerth who protests like fury, not least because the women wrestling attraction is losing popularity and struggling to make a profit. He gives Esch half what’s owed to his friends.

Esch take the train back to Mannheim and looks up Fräulein Erna, has tea with her and the milksop Lohberg. When Esch reports that he’s only brought only half the money owed to her, Erna flies into a fury. Despite this, a little later Esch is standing over her as she writes a receipt and finds himself stroking her cheek and then they kiss and then they go up to her bedroom and make love.

Immersed in the flow of the text, I accepted this development as many others, which I didn’t really understand or believe, but which flowed with the same lack of logic as him raping Mother Hentjen. I’d have preferred Erna to have remained an entertainingly vicious enemy and felt simply disappointed that they ended up sleeping together. Aren’t people boring, at least in novels. In novels, in fiction, in literature, it is so often about love love love or sex sex sex.

Anyway, Erna consents to have sex with Esch every night of his stay in Mannheim, despite the fact that they both know she is engaged to the weedy tobacconist, Lohberg. Which is so wildly beyond the psychology of any woman I’ve ever met or heard about that, by this stage, I seemed to be reading a novel from a parallel dimension. Or a different time. Or a different culture.

Esch dutifully visits Martin in prison and is infuriated that he seems to be taking his incarceration so calmly. Martin was, in fact, only sentenced to three months, for sedition, but Esch has worked himself up into a vast confused state of anger at the entire order of things, based on confused grievances at: poor Ilona having to stand by the board and have daggers thrown at her, at Martin being arrested simply for calling for the brotherhood of man, and at the corruption of Bertrand the unnatural sodomite who seems to be able to get away with it all.

This is all muddled in with his Salvation Army experience of yearning for a better world and, on the other hand, his narrow-minded, book-keeper’s obsession with balancing accounts, making everything just so and imposing order, an order which, in his feverish hallucinations, seems to include sacrifice, his own acts of sacrifice plus some obscure sense that someone must die or be murdered.

For some reason, murder and death and sacrifice have, by this stage, become the keywords of the text.

This delirious brew detaches itself from reality in an extended sequence where Esch takes the train from Mannheim to Badenweiler on the edge of the Black Forest. For it is here – according to one of the rent boy, Harry Köhler’s, friends in the gay bar, a fat musician named Alfons (his wobbling folds of fat are repeatedly described) – that Bertrand has his big estate.

As in a dream, Esch walks through town to the gates of the estate, walks unopposed through the gates, enters the house, mounts the stairs and finds himself meeting Bertrand, shaking his hand, welcomed into his study and talking to him. There follow pages of heady, pseudo-philosophical conversation which sound fine but didn’t mean anything to me. Here’s Bertrand:

‘No one can see another in the darkness, Esch, and that cloudless clarity of yours is only a dream. You know that I cannot keep you beside me, much as you fear your loneliness. We are a lost generation. I too can only go about my business.’
It was only natural that Esch should feel deeply stricken, and he said:
‘Nailed to the cross.’

This means nothing to me and apart from the fact that a dream sequence appears to have strayed into an otherwise fairly realistic novel, I just couldn’t process or compute this sequence.

According to the Wikipedia summary of the novel, Esch had visited with the intention of murdering Bertrand. But I found Esch’s consciousness so confused that I found the Bertrand visit a series of inconsequential and dreamlike sentences which conveyed no hard facts or events. It didn’t help that the visit is immediately preceded by a long digression describing a kind of dream voyage by ship to America. Taken together the entire thing seemed like a strange, dreamlike fantasy.

Certainly at no point did I feel it was ever Esch’s intention to hurt Bertrand and the scene contains no sense of threat or danger, and no dramatic reversal as of Bertrand talking him out if it, at all.

Esch goes to see Martin a second time in prison and slips him a packet of cigarettes while the easy-going warden turns a blind eye. Martin casually suggests Esch will never see him alive again, which just exacerbates Esch’s confused sense that some kind of sacrifice is required for him to be free of the past.

Esch returns to Cologne after his six-day excursion and returns to Mother Hentjen’s restaurant. His thought processes are really confused by now. He gets angry that MJ is once again cool to him in front of all her customers and storms out. But then he returns after the restaurant has closed, insists on being taken up to her bed, and assaults her almost at once.

Afterwards she is quiet as he goes off into one of his complex, contradictory long fantastical thought processes which winds him up into such a fury that he slaps her round the face and immediately proposes that they get married, to which she meekly replies yes. The reader is by this stage in the twilight zone of a completely alien psychology.

Next morning, the sight of the portrait of the original Herr Hentjen hanging on the wall of the restaurant drives Esch to (yet another) paroxysm of fury. He calls for paper and pen, and there and then writes a letter to the Chief of Police denouncing Bertrand as a homosexual and a pervert, folds it in his pocket.

He posts it next day on hi way to see Gernerth who, he discovers, is away from his office. Then Teltscher the knife thrower arrives and tells him just how weak the women wrestling business has become (there were only fifty customers in the audience the night before), and they discuss how they can recoup their investment from the mysteriously absent Gernerth.

Esch is still nudging Teltscher to come to America with him where Esch – like an idiot – thinks they’ll all be able to live in castles and Ilona will live in a deer park like a princess.

Later, Esch swings by the gay bar again and is surprised when Alfons the fat musician comes in looking dishevelled and distraught and tells him that Harry is dead, killed himself with an overdose. Why? asks Esch, and Alfons points to the newspapers.

They are edged with black and the entire city is mourning the abrupt death of the eminent businessman Eduard von Bertrand. Reading the small print, Esch sees that Bertrand shot himself. Because he is by now quite deranged with narcissistic self-absorption, Esch doesn’t in the slightest blame himself for giving the letter to the police which must have prompted an initial visit to Bertrand who must have realised he would be outed and imprisoned etc, and so decided to kill himself. None of this terrible agony is described or even hinted at. Instead we simply see it from Esch’s blunt, stupid point of view and his only reaction is to think – utterly irrationally – that this means Martin the cripple will no longer follow and menace him with his crutches (?).

Esch pushes off, leaving Alfons to have an extended reflection on his own life and how, as a fat gay musician, he is in touch with sensations and feelings which straight men with their incessant tragic pursuit of women, will never know. Men chase women because they think the intensity of their possession will protect them from their fear of death. Then when it doesn’t protect them, they rage against the women for failing them, and beat them. Alfons feels well out of the whole farce.

Cut to Ilona getting out of the bed she shares with Korn who is fast asleep and snoring. She also reflects on her life, on the man who committed suicide for her sake and the other man who she was unfaithful to and who nearly killed her, and to the venereal disease she was given as a girl which made her infertile. Then she sneaks down the hall and slips into bed beside skinny Fräulein Erna.

Back with Esch in Cologne, Oppenheimer and Teltscher are both keen to track down Gernerth who has disappeared on family business to Munich, apparently. The theatre’s rent and wages for the staff and performers all fall due at the end of the month, in a few days’ time. But Gernerth doesn’t appear and when they call in the police, the latter ascertain that Gernerth had withdrawn his entire company’s funds from his bank and done a bunk.

He’s disappeared with all their money, leaving them liable for all the company’s debts.

To my surprise this isn’t as ruinous for Esch as I’d expected. Oppenheim and Teltcher concoct a new plan to use the theatre properties which the Hungarian appears to own, and to rent out a new theatre and put on the knife throwing act among others. They persuade Esch to take out a mortgage on Mother Hentjen’s restaurant in order to finance the new business, Oppenheimer pocketing a 1% fee.

I wasn’t clear just how much Esch was being fleeced by this, but just like Joachim von Paselow in The Romantic it is clear that he is unworldly and impractical and easily duped. Not least because his head is continually occupied with obsessions about making ‘sacrifices’ in order to ‘redeem Time’ and bring about ‘a new world’, and so on.

While Esch’s head is full of this nonsense, Mother Hentjen gets on with repainting her restaurant and the others set up their theatre company and Esch has the claustrophobic feeling that all his best efforts to escape – to make some kind of grand sacrifice, to restore order to the world or, most ambitiously, to take everyone off to America where they would be reborn and live like kings – have failed, and that the banal world of the everyday is everywhere rising up to stifle him.

It was a vicious circle from which there was no escape. (p.336)

And so Esch slowly resigns himself to his place in the actual world, sometimes taking out his frustration at not being able, by some dramatic sacrifice to rise to a higher sphere of perfection, by beating the crap out of Mother Hentjen, and in due course they are married.

In a super-brief, one-paragraph coda right at the end of the text, the narrator tells us that when the theatre Teltscher and Ilona had set up in Duisburg goes bankrupt, Esch and Hentjen invest in their next venture, which also fails, and so lose all their money.

But then Esch unexpectedly gets a job as head book-keeper in a large industrial concern and so they live relatively well, Mother Hentjen grows to genuinely admire him, and he hardly ever beats her any more.

And that is that.

Social history

I’m not sure these are novels anyone would read for pleasure, exactly. The ‘drawing’ of the characters is detailed but feels alien, in fact doubly alien, because

The language the novels are translated into is not idiomatic English, it’s like an English no-one ever spoke or wrote, strongly betraying its Germanic roots.
The behaviour and attitudes of the characters is so alien to English traditions, in all kinds of ways.

Sex

In English literature until some time in the 1970s sex was avoided or buried in euphemisms. The German attitude is strikingly more blunt and crude.

Esch is experienced in ‘drinking dens, brothels and girls’ (p.226)
When Esch is half way through seducing Erna and she rebuffs him, he just goes off and spends the night with a more accommodating woman. Simple as that.
Esch is upset that Ilona is spending the night with Korn, not because of any outraged morality, but simply because he thinks Korn is a crude bear who doesn’t deserve her.
When Erna first meets Lohberg the naive tobacconist, she frankly wonders whether he’s ever had a woman and whether, during the heat of sex, he would be moved to tears (p.211). That’s not the kind of speculation you get in Virginia Woolf or Aldous Huxley, is it?
We are told that Esch fairly regularly ends the evenings at Mother Hentjen’s by taking Hede home and sleeping with her. Hede is never introduced as a character, we never hear her speak or feature in anyone’s consideration.
In a passage which is striking because the author and character take it for granted, Esch – at a loose end because of the strike – conceives a way to pass the time which is to make a list of all the women he’s ever had, and send them postcards. There’s no subtlety and no qualms or hesitation or periphrasis about the idea – he’s shagged a certain number of women and now he gets a pen and paper and racks his brains to make a list, after a while adding in the dates and locations so far as he can remember.

Compare and contrast with the Anglo-Saxon tradition, where sex is hedged around with the barbed wire of Puritanism and prudishness. To understand English literature you have to understand that the English have been terrified of open, honest descriptions of sex and sexual attraction until relatively recently.

I suppose a possible upside of the Anglo approach is that you could argue that sexual euphemism has taken its place alongside other English euphemisms and circumlocutions – for example around class, one’s place in society, and socially appropriate behaviour – to create what amounts, in England, to an entire culture or irony and misdirection.

As far as I can tell, throughout the 19th century the Continentals (especially the French) thought the English were disgusting hypocrites about sex, preserving a Victorian chasteness in our literature and public discourse (politics, religion), while the streets of London were heaving with prostitutes who accosted almost everyone every evening in the most brazen way; that we went to great lengths to preserve our self-image of gentlemanliness and stiff upper lip and imperial attitudes etc, while casually nipping over to Paris for scenes of gross debauchery. Whereas the French prided themselves on integrating sex and sexuality more honestly into their culture and literature.

So I suppose that the hypocrisy – of double standards – which the French so despised in the English might be related to all the other types of our multiple levels of irony, double entendre, misdirection and circumlocution about sex. In other words, that the English sense of humour which the Continentals remarked on, was closely connected to the English inability to discuss or describe sex honestly, which they also remarked on.

Anyway, the point of this excursion is simply to point out that this vast apparatus of irony, euphemism, and long-winded circumlocution about sex which characterises so much English literature is simply absent from this book. It doesn’t exist and nobody seems to miss it. They think about sex a lot, they have sex, sometimes they feel a bit jealous – that’s about it.

Therefore, although they contain a) extended nature descriptions, of parks and gardens and twilit skies and b) go into extended detail about the mental states of their central protagonists and the difficulty they have pinning down evanescent thoughts and ideas – these novels nonetheless completely lack the subtlety or understatement about social relationships and sex which a reader of English novels is used to.

There’s a strange kind of haunting absence about them.

Class

English literature, like English society, is absolutely drenched in class distinctions, the most fundamental of which is the gap between those who went to posh private schools – and dress and talk and exude confidence accordingly – and the rest of us, who didn’t.

Obviously, other 19th century European nations also had class hierarchies, sometimes more rigid than ours when it came to the top layers of aristocracy, court formalities etc.

But below that level, it’s harder to make out class distinctions in foreign literature. Thus in The Anarchist Esch is educated enough to be a clerk but doesn’t know what the ‘premiere’ of a play means (p.221), and I think Mother Hentjen’s is meant to be a pretty rough establishment, full of pipe-smoking working class types, who routinely take one or other of the ‘waitresses’ home to sleep with them, but there are none of the class markers I’d be used to in an English novel.

