All posts tagged Joachim von Paselow

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:

  1. is not an accurate description of what the books are actually about
  2. is, in any case, crushingly unoriginal and indebted to much more influential cultural forerunners such as Spengler
  3. 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

The Weimar Republic

German history

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by Simon on April 11, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 11, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/11/the-sleepwalkers-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:

  1. That each novel is, among other things, a portrait of its era
  2. 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

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 which was first published in 1996.

20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

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by Simon on April 2, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 2, 2020

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