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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.

Hermann Broch reviews

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

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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 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.

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20th century German literature

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

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The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch (1945)

The Sleepwalkers

Broch flees Austria

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The Jean Starr Untermeyer translation

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In the warehouse district

Pigs and slaves

German brutalism

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The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch: a summary

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

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20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

German history

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The Anarchist by Hermann Broch (1931)

Introduction to Hermann Broch

The Anarchist

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Sex

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Comedy

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20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

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