For example, none of them seem to have an accent. No distinction is made about the way they talk. They all appear to talk the same dialect, language and register. The interplay of accents and class distinction through vocabulary or turn of phrase which make up a huge amount of the dialogue in English novels (whether characters say ‘Hello, old boy’ or ‘Alright, mate’) is utterly absent from these books.

When rough Esch meets urbane Bertrand they speak the same language, use the same phrases, there is no way of distinguishing between the crude wife-beater and the suave gay company chairman by anything they say.

The only bit of linguistic distinction, the only place where Broch indicates that different people have different registers, idiolects and so on, relates to Ilona who is Hungarian and so doesn’t speak German very well. That’s it. All the other Germans appear to speak pure German without inflection or distinction.

Could it be that there is a lot of variation and distinctiveness in the characters’ speech in the original German and that all this has been lost in translation?

What is entirely missing from the novel is any sense of the self-consciousness and social awareness of class which so dominates English literature, snobbery in other words.

Snobbery plays a huge role in the English novel, from Jane Austen through Dickens and Thackeray and on to the incredibly upper-class characters in late George Eliot or Henry James, characters who skilfully navigate the complex social etiquette surrounding class (and region and education) in England.

All that social subtlety, all those velleities, all those implications through the careful selection of the mot juste in description or dialogue, are completely absent from these works.

Esch thinks the company chairman, Bertrand, must be a pretty decent sort. He thinks Martin the trade union activist is an honest bloke. He dislikes Korn because he’s so bearishly unthinking. That’s it. There is none of the social subtlety of the English tradition.

Comedy

A German joke is no laughing matter. (Mark Twain)

As a result of its blunt straightforwardness regarding a) sex and b) society and class, there is little or no comedy in the novel. Maybe I’m being obtuse, but you’ve read my summary of the plot and there aren’t many comic scenes, are there?

The only scene with a tincture of comedy is the tea party held by Fräulein Erna for Esch and Lohberg, where we see the three of them jostling and competing. Or Erna and Esch competing over the weedy tobacconist. But the humour mostly comes from Lohberg’s incomprehension of why the other two are bickering i.e. their thwarted lust for each other. And that is, at bottom, a fairly crude situation.

As I read about Martin the cripple or Bertrand the dandy company owner, and crop-haired Esch stumping around the cobbled streets of Cologne on his way to the dockers’ dive run by Mother Hentjen, I kept thinking of the stark German Expressionism of the 1900s, and then of the deliberate cripples and grotesques of Weimar art.

Stark and ugly is the German style. For example, nothing that Oppenheimer says is remotely funny or even interesting, but the way he is a tubby, little man with a disorderly office paints a picture which is sort of humorous in the Germanic way, in the way of laughing at crude stereotypes.

Philosophy

So what does the book have to offer if it lacks these mainstays of the English tradition? The answer is what I called in my review of The Anarchist, Broch’s phenomenology – his interest in the feeling of thought, his fascination with the way his central characters struggle to formulate and fully experience their own feelings and intuitions and ideas.

Yet there was an obscure miscalculation somewhere that he couldn’t quite put his finger on… (p.215)

This, it seems to me, is the strong point and main feature of the novels – the way Broch captures the fleeting quality of thought itself. Up to a point.

The big downside to the novels, in my opinion, is that these thoughts all too often turn out to be those of psychotics and religious hysterics.

Thus Joachim von Paselow, from the first novel, becomes steadily more deranged with paranoia, his thoughts eventually swamping the text in a goo of half-baked religio-philosophical ramblings.

In just the same way, the book-keeper August Esch, who starts the novel as a reasonably sensible character, by the end is consumed with absurdly over-the-top, overblown hyper-emotions.

Here’s a small example. The crude, blunt character Balthasar Korn arrives home to find a little drinks party going on in his front room, and rudely shoos the milksop tobacconist Lohberg off his sofa in order to plonk himself down on it. A pretty trivial moment. Here it is described from Esch’s point of view:

The noise which the man Korn raised while doing this was extraordinary, his body and voice filled the room more and more, filled it from wall to wall; all that was earthly and fleshly in Korn’s ravenously hungry being swelled beyond the confines of the room, threatening mightily to fill the whole world, and with it the unalterable past swelled up, crushing everything else out and stifling all hope; the uplifted and luminous stage darkened, and perhaps indeed it no longer existed. ‘Well, Lohberg, where’s your kingdom of redemption now?’ shouted Esch, as though he were seeking to deafen his own terrors, shouted it in fury, because neither Lohberg nor anybody else was capable of giving an answer to the question: why must Ilona descend into contact with the earthly and the dead?

Much of the later parts of the novel are like this, with way over-the-top hysteria prompted by apparently trivial, everyday occurrences.

By the end of the novel I had come to feel all the passages like this – and some go on for pages and pages – amounted to pretentious, adolescent bombast.

How I longed for one witty turn of phrase which would defuse this universal Weltschmerz, for the acid wit of an Evelyn Waugh, the levity of a P.G. Wodehouse, God for just a little English irony and self-deprecation.

But right to the end Broch appears to take everything as tragically as his pathetic, lowlife characters.

Credit

20th century German literature

A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)

The Weimar Republic

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by Simon on April 6, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Germany, Literature, Novel, Sex

Posted by Simon on April 6, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/the-anarchist-hermann-broch/

The Romantic by Hermann Broch (1931)

It was only fragments of the past that fleetingly emerged, and important and trivial things flowed chaotically through one another… (The Romantic, page 11)

Hermann Broch (1886 – 1951) is considered one of the major European Modernist authors. He was born in Vienna to a prosperous Jewish family and worked for some time in his family’s factory. In 1909 he converted to Roman Catholicism and married Franziska von Rothermann, the daughter of a knighted manufacturer. In 1927 i.e. aged 40, Broch sold the textile factory and decided to study mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna, and to pursue a full-time career as a writer. At the age of 45, in 1931, his first major literary work, the trilogy The Sleepwalkers, was published in Munich.

The Sleepwalkers consists of three medium-sized novels:

The Romantic (1888)
The Anarchist (1903)
The Realist (1918)

The dates are not my addition, they’re part of the formal, full titles of each novel, indicating:

That each novel is, among other things, a portrait of its era
That Broch is quite a schematic writer. Recall that he chose to study maths at university. Note that 1888 to 1903 is 15 years, and 1903 to 1918 is 15 years. So a span of 30 years. And it is symmetrical. And it is a trilogy, suggesting three points of focus…

Reading Hermann Broch

I read the trilogy in the English translation made by prolific translators Willa and Edwin Muir soon after the original German publication, back in the early 1930s.

There’s no getting round the fact that Broch is pretty difficult to read, for a number of reasons:

Long paragraphs Weaned on a hundred years of post-Hemingway minimalism, Anglo-Saxon readers are used to short sentences in short paragraphs. Whereas Broch – like Kafka – routinely deploys paragraphs which last an entire page, sometimes two, sometimes even more, so that the reader is confronted by what initially appears to be a wall of words.

In the modern Anglo-Saxon tradition, dialogue is broken up so that each exchange starts on a new line, making it visually and psychologically easy to follow. Not here. Extended dialogues are presented as unbroken blocks of text, which can make them hard to follow. If your focus drifts at all, it’s quite easy to find you’ve ‘read’ an entire page with absolutely no memory of what happened.

Long sentences The very long paragraphs contain some very, very long sentences. Routinely I got into the habit of having to reread entire paragraphs, and certainly some of the half-page-long sentences. Rereading helped them swim up into meaning.

The translation In almost every sentence there are ungainly and sometimes grammatically questionable turns of phrase.

Besides, visiting Berlin but twice a year, he had abundance to do when he was there. (p.11)

Perhaps his mother was really against his being sent to Culm, but one could put no dependence on her. (p.13)

Nevertheless she resolved to ask Joachim some time what was his birthday. (p.74)

Is this because German has such a different language from English, and the Muirs have stuck as close as possible to German word order? Or is it because Broch’s ‘Modernist’ German would be difficult even for a German speaker and the translators have tried to capture that difficulty?

There is no real way of knowing, but reading Broch is emphatically not like reading an English author.

Difficult descriptions Some of the text swims into view and suddenly you understand what is going on, who is talking, and what they’re saying. Then at other moments the text becomes blurry, describes the characters’ confused emotions or intuitions or misperceptions even, at moments (particularly when seen through the eyes of the central character, Joachim von Pasenow) what seem almost to be hallucinations.

Yet now suddenly everything had receded to a great distance in which Ruzena’s face and Bertrand’s could scarcely be told from each other. (p.56)

A lot of the time you’re not sure whether this is carefully calculated effect, or the cumulative impact of the long sentences in long paragraphs rendered into unidiomatic English. Is it you or him?

Stream of consciousness After a while I began to realise that, at least in part, it’s him i.e. it is a calculated effect. As you get used to Broch’s ‘background’ style, you begin to be able to make out passages where the characters have giddy, dizzy moments of misperception, the central character, Joachim von Pasenow, in particular being subject to all kinds of odd and confusing thoughts.

Things were as elusive as a melody that one thinks one cannot forget and yet loses the thread of, only to be compelled to seek it again and again in anguish. (p.114)

And you realise that at least part of Broch’s intention is to capture the flow of thoughts, and the evanescence of consciousness. Broch takes us into the mind of Joachim, and then of the two other central characters, in order to show us how multi-levelled consciousness is, and how often half-formed ideas or impressions float across our minds without ever coming into focus, often because we don’t want to fully acknowledge them.

Phenomenology I wonder what kind of philosophy Broch studied at the University of Vienna because this focus on trying to describe the actual processes of consciousness – the flavour of different thoughts, and the ways different types of thought arise and pass and sink in our minds – reminds me that Phenomenology was a Germanic school of philosophy from the early part of the century, initially associated with Vienna.

In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgements, perceptions, and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience. (Wikipedia)

That’s not a bad summary of what Broch appears to be doing in this novel. Here’s how one character feels about ‘love’:

It was an almost joyful ground for reassurance that the feeling which she hopefully designated as love should have such a very unassuming and civilised appearance; one had actually to search one’s mind to discern it, for it was so faint and thin that only against a background of silvery ennui did it become visible. (p.70)

Just one example of from hundreds of a Broch character seeking, searching to define and make out feelings or ideas or notions which hover on the edge of consciousness or definition.

Novel of ideas The ‘novel of ideas’ is a notoriously slippery concept to define. This is more of a novel with ideas.

This is most obvious in the cleverest character, Eduard von Bertrand, who makes subtle, sophisticated or ironic speeches about love or religion or the notable speech about African Christians over-running Europe (see below).

But other characters also struggle to define and understand ideas. When Elisabeth is at home with her parents in the country there is a two- or three-page passage where she reflects at length on the special nature of her parents’ marriage, which includes a meditation on the true meaning of collecting, of making collections (to overcome death, p.71) and of age, which she experiences not as an idea but like a serpent stifling her consciousness.

Joachim spends his entire time trying to sort out his ideas about honour, duty, the army, the uniform and so on and, in the final third or so of the novel becomes obsessed with religious imagery, with a conviction of his own sinfulness and that God is punishing him (what for? well, that’s what he spends his time agonising about).

But the most philosophical character is the narrator. Personally I feel the novel gets off to a rocky start, we are introduced to too many characters in a quirky and almost incomprehensible way. But once it beds in, you are never more than a few pages from an extended description which tends to morph into ‘philosophical’ thoughts about many aspects of the quiet bourgeois style of life the book describes: the effect of the music Elisabeth plays in a piano trio (p.92) or an extended description of the landscaping of the garden round the Baddensens’ manor house, or so on.

It is not a novel of ideas in the sense that it proposes a massive concept of society like 1984 or is full of clever character sitting round discussing Important Subjects, as in an Aldous Huxley novel. It is more a novel which describes the complex feelings and intuitions of its characters which sometimes invoke larger ideas or notions. In one scene Elisabeth and her mother pay a visit to the von Pasenows. The conversation is getting a little rocky when the pet canary starts singing.

They gathered round it as round a fountain and for a few moments forgot everything else; it was as though this slender golden thread of sound, rising and falling, were winding itself around them and linking them in that unity on which the comfort of their living and dying was established; it was as though this thread which wavered up and filled their being, and yet which curved and wound back again to its source, suspended their speech, perhaps because it was a thin, golden ornament in space, perhaps because it brought to their minds for a few moments that they belonged to each other, and lifted them out of the dreadful stillness whose reverberations rise like an impenetrable wall of deafening silence between human being and human being, a wall through which the human voice cannot penetrate, so that it has to falter and die. (p.77)

There aren’t any real ‘ideas’ in this passage. Maybe it would be accurate to call it a kind of philosophically-minded description. A novel written by a philosophically-minded author. Not so much a novel of ideas as a novel of thoughtful descriptions.

The Romantic (1888) – plot summary, part one

So, I found the book quite difficult to get into because its style, layout, and approach are all alien to the super-accessible, Americanised prose we are all used to in 2020.

But, rather like getting into a cold swimming pool, if you persist, your body acclimatises to the style and you begin to grasp the basic structures of the novel, and on the back of that, to understand and appreciate what, after a while, you realise are moments of great beauty and sensitivity.

And you also come to realise that the book is built about sets of binary opposites with an almost mathematical precision (see my comment about schematic, above).

Joachim von Pasenow was sent by his landowning family to army cadet school aged ten (p.24), unlike his elder brother, Helmuth, who remained on the estate to run the family farm. The story opens with Joachim now aged about 30 (he has spent 20 years away from home, p.40), still in the army, a lieutenant (p.15) and about to be promoted to captain (p.89).

Town versus country Thus the brothers represent alternative destinies: Joachim lives in barracks in Berlin; Helmuth has stayed on the family farm in the country to help his ageing parents. So a basic binary in the novel is the contrast between urban people and values (‘you people who live in cities’) and rural lives and values (p.29).

One must not judge things merely from the standpoint of the city man; out there in the country people’s feelings were less artificial and meant more. (p.52)

But Joachim is not quite the representative of urban life I’ve just suggested. We soon get to know about a good friend of his who he met in the boy cadets and became a brother officer, Eduard von Bertrand. Bertrand quit the army and has become a businessman, a cotton importer (p.26), familiar with the Stock Exchange and the mysteries of banking and business ledgers. He has a

sureness and lightness of touch, and his competence in the affairs of life (p.147)

He has grown his hair curly (his ‘far too wavy hair’, p.51), wears smart suits, and has travelled widely, most recently to America, all qualities which Joachim mistrusts or actively despises.

So if Helmuth represents life back on the farm and Bertrand represents smart wheeler-dealer city life – then Joachim is the man in between – attracted but repelled by Bertrand’s stylish cynicism, equally attracted by his memories of simple life on the family farm, but repelled by the reality of his parents’ stultifying boredom and vulgarity.

The virgin versus the whore Same when it comes to women. Joachim’s father comes to see him in Berlin and the son is, reluctantly, obliged to take him to see the sights, which includes dinner at the Jäger Casino, where they come across two fancy women. (I think they’re high class prostitutes, but the social manners of the time being depicted and the elliptical way everyone refers to them don’t make it utterly clear.) Joachim’s father bluntly hands the dark-haired woman a 50-mark note with the apparent idea that he’s buying her for his son, but she suddenly runs off to cry with the lavatory attendant (?).

Joachim is, characteristically, disgusted by his father’s crudeness, but also haunted by the girl’s beauty and by the fleeting moment when she flirtatiously runs her hand over his close-cropped army haircut. His dad goes back to the farm, and Joachim spends days scouring the working class districts of Berlin with a half-formed intention to find the girl. One day she steps out of the crowd and into his life.

She is named Ruzena. She is not German but Czech, to be precise Bohemian (p.17), and speaks German badly (‘Not like you friend; he’s ugly man’) in a harsh staccato style.

Joachim takes Ruzena for lunch, then they take a carriage out to ‘the Havel’ – a park in West Berlin – she takes his arms under hers as they stroll beside the misty river, till it starts to rain and they take shelter under a tree where she leans against him. They kiss.

Back in Berlin he walks her to the door of her apartment where they kiss again, he turns and begins walking away, but turns again, runs up to her. She takes him upstairs and strips him and they have sex, for days afterwards he is haunted by the vision of her long black hair spread like a fan across her white pillow.

But – as usual – Joachim is conflicted. On his visit up to town, his father had suggested that Joachim pay court to the daughter of an aristocratic family in the neighbourhood, the Baddensens. She is named Elisabeth, who (to make things as simplistically symbolic as possible) is a posh, innocent blonde compared with Ruzena’s sensuous dark colouring. Elisabeth is the daughter of the Baron and Baroness von Baddensen, who live in the old manor-house on an estate at Lestow (p.24).

So Joachim is caught between the pure, angelic, blonde virgin of an eminent, rich family – or a raven-haired sex goddess, a courtesan who’s not even properly German, but has stolen his heart… or his loins, anyway.

Honour versus cynicism Yet another binary pairing occurs when Joachim’s elder brother is unexpectedly shot dead in a duel. a) In plot terms, since Joachim is now the only heir of the farm, his father wants Joachim to return to the land, to rural life with its illiterate peasants and simpler, Christian values. b) But in terms of the schema, Bertrand now grows in weight as a symbolic figure. He is given speeches praising city life, and deprecating rural values, especially rural – and by extension European – Christian faith.

In a striking speech he compares the waning of European Christianity with the passionate adherence of the African converts German and other European missionaries are making in Africa right now (1888). One day, Bertrand fancifully predicts, a great tidal wave of African Christians will sweep into a heathen Europe, reconverting it, and enthroning a black Pope in the Vatican (p.29).

The cause of Helmuth’s death wasn’t accidental. It was a duel, an old-fashioned duel, fought over ‘an affair of honour’ with a Polish landowner (though we never find out the precise cause).

So Helmuth’s straightforward ‘honour’ is compared & contrasted with Bertrand’s more worldly-wise cynicism. It’s not that Bertrand is a particularly fiery atheist, he is just a modern, successful business man who doesn’t understand how such 17th century values as duels and ‘honour’ have lived on into the age of trains and factories (p.51).

The character of Joachim von Pasenow

And, as usual, Joachim is the man in between, caught between his brother’s impeccable rectitude, which he himself feels was excessive, but repelled by Bertrand’s casual dismissal or at least questioning of it.

It is this aspect of being a man caught in between two worlds which really defines Joachim’s character, and the phrase ‘two worlds’ occurs a number of times in his internal monologues. He is perpetually uneasy.

During the last few days he had become uncertain about many things, and this in some inexplicable way was connected with Bertrand; some pillar or other of life had become shaky… and there had grown within him a longing for permanence, security and peace. (p.31)

Joachim, the man in the middle of all these binary opposites, could, I suppose have been wise and witty, or brisk and soldier-like – but instead he comes over as neurotic and tense, so profoundly confused, about even simple things like who he’s walking behind in the city streets, ‘so susceptible to this feeling of insecurity’, that the reader starts to think he must be having a nervous breakdown.

For a moment everything was confused again and one did not know to whom Ruzena belonged… (p.56)

Joachim is easily confused. He doesn’t understand other people’s motives, or over-thinks them. He confuses people in a surreal way, so that the sight of his fiancée Elisabeth climbing up into a train departing for the country is so exactly like the movements of his father undertaking the same action, that Joachim momentarily confuses them both, to such an extent that he becomes speechless.

‘In his fantasy’ (p.24), Joachim imagines Ruzena lives in one of the small shops he walks past in Berlin, with her dark-haired mother. All fantasy.

He sees an Italian-looking man at the Opera with black hair, hears him speaking a foreign language, and in a fantastical way comes to believe that it is Ruzena’s brother, on no evidence at all. He proceeds to superimpose her features on his, and the ‘brother’s’ features onto Ruzena – all baseless fantasia.

It is typical of Joachim’s diseased fantasy that, when he returns home for his brother’s funeral and sits in the room with the coffin he fantasises that it is he, Joachim, in the coffin (p.41). He dreams that Ruzena has killed herself by drowning herself in the river at the Havel Park – but next thing, is fantasising that it is he who has drowned, or that it is his eyes which look up out of her face (p.123).

A fantastic association led his thoughts quite into the absurd, and the confusion became almost inextricable… (p.88)

Walking through Berlin he finds himself following a fat bearded man waddling along and on absolutely no evidence concludes that he must be Bertrand’s business agent.

Even though Joachim knew that what he thought was without sense or sequence, yet it was as though the apparently confused skein concealed a sequence… (p.48)

He can’t control his neurotic and destructive fantasies.

After a while I noticed the number of sentences which include two perhapses: perhaps it was this, perhaps only that –

Perhaps they were tears he had not noticed, perhaps however it was only the oppressive heat… (p.44)

Well, that might be taken as sarcasm, or it might not (p.76)

Ambiguity and uncertainty are sewn into the fabric of the text throughout.

Joachim often gets confused by the actual experience of his thoughts. His thoughts hove into view but don’t quite crystallise or complete, before they melt away. His mind has many levels and on all of them he is subject to confused impressions, misidentifications, and ungraspable insights.

… at the same time and in some other layer of his mind… (p.35)

Then, just when it was becoming visible, the thought broke off and hid itself… (p.67)

A new feeling had unexpectedly risen in him; he tried to find words for it… (p.74)

Some of this feels a little like the interior monologue brought to unmatched heights in James Joyce’s Ulysses, but only a little. In Joyce’s novel entire passages are conveyed in a swirl of consciousness, in which language itself breaks down. Nothing like that happens here. Language remains correct and grammatical, it’s the characters thoughts which break down and evade their grasp.

Urban alienation The most obvious way that the book is ‘modernist’ is the way the central character’s confusion and neurosis is directly linked to the bustling crowds of late-nineteenth century Berlin (what the book describes as ‘the labyrinth of the city, p.22) which he finds overwhelming.

But now his thoughts jostled each other like the people in the crowd round about him, and even though he saw a goal in front of him which he wanted to reach, it swam and wavered and was lost to view like the back of the fat man before him. (p.49)

Against the anarchy of modern values Joachim the soldier struggles to hold himself erect and firm but is constantly fighting a losing battle.

It often required an actual effort to hold things firmly in their proper shapes, an effort to difficult that many a time all those people who bustled about as if all was in order seemed to him limited, blind and almost crazy. (p.113)

This is epitomised by the odd, extended passage early in the novel where Joachim tries to express to himself why the concept of the uniform is so important. For him his uniform is a ‘bulwark against anarchy’ (p.23) and the sight of civilian clothes sometimes makes Joachim feel physically sick.

The dangers of civilian life were of a more obscure and incomprehensible kind. Chaos and disorder everywhere, without a hierarchy, without discipline. (p.60)

When he meets Bertrand wearing civvies, Joachim is as embarrassed and ashamed to be seen with him as if he were naked (p.27). When his parents start sending him letters requesting that he quit the army and go to run the family farm, Joachim likens the idea to being stripped of his uniform and dumped naked in the Alexanderplatz (p.59).

The tangle of nets which stretched over the whole city, the net which he felt everywhere… an impenetrable, incomprehensible net of civilian values which was invisible and yet which darkened everything. (p.62)

Interlude: Why is the novel titled The Romantic?

It would be easy to answer that Joachim is a man whose head is full of ‘romantic’ notions of honour, duty, love and Christian faith and rural values, and the novel shows the stress all these ideas come under – but it’s not quite that simple.

For Joachim is far beyond having a ‘romantic’ turn of mind. He’s mad, actually. He regularly hallucinates – as in merging different people – is puzzled and confused about how to behave and what to think. And also he is simply too stupid to understand what Bertrand is saying half the time. I.e. Joachim is not a portrait of a throwback to an earlier, more romantic era – he is a neurotic on the edge of a breakdown, quite a lot more of a hard-edged figure.

Also he is a soldier. There’s a moment in Joachim’s rooms where Bertrand proposes an elaborate and humorous toast to Ruzena and, seeing it through Joachim’s eyes, we realise that he simply doesn’t understand what Bertrand is on about. He suspects it’s some complicated ploy to take Ruzena away from him, whereas the reader can see it’s just an elaborate and humorous toast.

Later in the book, Joachim tries to provide a regular income for Ruzena, and Bertrand recommends him to his lawyer to arrange it all, and the lawyer quickly sees that Joachim is useless at making decisions, in all the aspects of practical life.

Later still, in conversation with Elisabeth, Betrand tells her point blank that the ability to ‘love’ requires a modicum of wisdom, or at least cleverness – and that Joachim lacks both.

After a while I realised that Joachim is scared of everything and everyone. He is certain Bertrand is out to ‘get’ him, to drag him into civilian life, to steal his black-haired beauty or his blonde virgin. He is insistently paranoid. Unless his uniform is done up just so, unless he hold himself stiff and erect, then some nameless, dreadful thing will happen.

So it seems to me that Joachim is less a ‘romantic’ than a delusional, borderline hysterical, neurotic, extremely uptight and dim junior army officer. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see him as precisely the kind of narrow, patriotic, sexually tortured junior officer who went on to carry out countless coups throughout the 20th century, imprison and execute the liberal opposition, close bars and brothels and impose a strict sexual morality which reflects his own neuroses.

In conclusion, the protagonist of this novel is not at all what the title ‘The Romantic’ might lead you to believe.

Also, he isn’t the only ‘romantic’ character in the book. Elisabeth is, in her way, a desperate romantic i.e. she wants wishful fantasies to outweigh reality. She wants to live with her mummy and daddy forever and ever. And then there’s Ruzena who, Bertrand decides, is a romantic child, as helpless as a little animal.

So maybe the novel would more accurately be titled The Romantics.

The Romantic (1888) – plot summary, part two

Joachim is called down to his parents’ farm for the funeral of Helmuth. This means abandoning Ruzena in Berlin. She has just recently got a job as a showgirl-cum-actress through contacts of Bertrand’s.

Characteristically, Joachim had no idea about how to fulfil this ambition of hers ‘with all his mooning, romantic fantasies’ (p.64), whereas Bertrand was easily able to pull a few strings and make it happen. Which is why Joachim envies and despises him. (As the novel progresses we get more and more ‘leaks’ as to what Bertrand makes of his former comrade in arms; he thinks of Joachim as a ‘clumsy fellow’, p.92, and later on will simply call him stupid.)

Bertrand pays a courtesy call on Ruzena and walks her home and then Ruzena leans into him and lifts her mouth to be kissed, exactly as she did with Joachim. But Bertrand chastely kisses her cheek, she goes into her apartment block while he lights a cigar and strolls jauntily away. You begin to realise Bertrand has the measure of both Joachim and Ruzena, and is amusing himself with them.

Similarly, when Bertrand goes down to stay with the von Pasenow family at their estate in Stolpin, Joachim has a (characteristically) fatalistic intuition that Bertrand will take Elisabeth from him and, just as inevitably, Bertrand does.

The three go riding together and – in a strange and persuasive moment – Joachim reins his horse in just as it was about to take an easy jump, making it stumble and hurt its ankle; so that he reluctantly says he better walk it home – leaving Bertrand to embark on an extended and highly philosophical seduction of Elisabeth.

It is a characteristically Broch touch that Joachim doesn’t understand then or forever after just what impulse made him rein in his horse, thus almost certainly hurting it, thus forcing him to leave Bertrand and Elisabeth alone, thus almost certainly pushing them together, thus almost certainly sabotaging the plans the parents of both families have to make a convenient match between them.

It’s not rocket science, but it’s typical of Joachim’s puzzled personality that he agonises about it; and it’s typical of Broch’s approach to the novel, to the idea of fiction, that this is the kind of psychologically charged moment he likes to depict and then have his characters mull over for pages of dense, psychologically-charged prose.

Joachim’s father has a stroke. He begins behaving oddly. The stroke occurred when he was writing a furious letter disinheriting Joachim for his ‘treachery’ of insisting on going back to Berlin and refusing to stay and run the family farm. Joachim goes down to see him and stay. He pays some visits to Elisabeth where their relationship proceeds in a halting, frosty kind of way. After vegetating at the farm for some time, Joachim makes an excuse to return to Berlin for three days and immediately sends for Ruzena. She comes running, cooks for him, they go to bed. Joachim is unhappy with Ruzena’s career on the stage – where she gets plaudits from strange men – and suggests to her that he sets her up running a little lace shop.

This is a typically stupid Joachim suggestion based solely on the warm impression he gained from looking into a lace shop in which a mother and daughter were bent over their needles on one of his many walks around Berlin. Ruzena enjoys the attention she gets as a showgirl and so she angrily rejects Joachim’s suggestion, and angrily asks if he’s been put up to it by his ‘bad’ friend, Bertrand, who she’s never liked (p.117).

Joachim’s father deteriorates and so he is compelled to accompany a nerve specialist from Berlin down to the family home. Here the father makes another scene in a small gathering of his wife, Joachim, the village priest, the family doctor and the nerve specialist. He insists on rising from his sick bed and taking the head of the table from where he issues denunciations, telling everyone that his son Joachim is dead and buried in the local cemetery but still doesn’t write to him anymore. The people round the table look at each other. Father is losing his mind.

Meanwhile, Bertrand, back from a business trip to Prague, drops by Joachim’s flat to pay a courtesy call on Ruzena. Here he unwittingly presses all the wrong buttons, exacerbating her sense of grievance that Joachim wants to take her off the stage (and deny her the first really fulfilling activity she’s ever had in her life) and in a rather surprising development, she becomes so furious that she rummages around in Joachim’s drawers, finds his service revolver and shoots Bertrand.

Not badly. In the arm. She drops the revolver, he bleeds. It is a scene from an opera or a late 19th century melodrama. He insists she accompanies him in a hansom cab to the hospital where he has the wound dressed but when he comes out she has gone.

After seeking her in vain for a few days, Bertrand writes to Joachim who comes up from the farm. He explains what happened. Joachim sets out on a trawl of Berlin nightclubs, cafes etc. Eventually he finds Ruzena sprawled in the loos of a louche club. She is in a terrible state and has become a prostitute again. When he pleads with her to come home with him she locks herself in a cubicle. Joachim waits outside for an hour and then is horrified to see her emerging on the arm of a fat client, and getting into a cab together. Looks like his affair with the Bohemian beauty is over.

This leads to the sequence of scenes where Joachim, driven by ‘romantic’ notions, decides to settle some money on Ruzena. Bertrand’s lawyer sizes him up quickly, realising that the stiff-necked man in front of him is ‘helpless’ in the face of the real world (p.131). To Joachim, inside his head, everything feels tangled and entrapped in a closing mesh over which presides a vengeful God. Whereas to the lawyer facing him, Joachim’s case is one of a type he sees all the time – army officer of good family needs to pay off illicit lover, in order to clear way for marriage to eligible heiress, and he gives him brisk practical advice on how to do it, while useless Joachim sits in front of him, racked by terror of The Evil One.

Joachim goes straight from this meeting (stopping only to put on his best pair of army gloves) to the house in the western suburbs of the city which the von Banndensen family take for the season, knocks, enters, and asks Freiherr von Baddensen for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He and his wife are thrilled, but caution that they must speak to Elisabeth first.

A day or so later Joachim meets Bertrand and explains what he’s done. Bertrand is shrewd and supportive. In a classic piece of dramatic irony, the narrator then tells us why: that Elisabeth came to see Bertrand the day before, taking a carriage to the hospital and insisting on seeing him in a small private reception room to ask his advice.

Here they have a reprise of the semi-philosophical love-sparring which they had first had on the day of the horse ride. During this, Bertrand a) points out that Joachim is ‘too stupid to love’ (p.135) b) that he, Bertrand, loves Elisabeth, but will be leaving the country soon and so they cannot marry. Therefore c) she should marry Joachim.

It was difficult to gauge the tone of this. Is it light satire or – what it feels more like – Bertrand being quite brutally unfeeling and playing with Elisabeth’s emotions. All the time he is telling her they can’t be together, he is kissing her and telling her how much he loves her. Is he deliberately tormenting her? Or is he himself not quite in control of the situation? Anyway, having exhausted themselves, Elisabeth decides that she will marry Joachim and leaves the feverish Bertrand to return to his hospital bed.

The narration returns to the ‘now’ from which this flashback occurred i.e. to Joachim talking to Bertrand, and Joachim declares more fiercely than ever that he will marry Elisabeth.

This leads on to an extraordinary scene where Joachim pays a formal visit to the von Baddensens, there is a formal dinner, toasts are proposed in champagne, and then everyone leaves the happy couple alone. And there follows an extremely tense and embarrassing scene where the two lovers, neither of whom really wants to get married, have to go through the ghastly farce of Joachim getting down onto his knees to propose. In a very ‘modern’ touch, Joachim has a hallucination of the room’s walls moving away, of all the furniture moving away from him to an infinite distance while his heart freezes as he touches Elisabeth’s dainty little fingers which are as cold as ice (p.142), a chill which is like ‘a dreadful foreboding of death’ (p.153).

Not the least weird aspect of this very weird scene is that they both end up talking about Bertrand who is a more central part of their lives than each other.

In the coach back from the von Baddensens, Joachim has a typical one of his hallucinations, an overwhelming sense that both his father and Bertrand must have died, together, that evening. Of course, neither of them have. Joachim isn’t a ‘romantic’. He is delusional.

Joachim goes to see Bertrand in hospital and tell him about his proposal and acceptance and Bertrand is humorously supportive and, as always, Joachim feels he is being deluded, deceived, having rings run round him.

Elisabeth and Joachim get married. they fuss and fret about whether she’ll come to stay at his house, given that his father is now an invalid, or she go separately to stay with her parents, or whether they should go to the house in the suburbs of Berlin which her parents have gifted the couple. Joachim urgently needs the worldly wisdom of Bertrand to answer these questions for him, but Bertrand is not there.

During the marriage ceremony, Joachim is overcome with religious terror, that he is an imposter, one of the damned, and barely hears the words of the service at all. He is an Expressionist hysteric. He is screaming inside like Munch’s picture.

They go to stay in a hotel in Berlin and several pages are spent describing the inner turmoil of Joachim’s mind. In his head Elisabeth has always been a pure virginal figure – he is agonised by the presence a toilet next door, he cannot possibly imagine her using it – and he sees himself as her knight in shining armour devoted to protecting her. Thus the last few pages of the novel describe his agonising before he can bring himself to knock on her hotel door (they have separate rooms), going to the bed, kneeling beside it and kissing her hand. He wishes Bertrand were there to help him. He wishes Elisabeth were Ruzena with whom everything seemed easy and natural. By slow steps he lies down on the bed beside her and falls asleep. Elisabeth smiles and, after a while, falls asleep too.

This, I suppose, we are meant to take it, was the manner of the wooings and marriages of the Broch’s parents’ generation. Joachim is nuts, that’s extremely clear. And yet the message is subtler. For all the lies and evasions it is based on, I for one ended the book admiring the determination of both these dim, unprepared innocents to make the most of the situation they find themselves in. If they go on to have a formal, staid, distanced but affectionate and respectful marriage, who’s to say there’s anything wrong with that?

Religion

In the second half of the book, religion becomes a more and more dominant theme. Joachim’s confused thoughts gather together bits and pieces from the village priest, memories of extravagant religious pictures he saw in Dresden, attendance at church parades with his corps, and a few private visits to churches, to convince him that God is punishing him for his sins.

Inevitable fate, inescapable discipline of God! (p.122)

I can see how some readers might take this at face value and I’d be surprised if there aren’t hundreds of academic essay about religious imagery in the book. And yet to me it seems obvious that it’s all due to the fact that Joachim is an idiot.

He is terrified of civilians. He can’t handle the chaotic hustle and bustle of the big city. He doesn’t understand what Bertrand does, he doesn’t understand business. He has no idea how to make a bequest to Ruzena. He has no sense of how to run his parents’ farm as a business.

He is, in other words, hopeless and impractical and dim. His increasing turn to God and religion, therefore, seems to me the refuge of an idiot. Because he doesn’t understand anything about the actual world he finds himself in, he retreats to thinking it’s all part of a Divine Plan against him.

So, in my opinion, the religious aspect of the last third of the book has no real religious content but represents Joachim’s stupidity and his paranoia. It is more an investigation of how the stupid and the paranoid come to have religious faith. It’s not so much that it’s consoling (which it is) as that it is easy to understand. God is Daddy. Daddy is punishing me. I have been a bad boy. Not difficult, is it?

Descriptions

Once you have slowed right down to the speed of this odd book, and once you get into the habit of often rereading entire paragraphs to decipher what they’re about, I found myself admiring whole passages for their evocativeness and beauty.

They are not examples of good English prose, in fact they are often disfigured by unbeautiful phraseology (is that Broch or the Muirs?) but nonetheless there are passages of extended description which really manage to convey a room, a view, a landscape, a scene or setting and, in particular, the strange evanescent feeling of fleeting thoughts – with a depth and power which I found increasingly rewarding.

You really feel like you are entering the minds of the characters, above all the neurotic army lieutenant Joachim von Pasenow. Although, by the end, I wondered if the novel wasn’t about a so-called ‘romantic’ at all, but really about a near-simpleton. A good deal of Joachim’s agonising and tortured reflections about God or his uniform or civilian life etc really boil down to the fact that he’s a stupid person who doesn’t understand what’s going on around him, and finds it a real challenge coping with even the basics of adult life.

Maybe the book could have more accurately been titled The Idiot.

The dense crowd around him, the hubbub, as the Baroness called it, all this commercial turmoil full of faces and backs, seemed to him a soft, gliding, dissolving mass which one could not lay hold on. Where did it all lead to? (p.49)

Where indeed?

Credit

20th century German literature

A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)

The Weimar Republic

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by Simon on April 2, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Germany, Literature, Novel

Posted by Simon on April 2, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/the-romantic-hermann-broch/

The Nightmare of Reason: The Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel – part one (1984)

‘What do I have in common with the Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.’
(Franz Kafka, 8 January 1914)

This is a hugely enjoyable biography of Franz Kafka, chiefly because it is itself so unKafkaesque, so informative and logical and entertaining.

Although the subject matter and settings of Kafka’s novels and short stories vary, what all Kafka’s works have in common (well, apart from the really short stories) is the long-winded and often convoluted nature of his prose which seeks to reflect the over-self-conscious and over-thinking paranoia, anxiety and, sometimes, terror of his protagonists, narrators or characters.

Pawel’s book, by contrast, is a wonderfully refreshing combination of deep historical background, penetrating psychological insights, fascinating detail about the literary and cultural world of turn-of-the-century Prague, and hair-raising quotes from Kafka’s diaries, letters and works, all conveyed in brisk and colourful prose. Pawel is about as variedly entertaining as prose can be, which came as a huge relief after struggling through the monotone grimness of a story like The Burrow.

Three ethnicities

If you read any of Kafka’s works it’s difficult to avoid blurbs and introductions which give away the two key facts of his biography – 1. his lifelong fear of his father, Herrmann, and 2. how he spent his entire working life in a state insurance company, itself embedded in the elephantine web of Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy.

The Workmen’s Accident and Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia was an integral part of the pullulating Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy that, like a giant net of near-epic intricacy, covered the entire Hapsburg domain. (The Nightmare of Reason, page 183)

Between them these two facts can be used as the basis of entry-level commentaries on Kafka’s stories, interpreting them as being about either:

anxiety and dread of some nameless father figure who inspires an irrational sense of paralysing guilt
or (as the two famous novels do) as unparalleled descriptions of vast, impenetrable bureaucracies which the helpless protagonists can never understand or appeal to

So far, so obvious. What I enjoyed most in this biography was all the stuff I didn’t know. First and foremost, Pawel gives the reader a much deeper understanding of the history, the politics and, especially, the ethnic make-up of Bohemia, where Kafka was born and lived most his life, and of its capital city, Prague – and explains why this mattered so much.

What comes over loud and clear is the tripartite nature of the situation, meaning there were three main ethnic groups in Bohemia, who all hated each other:

1. The majority of the population of Prague and Bohemia was Czech-speaking Czechs, who became increasingly nationalistic as the 19th century progressed, lobbying for a nation state of their own, outspokenly resentful of the Austrian authorities and of their allies in the German-speaking minority.

2. A minority of the population, around 10 to 15%, were ethnic Germans. They regarded themselves as culturally and racially superior to the Czechs, who they thought of as inferior ‘slavs’. The Germans were bolstered 1. by their proximity to Germany itself, with its immense cultural and literary heritage, and 2. because they spoke the same language as the Austrians who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most schools in Bohemia taught German as the official language, resulting in a state of civil war between the two languages and low level conflict between the two cultures – Pawel describes it as an ‘abyss’ (p.140).

Kafka, for example, although he was complimented on his spoken Czech, never considered himself fluent in it, and was educated, preferred to speak and wrote in German. In reference books he is referred to as a master of German prose.

3. And then there were the Jews. Pawel goes into great detail and is absolutely fascinating about the position of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Bohemia in particular. He goes back to the Emperor Joseph II’s 1781 Patent of Toleration, which allowed Jews and Protestants for the first time to practice their religion in the Empire, and the charter for religious freedom granted the Jews of Galicia in 1789. From these statutes dated a series of other laws enacted throughout the nineteenth century designed to ’emancipate’ the Jews from a range of medieval laws which had placed huge restrictions on how they could dress, where they could go, what jobs they could hold.

But this so-called emancipation was a double-edged sword, because it also abolished the communal autonomy which the Jews had enjoyed, it forbad the wearing of traditional Jewish clothes, and it enforced the Germanisation of Jewish culture.

The effect of all this was that, through the 19th century, successive generations of Jews tried to break out of the squalor and poverty of their predominantly rural settlements, emigrated to the big cities of the Empire, dropped their traditional clothing and haircuts, learned to speak German better than the Germans, and in every way tried to assimilate.

Both [Kafka’s] parents belonged to the first generation of assimilated Jews. (p.54)

Unfortunately, this ‘aping’ of German culture mainly served to breed resentment among ‘true’ Germans against these cultural ‘impostors’, with the net result that, the more the Jews tried to assimilate to German culture, the more the Germans hated them for it.

Thus, in a bitter, world-historical irony, an entire generation of urbanised, secular Jews found themselves in love with and practicing a Germanic culture whose rightful ‘owners’, the Germans, hated them with an unremitting anti-semitism (pp.99, 149).

And these hyper-intelligent Jews were totally aware of the fact, bitterly reminded of it every time another anti-semitic article was published in their newspapers or anti-semitic ruit took place in their towns. And so it helped to create a feeling that if only they weren’t Jews everything would be alright. It helped to create the phenomenon known as Jewish self-hatred, a condition Pawel thinks Kafka suffered from, acutely, all his life (p.108).

(Though not as much as the journalist Karl Kraus. In a typically fascinating digression, Pawel devotes an excoriating passage to Kraus, a secular Jew born into a wealthy industrialist family, who became a leading satirical writer and journalist, and devoted his flaming energies to protecting the ‘purity’ of the German language, and – according to Pawels – castigating ‘the Jews’ for importing provincial jargon and Yiddishisms. Kraus was, in Pawel’s view, ‘the quintessential incarnation of Jewish self-hatred’ (p.226).)

And don’t forget that, all the while they were the subject of German anti-semitism, the Jews also got it in the neck from the other side, from the nationalist Czechs, the more Germanic the Jews strove to become, the more the Czech nationalists hated them for sucking up to their oppressors. The Jews got it from both directions.

I knew about Austrian anti-semitism, not least from reading biographies of Freud. But I didn’t know anything about the distinctive dynamic of Czech anti-semitism.

The emancipation of the Jews

Pawel describes all this in such depth and detail because it explains the impact on Kafka’s own biography – namely that Franz’s father, Herrmann, was one of that generation of Jews who, in the mid-nineteenth-century, escaped from the grinding poverty of the rural shtetl, migrated to the city, and finagled the money to set himself up in business, to try to rise in the world.

One of the best-known things about Kafka is how he lived in abject fear of his father, who instilled a permanent sense of terror and anxiety in him, but Pawel explains brilliantly how Kafka senior was a highly representative figure, just one among a great wave of Jews of his generation who escaped rural poverty, migrated to the city, became more or less successful businessmen and… sired sons who despised them.

He wasn’t alone. Pawel shows how it was a pattern repeated across educated Jewry (p.98).

Seen from this historical perspective, Sigmund Freud (born 1856 in Příbor in what is now the Moravian province of the Czech Republic) is a kind of patron saint of his and the slightly later generation (Kafka was born in 1883) for Freud’s father, Jakob, was the son of devout Hasidic Jews, who, in the classic style, moved from his home district to the big city of Vienna where he struggled to run a business as a wool merchant, rejecting along the way all the appurtenances of the rural Judaism which were so associated with poverty and provincialism. It was as a result of Jakob’s deracination, that his son decisively broke with any religious belief, and became the immensely successful and highly urbanised founder of psychoanalysis.

Same or something similar with a whole generation of Jewish-German writers artists and composers – Kafka, Brod, Hermann Broch, Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and so on (pp.98, 99). It was a world of staggering artistic brilliance – this was the generation which contributed to and helped define the whole idea of Modern Art. But it was all built on a volcano, the fierce hatred of ‘genuine’ Germans for the ‘cosmopolitan’ Jews who (they thought) were appropriating their culture.

This was the atmosphere of Kafka’s world, dense with hate. (p.44)

Judaism is replaced by literature

A further consequence emerges from Pawel’s historical approach which is that this generation, the first generation of truly urbanised Jews, which had largely lost its religious faith in the process, nonetheless continued, like their rabbinical forefathers, the Jewish obsession with the written word.

Only instead of devoting their lives to interpreting the Holy Scriptures as their Hasidic forefathers, rabbis and holy men had – these largely irreligious urbanites now nagged and worried about secular types of writing – namely literature and philosophy and criticism and aesthetics. God may have been declared dead and words no longer used to pray and worship – but instead, the endless finagling of rabbis and commentators was now applied to existence itself, to a scrupulous cross-examination of modern life in the hurly-burly of hectic cities.

The Jewish intelligentsia on the whole remained isolated, inbred and inward looking…Theirs was a paradoxically communal shtetl of cantankerous individualists huddled in the warrens of their self-absorption, with literature as their religion and self-expression their road to salvation. (p.153)

As Pawel puts it with typically colourful rhetoric:

Kafka’s true ancestors, the substance of his flesh and spirit, were an unruly crowd of Talmudists, Cabalists, medieval mystics resting uneasy beneath the jumble of heaving, weatherbeaten tombstones in Prague’s Old Cemetery, seekers in search of a reason for faith. (p.100)

The same intense scrutiny the forefathers paid to every word and accent of the Talmud, their heirs now devoted to the production of texts exploring the experience of the modern world which boiled down, again and again, in the hands of its most dogged exponents, to an investigation of language itself.

And so we find Kafka in December 1910 making one of the hundreds and hundreds of diary entries he devoted obsessively to the subject of writing, of words, of prose, of literature:

I cannot write. I haven’t managed a single line I’d care to acknowledge; on the contrary, I threw out everything – it wasn’t much – that I had written since Paris. My whole body warns me of every word, and every word first looks around in all directions before it lets itself be written down by me. The sentences literally crumble in my hands.

‘Every word first looks around in all directions before it lets itself be written down by me’! In Kafka’s hands, even language itself is gripped by fear.

Kafka’s diet

Kafka was a lifelong hypochondriac who also happened to suffer from actual illnesses and conditions. From early in adulthood he experimented with a variety of cures from surprisingly silly quack doctors. He became obsessed with diet, first becoming a vegetarian, and then implementing an increasingly complicated regime of diets, which Pawel describes in detail.

But once again Pawel uses this to make the kind of socio-psychological point for which I really enjoyed this book, when he points out the following: In the Jewish tradition, strict adherence to kashrut or traditional Jewish dietary law linked the individual to the community, made him one with a much larger people and their heritage – whereas the dietary rituals Kafka made for himself completely cut him off not only from the Jewish tradition, but even from his own family, and ultimately his own friends. Later in life Kafka:

gradually got into the habit of taking all his meals by himself and intensely disliked eating in anyone’s presence. (p.209)

Like everything else in his life, even eating became a source of anxiety and dread and shame.

Hermann Kafka and his family

Although Pawel records the lifelong terror and feeling of humiliation which Herrmann inculcated in his over-sensitive son, he injects a strong dose of scepticism. As you read Franz’s Letter to his Father, the sustained thirty-page indictment of Herrmann which poor Franz wrote at the age of 36, you can’t help beginning to feel sorry a bit sorry for Herrmann. It wasn’t his fault that he emerged from grinding poverty all but illiterate and had to work hard all his life to support his family. Whereas Franz enjoyed 16 years of education and wangled a cushy job at the Workers Insurance Company thanks to a well-connected uncle. From one point of view, Franz is the typically ungrateful, spoilt son.

And in a subtle reinterpretation of the traditional story, Pawel wonders if it wasn’t Kafka’s mother, Julie, who did most damage to her son. How? By being totally aware of young Franz’s hyper-sensitive nature, but doing nothing about it – by effectively ignoring his hyper-sensitive soul in order to suck up to her bullying husband.

Because, as Pawel points out, Kafka gave the notorious Letter to His Father to his mother to read and then pass on to the family ‘tyrant’. She certainly did read it but never passed it on, returning it to Franz after a week and, well… Franz could easily have handed it over to his father by hand – or posted it. But he chose not to. That, Pawel speculates, is because the letter had in fact achieved its purpose. Not to address his father at all, but successfully implicating his mother in his childhood and teenage trauma. After all:

All parents fail their children, and all children weave their parents failure into the texture of their lives. (p.82)

As this all suggests, Kafka’s story was very much a family affair, a psychodrama played out in the claustrophobic walls of the Prague apartment he shared with his mother, father and three sisters.

Indeed it is a little staggering to read Pawel’s description of the apartment the family moved to in 1912, whose walls were so thin that everyone could hear everyone else cough or sneeze or open a window or plump a book down on a table – let alone all the other necessary bodily functions. What a terrible, claustrophobic environment it was (and we know this, because we have hundreds of diary entries made by Franz moaning about it) and yet – he didn’t leave.

More than once Pawel suggests there is something very Jewish about this smothering family environment and the way that, although he could easily have left once he had a secure job, Kafka chose to remain within the bosom of his smothering family.

It’s aspects of Kafka’s psychology and life like this which drive Pawel’s frequent comparisons and invocations of Freud, dissector and analyst of the smothering turn-of-the-century, urban, Jewish family, investigator of the kind of family lives that the young women of his case studies made up hysterias and neuroses, and the young men made up violent animal fantasies, to escape from.

But here, as in other ways, Kafka stands out as taking part in a recognisable general trend – but then going way beyond it – or moulding it to his own peculiar needs – because at some level, deep down, he needed to be smothered.

Anti-Semitism and Zionism

And all around them, surrounding the anxieties of family life, were the continual ethnic tensions which regularly broke out into actual violence. Sometimes it was Czech nationalists rioting against their Austro-German overlords in the name of Czech nationalism – as they did in the so-called Prague Pogrom of 1897 when Czech nationalists started off by ransacking well-known German cultural and commercial establishments, but ended up devoting three days to attacking Jewish shops and synagogues and anyone who appeared to be a Jew.

Slowly, over his lifetime, Kafka noted the situation getting steadily worse. Fifteen years later, the 60th anniversary of the accession of the Emperor Franz-Joseph led to violent attacks organised by the Czech National Socialists on German properties, which led to troops being sent in and the imposition of martial law (p.298).

But whether it was the Germans or the Czechs, and whether it was the journalistic or bureaucratic attacks of the intelligentsia, or crude physical attacks on the street (and street fighting occurring on an almost weekly basis, p.205):

The extremist demagogues prevailing in both camps were equally vocal in their common hostility to the Jews.

This pervasive fearfulness among Jews helps explain the origins of Zionism, first given theoretical and practical expression by Theodor Herzl, another urbanised and ‘assimilated’ Jewish son of poorer, more rural parents, from the same generation as Freud (Herzl was born a year later, in 1860).

In 1896, deeply shocked by the anti-semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Affair in France (1894-1906), Herzl published Der Judenstaat, in which he argued that anti-semitism in Europe couldn’t be ‘cured’ but only avoided altogether, by leaving Europe and founding a state solely for Jews.

The theme of Zionism looms large in Kafka’s life. Many of his school and university friends became ardent Zionists – including his good friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who managed to escape Prague on the last train before the Nazis arrived, and successfully made it to Palestine. Zionism it was one of the big socio-political movements of the time, along with socialism, anarchism, and Tolstoyan pacifism. (pp.61, 290)

And it was a practical movement. The Bohemian Zionists didn’t just campaign for the establishment of a foreign homeland; closer to home they organised the community, publishing a weekly magazine named Self Defence edited by Kafka’s friend Felix Weltsch (one of the many writers, journalists, critics and poets who Pawel tells us about).

Above all, they preached the idea that all the Jewish hopes for ‘assimilation’ were a fantasy: the Jews who worshipped German culture were adulating their abuser. There could never be full assimilation and the sooner the Jews realised it and planned for their own salvation the better. Tragically, the Zionists were to be proved entirely right.

So from Kafka’s twenties onwards, Zionism was one of the half dozen cultural and political themes of the day. Late in life Kafka encouraged his sisters to develop agricultural skills preparatory to emigrating to Palestine. It was a constant possibility, or dream of his, mentioned in diaries and letters although, being Kafka, he knew it was not a dream he would ever live to fulfil.

Multiple reasons to be afraid

Thus it is that Pawel’s book brilliantly conveys the multiple levels or sources of Kafka’s terror.

He was born over-sensitive and anxious and would have had a hard time adapting to real life anywhere. He was painfully shy and morbidly self-aware.
His father was a philistine bully who ridiculed his son’s weakness and intellectual interests, exacerbating the boy’s paranoia and anxieties in every way.
In newspapers and even in lectures at the university he attended, Kafka would routinely read or hear the most blistering attacks on the Jews as enemies of culture, emissaries of poverty and disease from pestilent rural slums, Christ-killers and followers of an antiquated anti-Enlightenment superstition.
And then, in the streets, there would be periodic anti-Jewish riots, attacks on individual Jews or smashing up Jewish shops.

In the midst of explaining all this, Pawel makes a point which it is easy to miss. He notes that in Kafka’s surviving correspondence with Max Brod or with his three successive girlfriends, Kafka rarely if ever actually alludes to anti-semitism, or to the street violence, clashes, public disorders and growing power of the anti-semitic nationalist parties in Prague. Pawel makes what I thought was a really powerful comment:

It was only in his fiction that he felt both safe and articulate enough to give voice to his sense of terror. (p.204)

An insight I thought was really worth pondering… something to do with the way fiction, or literature, can be a way of controlling and ordering the otherwise chaotic and overwhelming, the personally overwhelming and the socially overwhelming…

Anyway, that’s a lot of sources of fear and terror to be getting on with, before you even get into Franz’s more personal anxieties – not least about sex and everything sexual, which sent him into paroxysms of self-disgust.

Sex

I had no idea that Kafka was such an habitué of brothels. I mean not now and then. I mean routinely and regularly, as well as having sexual escapades with all sorts of working class girls, serving girls and servants and waitresses and barmaids and cleaning women in the many hotels he stayed at on his business trips. We know this because it is all recorded in the copious diaries he kept, and in his extensive correspondence with Max Brod and he even mentions it in letters to his various fiancées.

The subject prompts another one of Pawel’s wide-ranging cultural investigations which I found so fascinating, this time a lengthy description of the way the madonna-whore dichotomy experienced a kind of ill-fated, decadent blossoming in turn of the century Austro-Hungary – in the Vienna we all know about with its Klimt and Schiele paintings, but also in Germanic Prague.

Sex… was the sinister leitmotif dominating literature, drama, and the arts of the period. And beyond the poetic metaphors loomed the brutal real-life affinity of sex and death – botched abortions, childbed fever, syphilis, suicides. (p.77)

All his friends were at it, they all slept with prostitutes: we learn that Max Brod’s marriage got into trouble because he simply refused to carry on sleeping with every woman he could. The women – we learn – came in different grades, from professionals in brothels, to semi-pros in doorsteps, to amateurs – cleaners and suchlike – who would give you a quick one for cash.

All of which exacerbated the aforementioned Madonna-Whore complex, whereby women were divided into two categories – the generally working-class whores you paid to have dirty sex with – and the pure, high-minded and chaste young ladies you accompanied to concerts and were expected to marry (p.180).

To an astonishing extent, Kafka was a fully paid-up member of this club and had an extraordinary number of casual sexual partners – innumerable encounters which he then followed up with the predictable paroxysms of self-loathing and self-hatred. In this respect he was surprisingly unoriginal.

There is a lot more to be said about the relationship between Kafka’s intense but guilt-ridden sex life and the peculiar relations his two key protagonists have with women (in The Trial and The Castle) but that’s for others to write about. I’m interested in history, and language.

The Workmen’s Accident and Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia

It is a revelation to discover that Kafka was good at his job in this insurance company. Not just good, vital. His quick intelligence and pedantic attention to detail were just what was needed. He was tasked with auditing safety regulations about a whole range of industrial processes, a job which required him to travel extensively around the country, staying in hotels (shagging chambermaids if possible) and visiting a huge range of factories and workplaces.

His annual reviews still survive and glow with praise from his superiors and colleagues. He started work at the company’s offices in 1908, was promoted within a year, given full civil service tenure in 1910, advanced to Junior Secretary in 1913, to Secretary in 1920, and senior Secretary in 1922. His immediate superior, Chief Inspector Pfohl, wrote that without him the entire department would collapse. He was a model employee, prompt, intelligent, diligent and polite, as all the testimony from his colleagues confirms.

Fourteen years of following bureaucratic procedures in an institute which was itself part of the wider bureaucratic Empire. And of writing official reports in the tone and style of a senior bureaucrat. You’d have to be quite dense not to link these factors with a) the visions of a vast topless bureaucracy which form the core of the two great novels, and b) with the parody of official, academic-bureaucratic style which is so omnipresent, especially in the later stories.

Kafka’s officialese

Commenting on the contradiction between Kafka the florid hypochondriac and Kafka the smartly turned-out insurance inspector, a contemporary Prague’s literary circle, Oskar Baum, is quoted about how the mental or intellectual structures of the workplace, of its official and stern prose, mapped very handily onto Kafka’s intensely personal obsessions with writing.

By nature he was a fanatic full of luxuriating fantasy, but he kept its glow in check by constantly striving toward strict objectivity. To overcome all cloying or seductive sentimental raptures and fuzzy-minded fantasising was part of his cult of purity – a cult quasi-religious in spirit, though often eccentric in its physical manifestation. He created the most subjective imagery, but it had to manifest itself in the form of utmost objectivity (quoted on page 133)

It’s easy to overlook, but this is a profoundly distinctive aspect of Kafka’s art which is easy to overlook: that all these delirious and often visionary stories are told in very formal and precise prose, and in a style which, in the later stories, becomes really heavily drenched in bureaucratic or academic or official rhetoric.

Pawel’s lurid style

So I found the way Pawel’s factual information about the social, economic and political changes in Bohemia leading up to Kafka’s birth – specifically the changing role of Jews in Bohemian culture – and then his detailed account of Franz’s family life and how that was woven into the complicated social and intellectual currents of the time, really built up a multi-layered understanding of Kafka’s life and times.

But curiously at odds with all this is Pawel’s own very uneven style. One minute he is describing statistics about industrial production or the percentage population of the different ethnicities in the tone of a government report or Wikipedia article:

Prague’s German-speaking minority was rapidly dwindling in proportion to the fast-growing Czech majority, from 14.6 percent in 1880, when the first language census was taken, to 13.6 percent in 1889, Kafka’s first school year. The city’s population totaled 303,000 at the time; of these, 41,400 gave German as their first and principal language. (p.31)

Or:

Between 1848 and 1890, Bohemia’s share in the total industrial output of the monarchy rose from 46 to 59 percent. By 1890, Bohemia and Moravia accounted for 65 percent of Austria’s industrial labour force. (p.37)

The next, he is writing wild and extravagant similes which seem to belong to another kind of book altogether. Here he is describing one of Kafka’s teachers:

Gschwind, author of several studies in linguistics, was rightfully regarded as an eminent classicist, and one can only speculate on the reasons that led him to waste his scholarly gifts and encyclopedic knowledge on a gang of recalcitrant teenagers who, as a group, progressed in classical philology with all the speed and enthusiasm of a mule train being driven up a mountain. (p.73)

Here he is describing Kafka’s anxiety about his end-of-school exams:

The prospect of those apocalyptic trials turned the final school years into a frenzied last-ditch effort to shore up the crumbling ramparts of knowledge, retrieve eight years of facts and figures, and prepare for a bloodbath. (p.76)

Once he starts engaging with Kafka’s stories, Pawel often adopts their phraseology, or at least their worldview, in over-the-top descriptions which could have been penned by Edgar Allen Poe.

Kafka’s impulse was basically sound – that of a trapped, starving animal wanting to claw its way out and sink its teeth into a solid food. (p.114)

Here he is describing the ferociously competitive literary world of Edwardian Prague:

In their panic it was every man for himself, a wild stampeded of gregarious loners grappling with monsters spawned in their own bellies. (p.155)

Or describing the detailed and self-punishing diaries Kafka kept all his adult life.

These so-called diaries assumed many forms and functions, from the writer’s version of the artist’s sketchbook to a tool for self-analysis; they were a fetishistic instrument of self-mutilation, a glimpse of reason at the heart of madness, and an errant light in the labyrinth of loneliness. (p.213)

In fact you can watch Pawel’s style go from sensible to overblown in just that one sentence.

I’ve read criticisms of the book which ridicule Pawel’s purple prose and certainly, from a po-faced academic point of view, much of his writing can sound a bit ludicrous. But as a reader I found it deeply enjoyable. It made me smile. Sometimes it was so over the top it made me laugh out loud.

I liked it for at least two reasons: after struggling with the long-winded and often very official and bureaucratic prose of late Kafka, reading Pawel’s juicy similes and purple paragraphs was like going from black and white to colour.

Secondly, it matches Kafka’s own hysteria. Kafka really was a very, very weird person. His letters abound in the most extreme language of paralysing fear and inchoate terror and crippling anxiety.

My fear… is my substance, and probably the best part of me.

He describes not being able to stand up for fear, not being able to walk for fear, not being able to face people or say anything because of the terror it caused him.

This craving I have for people which turns to fear the moment it reaches fulfilment (letter of July 1912)

– all symptoms of what Pawel calls his ‘near-pathological sensitivity’.

Kafka describes the way words crumble at his touch, his heart is going to explode, his head is too heavy to carry. He talked and wrote regularly about suicide (except that, in typical Kafkaesque fashion, he wrapped it round with paradoxes and parables).

Always the wish to die, and the still-just-hanging on, that alone is love (Diary, 22 October 113)

In other words, much of Pawel’s lurid and melodramatic writing, while not in the same league as Kafka’s, while much more obvious and pulpy and sometimes quite silly – nevertheless is not an unreasonable way to try and catch the permanent atmosphere of extremity and hyperbole which Kafka lived in all the time. I thought it was a reasonable attempt to translate Kafka’s own worldview from Kafkaese into phraseology which is easier for you and me to process and understand.

Fear, disgust, and rage were what this recalcitrant bundle of taut nerves, brittle bones, frail organs and coddled flesh had aroused in him from earliest childhood.

And sometimes Pawel’s phrases are so colourful and exaggerated that they’re funny. And humour, real laugh-out-loud humour, is in short supply in this story.

Related Kafka reviews

Dates are dates of composition.

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by Simon on October 8, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Biography, Germany, Great War, History, Holocaust, Literary criticism, Literature

Tagged 1897, 1984, 19th century, anti-Semitism, anxiety, Arnold Schoenberg, Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, Biography, book, bureaucracy, Chief Inspector Pfohl, Czech National Socialists, Czech nationalism, Der Judenstaat, diet, Emancipation of the Jews, Emperor Franz Joseph, Emperor Joseph II, Ernst Pawel, Felix Weltsch, France, Franz Kafka, Freud, German literature, Gustav Mahler, Hasidic Jews, Hermann Broch, Herrmann Kafka, hypochondria, hysteria, Jewish dietary law, Jewish self-hatred, Jews, Julie Kafka, Kafkaesque, Karl Kraus, kashrut, language, Letter to My Father, Literature, madonna-whore complex, Max Brod, Modernism, Moravia, novels, Oskar Baum, Palestine, paranoia, Prague, prose, prostitutes, Psychoanalysis, sex, short stories, shtetl, Sigmund Freud, terror, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Burrow, the Dreyfus Affair, The Nightmare of Reason, The Nightmare of Reason: The Life of Franz Kafka, the Prague Pogrom, The Workmen's Accident and Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, Theodor Herzl, turn-of-the-century, turn-of-the-century Prague, vegetarian, Vienna, Walter Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Yiddish, Zionism

Posted by Simon on October 8, 2019

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The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera (1986)

Need I stress that I intend no theoretical statement at all, and that the entire book is simply a practitioner’s confession? Every novelist’s work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is; I have tried to express here the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels. (Preface)

This book contains seven essays on the art of the novel. First, a few observations.

Kundera is an academic Remember Kundera was a lecturer in ‘World Literature’ at Charles University in Prague for some 20 years (1952-75). This is a grand title and obviously encouraged a panoramic overview of the subject. Then he emigrated to France, where he continued to teach at university. He is, in other words, an academic, an expounder, a simplifier and teacher of other people’s views and theories, and that is probably the most dominant characteristic of his fiction – the wish to lecture and explicate.

He discusses a narrow academic canon You quickly realise he isn’t talking about the hundreds of thousands of novels which have been published over the past 400 years – he is talking about The Novel, the ‘serious novel’, ‘real novels’ – an entirely academic construct, which consists of a handful, well at most 50 novelists, across that entire period and all of Europe, whose concerns are ‘serious’ enough to be included in ‘serious’ academic study.

Non-British And he is very consciously European. This means many of his references are alien or exotic to us. Or just incomprehensible. When he says that The Good Soldier Schweik is probably the last popular novel, he might as well be living on Mars. There is no mention of Daniel Defoe, of Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Conrad, Henry James, DH Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, or anyone from the British ‘Great Tradition’ except the dry and dusty Samuel Richardson, in some histories, the founder of the English novel. He mentions Orwell’s ‘1984’ to dismiss it as a form of journalism. All Orwell’s fiction, he thinks, would have been better conveyed in pamphlets.

There is no mention of American fiction: from Melville through Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner (OK, Faulkner is mentioned right towards the end as one of the several authors who want nothing written about their lives, only their works), Updike or Roth or Bellow. No reference to science fiction or historical fiction or thrillers or detective fiction. Or children’s fiction. There is no mention of South American fiction (actually, he does mention a novel by Carlos Fuentes), or anything from Africa or Asia.

Some exceptions, but by and large, it is a very very very narrow definition of the Novel. Kundera can only talk as sweepingly as he does because he has disqualified 99.9% of the world from consideration before he begins.

1. The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes (1983)

In 1935 Edmund Husserl gave a lecture titled ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man’. He identifies the Modern Era as starting with Galileo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632) and Descartes (Discourse on the Method, 1637) and complains that Europe (by which he includes America and the other colonies) has become obsessed with science and the external world at the expense of spirit and psychology, at the expense of Lebenswelt.

Kundera says that Husserl neglected the novel, which was also born at the start of the modern era, specifically in the Don Quixote of Miguel Cervantes (1605). It is in the novel that Europeans have, for 400 years, been investigating the interior life of humanity. The novel discovers those elements of life which only it can discover. Therefore the sequence of great novelists amounts to a sequence of discoveries about human nature:

Cervantes – explores the nature of adventure
Richardson – the secret life of feelings
Balzac – man’s rootedness in history
Flaubert – details of the everyday
Tolstoy – the intrusion of the irrational into decision making
Proust – the elusiveness of time past
Joyce – the elusiveness of time present
Mann – the role of ancient myth in modern life

At the start of the Modern Era God began to disappear, and with him the idea of one truth. Instead the world disintegrated into multiple truths. In the novel these multiple truths are dramatised as characters.

The whole point of the novel is it does not rush to judgement, to praise or condemn. Religion and ideologies (and political correctness) does that. The whole point of the novel is to suspend humanity’s Gadarene rush to judge and condemn before understanding: to ‘tolerate the essential relativity of things human’ (p.7).

He describes how there is a straight decline in the European spirit, from Cervantes – whose heroes live on the open road with an infinite horizon and never-ending supply of adventures – through Balzac whose characters are bounded by the city, via Emma Bovary who is driven mad by boredom, down to Kafka, whose characters have no agency of their own, but exist solely as the function of bureaucratic mistakes. It’s a neat diagram, but to draw it you have to leave out of account most of the novels ever written – for example all the novels of adventure written in the later 19th century, all of Robert Louis Stevenson, for example.

As in all his Western books, Kundera laments the spirit of the age, how the mass media are making everything look and sound the same, reducing everything to stereotypes and soundbites, simplifying the world, creating ‘the endless babble of the graphomanics’ – whereas the novel’s task is to revel in its oddity and complexity.

2. Dialogue on the Art of the Novel

In a written dialogue with an interviewer, Kundera moves the same brightly coloured counters around – Cervantes, Diderot, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce. The novel was about adventure, then about society, then about psychology.

He states his novels are outside the novel of psychology. There’s psychology in them but that’s not their primary interest.

Being a central European he sees the 1914-18 war as a catastrophe which plunged art and literature into the grip of a merciless History. The essential dreaminess of a Proust or Joyce became impossible. Kafka opened the door to a new way of being, as prostrate victim of an all-powerful bureaucracy.

He clarifies that a key concern is the instability of the self: which is why characters often play games, pose and dramatise themselves; it is to find out where their limits are.

He clarifies his approach as against Joyce’s. Joyce uses internal monologue. There is no internal monologue at all in Kundera. In fact, as he explains it, you realise that the monologue is his, the author’s as the author tries different approaches in order to analyse his own characters. His books are philosophical analyses of fictional characters. And the characters are conceived as ‘experimental selfs’ (p.31), fully in line with his core idea that the history of the novel is a sequence of discoveries.

If the novel is a method for grasping the self, first there was grasping through adventure and action (from Cervantes to Tolstoy). Then grasping the self through the interior life (Joyce, Proust). Kundera is about grasping the self though examining existential situations. He always begins with existential plights. A woman who has vertigo. A man who suffers because he feels his existence is too light, and so on. Then he creates characters around these fundamentals. Then he puts them into situations which he, the author, can analyse, analyse repeatedly and from different angles, in order to investigate the mystery of the self.

Thus a character is ‘not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self.’ (p.34) Making a character ‘alive’ means getting to the bottom of their existential problem’ (p.35).

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. (p.42)

The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence. (p.44)

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters. (p.83)

A theme is an existential enquiry. (p.84)

3. Notes inspired ‘The Sleepwalkers’

The Sleepwalkers is the name given to a trilogy of novels by the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch (1886 – 1951). The three novels were published between 1928 and 1932. They focus on three protagonists and are set 15 years apart:

Joachim von Pasenow set in 1888
August Esch set in 1903
Wilhelm Huguenau set in 1918

In their different ways they address on core them: man confronting the disintegration of his values.

According to Kundera, before one writes one must have an ontological hypothesis, a theory about what kind of world we live in. For example The Good Soldier Švejk finds everything about the world absurd. At the opposite pole, Kafka’s protagonists find everything about the world so oppressive that they lose their identities to it.

After all, What is action? How do we decide to do what we do? That is, according to Kundera, the eternal question of the novel. (p.58)

Through an analysis of the plots of the three novels, Kundera concludes that what Broch discovered was the system of symbolic thought which underlies all decisions, public or private.

He closes with some waspish criticism of ‘Establishment Modernism’, i.e. the modernism of academics, which requires an absolute break at the time of the Great War, and the notion that Joyce et al. definitively abolished the old-fashioned novel of character. Obviously Kundera disagrees. For him Broch (whose most famous masterpiece, The Death of Virgil didn’t come out till the end of World War Two) was still opening up new possibilities in the novel form, was still asking the same questions the novel has asked ever since Cervantes.

It is a little odd that Kundera takes this 2-page swipe at ‘Establishment Modernism’, given that a) he is an academic himself, and his own approach is open to all sorts of objections (mainly around its ferocious exclusivity), and b) as he was writing these essays, Modernism was being replaced, in literature and the academy, by Post-Modernism, with its much greater openness to all kinds of literary forms and genres.

4. Dialogue on the Art of Composition (1983)

Second part of the extended ‘dialogue’ whose first part was section two, above. Starts by examining three principles found in Kundera’s work:

1. Divestment, or ellipsis. He means getting straight to the heart of the matter, without the traditional fol-de-rol of setting scenes or background to cities or towns or locations.

2. Counterpoint or polyphony. Conventional novels have several storylines. Kundera is interested in the way completely distinct themes or ideas can be woven next to each other, setting each other off. For the early composers a principle of polyphony was that all the lines are clear and distinct and of equal value.

Interestingly, he chooses as fine examples of his attempts to apply this technique to his novels, the Angels section in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – which I found scrappy and unconvincing – and Part Six of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I think is by far the worst thing he’s ever written, embarrassingly bad.

There’s some chat about Kundera’s own personal interventions in his novels. He emphasises that anything said within a novel is provisional hypothetical and playful. Sure, he intervenes sometimes to push the analysis of a character’s situation deeper than the character themselves could do it. But emphasises that even the most serious-sounding interventions are always playful. They can never be ‘philosophy’ because they don’t occur in a philosophical text.

From the very first word, my thoughts have a tone which is playful, ironic, provocative, experimental or enquiring. (p.80)

This is what he means by ‘a specifically novelistic essay’ i.e. you can write digressions and essays within novels but, by coming within its force field, they become playful and ironic.

The final part is an analysis of his novels in terms of their structure, their architecture i.e. the number of parts, the way the sub-sections are so distinct. And then a really intense comparison with works of classical music, in the sense that the varying length and tempo of the parts of his novels are directly compared with classical music, particularly to Beethoven quartets. Until the age of 25 he thought he was going to be a composer rather than a writer and he is formidably learned about classical music.

5. Somewhere behind (1979)

A short essay about Kafka. He uses the adjective Kafkan, which I don’t like; I prefer Kafkaesque. What does it consist of?

boundless labyrinth
a man’s life becomes a shadow of a truth held elsewhere (in the boundless bureaucracy), which tends to make his life’s meaning theological. Or pseudo-theological
the punished seek the offence, want to find out what it is they have done
when Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends everyone laughed including the author. Kafka takes us inside a joke which looks funny from the outside, but…

Fundamentally his stories are about the dehumanisation of the individual by faceless powers.

What strikes Kundera is that accurately predicted an entire aspect of man in the 20th century without trying to. All his friends were deeply political, avant-garde, communist etc, thought endlessly about the future society. But all of their works are lost. Kafka, in complete contrast, was a very private man, obsessed above all with his own personal life, with the domineering presence of his father and his tricky love life. With no thought of the future or society at large, he created works which turned out to be prophetic of the experience of all humanity in the 20th century and beyond.

This Kundera takes to be a prime example of the radical autonomy of the novel, whose practitioners are capable of finding and naming aspects of the existential potential of humanity, which no other science or discipline can.

6. Sixty-Three Words (1986)

As Kundera became famous, and his books published in foreign languages, he became appalled by the quality of the translations. (The English version of The Joke particularly traumatised him; the English publisher cut all the reflective passages, eliminated the musicological chapters, and changed the order of the parts! In the 1980s he decided to take some time out from writing and undertake a comprehensive review of all translations of his books with a view to producing definitive versions.

Specific words are more important to Kundera than other novelists because his novels are often highly philosophical. In fact, he boils it down: a novel is a meditation on certain themes; and these themes are expressed in words. Change the words, you screw up the meditations, you wreck the novel.

A friendly publisher, watching him slog away at this work for years, said, ‘Since you’re going over all your works with a fine toothcomb, why don’t you make a personal list of the words and ideas which mean most to you?’

And so he produced this very entertaining and easy-to-read collection of short articles, reflections and quotes relating to Milan Kundera’s keywords:

aphorism
beauty
being – friends advised him to remove ‘being’ from the title of The Unbearable Lightness of Being’: but it is designed to be a meditation on the existential quality of being. What if Shakespeare had written: To live or not to live… Too superficial. He was trying to get at the absolute root of our existence.
betrayal
border
Central Europe – the Counter-Reformation baroque dominated the area ensuring no Enlightenment, but on the other hand it was the epicentre of European classical music. Throughout the book he is struck by the way the great modern central European novelists – Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz – were anti-Romantic and modern just not in the way of the flashy avant-gardes of Rome or Paris. Then after 1945 central Europe was extinguished and – as he was writing this list – was a prophetic type of the extinguishment of all Europe. Now we know this didn’t happen.
collaborator – he says the word ‘collaborator’ was only coined in 1944, and immediately defined an entire attitude towards modernity. Nowadays he reviles collaborators with the mass media and advertising who he thinks are crushing humanity. (Looking it up I see the word ‘collaborator’ was first recorded in English in 1802. This is one of the many examples where Kundera pays great attention to a word and everything he says about it turns out to be untrue for English. It makes reading these essays, and his ovels, a sometimes slippery business.)
comic
Czechoslovakia – he never uses the word in his fiction, it is too young (the word and country were, after all, only created in 1918, after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed). He always uses ‘Bohemia’ or ‘Moravia’.
definition
elitism – the Western world is being handed over to the control of a mass media elite. Every time I read his diatribes against the media, paparazzi and the intrusion into people’s private lives, I wonder what he makes of the Facebook and twitter age.
Europe – his books are streaked with cultural pessimism. Here is another example. He thinks Europe is over and European culture already lost. Well, that’s what every generation of intellectuals thinks. 40 years later Europe is still here.
excitement
fate
flow
forgetting – In my review of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I pointed out that Mirek rails against forgetting as deployed by the state (sacking historians) but is himself actively engaged in trying to erase his past (claiming back his love letters to an old flame). Kundera confirms my perception. Totalitarian regimes want to control the past (‘Orwell’s famous theme’), but what his story shows is that so do people. It is a profound part of human nature.
graphomania – he rails against the way everyone is a writer nowadays, and says it has nothing to do with writing (i.e. the very careful consideration of form which he has shown us in the other essays in this book) but a primitive and crude will to impose your views on everyone else.
hat
hatstand
ideas – his despair at those who reduce works to ideas alone. No, it is how they are treated, and his sense of the complexity of treatment is brought out in the extended comparison of his novels to complicated late Beethoven string quartets in 4. Dialogue on the Art of Composition
idyll
imagination
inexperience – a working title for The Unbearable Lightness of Being was The Planet of Inexperience. Why? Because none of us have done this before. We’re all making it up as we go along. That’s what’s so terrifying, so vertiginous.
infantocracy
interview – as comes over in a scene in Immortality, he hates press interviews because the interviewer is only interested in their own agenda and in twisting and distorting the interviewees’ responses. Thus in 1985 he made a decision to give no more interviews and only allow his views to be published as dialogues which he had carefully gone over, refined and copyrighted. Hence parts two and four of this book, although they have a third party asking questions, are in the form of a dialogue and were carefully polished.
irony
kitsch – he’s obsessed with this idea which forms the core – is the theme being meditated on – in part six of the Unbearable Lightness of Being. It consists of two parts: step one is eliminating ‘shit’ from the world (he uses the word ‘shit’) in order to make it perfect and wonderful, as in Communist leaders taking a May Day parade or TV adverts. Step two is looking at this shallow, lying version of the world and bursting into tears at its beauty. Kitsch is ‘the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection.’ (p.135)
laughter – For Rabelais, the comic and the merry were one. Slowly literature became more serious, the eighteenth century preferring wit, the Romantics preferring passion, the nineteenth century preferring realism. Now ‘the European history of laughter is coming to an end’. (p.136) That is so preposterous a thought I laughed out loud.
letters
lightness
lyric
lyricism
macho
meditation – his cultural pessimism is revealed again when he claims that ‘to base a novel on sustained meditation goes against the spirit of the twentieth century, which no longer likes to think at all. (p.139)
message
misogynist – gynophobia (hatred of women) is a potential of human nature as is androphobia (hatred of men), but feminists have reduced misogyny to the status of an insult and thus closed off exploration of a part of human nature.
misomusist – someone who has no feel for art or literature or music and so wants to take their revenge on it
modern
nonbeing
nonthought – the media’s nonthought
novel and poetry – the greatest of the nivelists -become-poets are violently anti-lyrical: Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka (don’t think that’s true of Joyce whose prose is trmeendously lyrical)
novel – the European novel
novelist and writer
novelist and his life – quotes from a series of novelists all wishing their lives to remain secret and obscure: all attention should be on the works. Despite this, the army of biographers swells daily. The moment Kafka attracts more attention that Josef K, cultural death begins.
obscenity
Octavio – the Mexican writer, Octavio Paz
old age – frees you to do and say what you want.
opus
repetitions
rewriting – for the mass media, is desecration. ‘Death to all those who dare rewrite what has been written!’ Jacques and His Master
rhythm – the amazing subtlety of rhythm in classical music compared to the tedious primitivism of rock music. Tut tut.
Soviet – the Germans and Poles have produced writers who lament the German and Polish spirit. The Russians will never do that. They can’t. Every single one of them is a Russian chauvinist.
Temps Modernes – his cultural pessimism blooms: ‘we are living at the end of the Modern Era; the end of art as conceived as an irreplaceable expression of personal originality; the end that heralds an era of unparalleled uniformity’ (p.150)
transparency – the word and concept in whose name the mass media are destroying privacy
ugly
uniform
value – ‘To examine a value means: to try to demaracte and give name to the discoveries, the innovations, the new light that a work casts on the human world.’ (p.152)
vulgarity
work
youth

7. Jerusalem Address: the Novel and Europe (1985)

In the Spring of 1985 Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. He went to Jerusalem to deliver this thank you address. It is a short, extremely punch defense of the novel as a form devoted to saving the human spirit of enquiry in dark times.

In a whistlestop overview of European history, he asserts that the novel was born at the birth of the modern era when, with religious belief receding, man for the first time grasped his plight as a being abandoned on earth: the novel was an investigation of this plight and has remained so ever since.

The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth… but where everyone has the right to be understood. (p.159)

Every novel, like it or not, offers some answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie? (p.161)

But the novel, like the life of the mind, has its enemies. Namely the producers of kitsch and what Rabelais called the agélastes, people who have no sense of humour and do not laugh. He doesn’t say it but I interpret this to mean those who espouse identity politics and political correctness. Thou Must Not Laugh At These Serious Subjects, say the politically correct, and then reel off a list which suits themselves. And kitsch:

Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for the banality of what we think and feel. (p.163)

The greatest promoter of kitsch is the mass media which turns the huge human variety into half a dozen set narratives designed to make us burst into tears. We are confronted by a three-headed monster: the agélastes, the nonthought of received ideas, and kitsch.

Kundera sees European culture as being under threat from these three forces, and identifies what is most precious about it (European culture), namely:

its respect for the individual
for the individual’s original thought
for the right of the individual to a private life

Against the three-headed monster, and defending these precious freedoms, is set the Novel, a sustained investigation by some of the greatest minds, into all aspects of human existence, the human predicament, into human life and interactions, into human culture.

Central ideas

The novel is an investigation into man’s Lebenwelt – his life-being.

Novelists are discoverers and explorer of the capabilities, the potentialities, of human existence.

Conclusions

1. Fascinating conception of the novel as a sustained investigation into the nature of the self, conducted through a series of historical eras each with a corresponding focus and interest.

2. Fascinating trot through the history of the European novel, specially the way it mentions novelists we in England are not so familiar with, such as Hermann Broch or Diderot or Novalis, or gives a mid-European interpretation to those we have heard of like Kafka or Joyce.

3. Fascinating insight into not only his own working practice, but what he thinks he’s doing; how he sees his novels continuing and furthering the never-ending quest of discovery which he sees as the novel’s historic mission.

But what none of this fancy talk brings out at all, is the way Milan Kundera’s novels are obsessed with sex. It is extraordinary that neither Sex nor Eroticism appear in his list of 63 words since his powerfully erotic (and shameful and traumatic and mysterious and ironic) explorations of human sexuality are what many people associate Kundera’s novels with.

Last thoughts

Changes your perspective It’s a short book, only 165 pages with big gaps between the sections, but it does a very good job of explaining how Kundera sees the history and function of the novel, as an investigation into the existential plight of humanity. It changed my mental image of Kundera from being an erotic novelist to being more like an existentialist thinker-cum-writer in the tradition of Sartre.

The gap between Britain and Europe There is a subtler takeaway, which is to bring out how very different we, the British, are from the Europeans. True, he mentions a few of our authors – the eighteenth century trio of Richardson, Fielding and Sterne – but no Defoe, Austen, Scott or Dickens.

The real point is that he assumes all European intellectuals will have read widely in European literature – from Dante and Boccaccio through Cervantes and into the eighteenth century of Diderot, Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade. And when you read the French founders of critical theory, Barthes or Derrida, or the influential historian Foucault, they obviously refer to this tradition.

But it remains completely alien to us in Britain. Not many of us read Diderot or Novalis or Lermontov or even Goethe. We’ve all heard of Flaubert and Baudelaire because, in fact, they’re relatively easy to read – but not many of us have read Broch or Musil, and certainly not Gombrowicz. Though all literature students should have heard of Thomas Mann I wonder how many have read any of his novels.

My point being that, as you read on into the book, you become aware of the gulf between this huge reservoir of writers, novels and texts in the European languages – French, German and Russian – and the almost oppressively Anglo-Saxon cultural world we inhabit, not only packed with Shakespeare and Dickens, but also drenched in American writers, not least the shibboleths of modern American identity politics such as Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou.

Reading this book fills your mind with ideas about the European tradition. But at the same time it makes you aware of how very different and apart we, in Britain, are, from that tradition. Some of us may have read some of it; but none of us, I think, can claim to be of it.

Credit

The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera was first published in French in 1986. The English translation was published by Grove Press in the USA and Faber and Faber in the UK in 1988. All references are to the 1990 Faber paperback edition.

Milan Kundera’s books

1967 The Joke
1969 Life Is Elsewhere
1969 Laughable Loves (short stories)

1972 The Farewell Party
1978 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1986 The Art of the Novel (essays)

1990 Immortality
1995 Slowness
1998 Identity

2000 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance

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by Simon on September 2, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, European History, Literary criticism, Literature

Tagged academic, agélastes, August Esch, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Balzac, Beethoven, Bohemia, Central Europe, Cervantes, comedy, counterpoint, Czechoslovakia, Descartes, Diderot, Don Quixote, Edmund Husserl, Emma Bovary, Establishment Modernism, First World War, Flaubert, France, graphomania, graphomaniac, Hermann Broch, Jacques and His Master, James Joyce, Joachim von Pasenow, Joyce, Kafka, Kafkaesque, kitsch, Kundera, Lebenswelt, lecturer, Literature, Mann, mass media, Miguel Cervantes, misogyny, Moravia, nonthought, Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, polyphony, Prague, Proust, Rabelais, Richardson, Robert Louis Stevenson, soundbite, string quartets, the Baroque, the comic, the Counter-Reformation, The Death of Virgil, The Good Soldier Schweik, the Jerusalem Prize, The Joke, the Modern Era, the novel, The Sleepwalkers, Tolstoy, Wilhelm Huguenau

Posted by Simon on September 2, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/02/the-art-of-the-novel-milan-kundera/

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All posts tagged Hermann Broch

The Sleepwalkers

Broch flees Austria

Schematics

Modernist?

The Jean Starr Untermeyer translation

Long sentences

Thought-groups

In the warehouse district

Pigs and slaves

German brutalism

Phenomenology

Lyricism

Plot summary

Credit

Hermann Broch reviews

Reviews of 20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

Exhibitions

Books

German history

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Four problems

Tone of voice

The man without qualities

Kakania

Moosbrugger

The ‘Parallel Campaign’

Part 1 A sort of introduction, chapter listing

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Austro-Hungarian literature and history

History

The Good Soldier Švejk

Franz Kafka

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Brief summary

On the word ‘Steppenwolf’

Part one – Steppenwolf’s self-pity

1. The nephew’s account

2. Harry Haller’s manuscript

The two eras theory and ‘the sickness of our times’

Treatise on the Steppenwolf (p.51-80)

Overuse of the word ‘hell’

The rebel

Back to sad Harry

Part two – Hermine

Part three – The Magic Theatre

Conclusion

Credit

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20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

German history

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Critics claim The Sleepwalkers is a panoramic overview of German society and history

Critics claim The Sleepwalkers portray ‘a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals and reason’

Critics claim The Sleepwalkers is a bold analysis of the collapse of Western values

Using Walter Laqueur to critique The Sleepwalkers

1. The Sleepwalkers’ cultural pessimism, far from being innovative, was entirely in line with its time and place

2. The Sleepwalkers is a good example of turgid, incomprehensible Germanic philosophising at its worst

3. The Sleepwalkers revels in the corruption it portrays without offering any positive vision

The hopeless German-ness of the Germans

The gross failure of German political culture between 1870 and 1945

Back to Broch

Conclusion

What German ‘culture’ meant to its neighbours

How to cure Germany

Credit

20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

German history

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1. The cast

2. A more accessible layout

3. The plot

4. ‘Modernist’ techniques