All posts tagged Wilhelm Huguenau

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 Realist (1918) by Hermann Broch (1931)

Incapable of communicating himself to others, incapable of breaking out of his isolation, doomed to remain the mere actor of his life, the deputy of his own ego – all that any human being can know of another is a mere symbol, the symbol of an ego that remains beyond our grasp, possessing no more value than that of a symbol; and all that can be told is the symbol of a symbol, a symbol at a second, third, nth remove, asking for representation in the true double sense of the word. (p.497)

1. The cast
2. A more accessible layout
3. The plot
4. ‘Modernist’ techniques
5. Broch’s pseudo-philosophy
6. Humourless hysteria
7. Drawing strands together

The Realist (1918) is the third in Austrian writer Hermann Broch’s trilogy, The Sleepwalkers. At nearly 300 pages in the Vintage paperback edition it is almost twice as long as the first two novels put together.

The first two novels started out as realistic accounts of a handful of characters, featuring very vividly drawn settings and events, which slowly became more long-winded and hysterical, bloated with the religio-philosophical speculations of their chief protagonists which are mingled with their psychological obsessions and idées fixes into a complicated and sometimes confusing brew.

The Realist has more characters than the previous books, and more systematically deploys the different styles or registers of Broch’s writing, from the purely descriptive, through the psychological delineation of character, to – at the highbrow end – sections of pure philosophy and cultural critique. First, a look at the characters.

1. The cast

1. The Realist is Wilhelm Huguenau. He was approaching his thirtieth birthday when the Great War broke out. Quickly we skim over the years Huguenau spent waiting to be called up, then his conscription and training in 1917 and his first experiences in the trenches on the Western Front, lined with human excrement and flooded with rain and urine.

This is all dealt with briskly because the point is that on his first evening Huguenau promptly climbs over the lip of the trench and goes absent without leave. He is a handsome, smooth-talking man who grew up in Alsace on the border between Germany and Belgium and so is able to present himself to suspicious peasants and to a devout pastor who puts him up for a while, as an innocent man reluctantly dragooned into the army. He is a chancer with a beaming, friendly face and a ready smile on his lips (p.346). Surprisingly, though, he is stout and short (p.513), ‘a round, thickset figure’ (p.535). Possibly because Broch intends us to despise him as a symbol of the self-centred, go-getting corruption of the modern age.

2. Ludwig Gödicke is 40. He was a bricklayer before he was called up to the Landwehr. He was buried alive in a front line trench by shellfire. When the ambulancemen dug him out they couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead and so had a bet on the matter, it’s only because of the random decision to have a bet that they didn’t fling him back in the hole but instead take him to a field hospital where he hovers between life and death as his soul slowly reconstitutes itself in anguish (p.351). (If this were an English novel he would recover from his ordeal; because it is a German novel by a German author, Ludwig has to reconstitute a soul which was atomised by his near-death experience and rebuild it fragment by fragment, a process described in immense detail.) For even though his body is repaired, it turns out that Ludwig’s soul is an unbuilt house which he must reconstruct one brick at a time. Meanwhile, in total silence he hobbles on crutches around the hospital grounds (p.383).

3. Lieutenant Jaretzki is in military hospital, almost the whole of his left arm swollen and infected by gas. The doctors discuss the need to amputate the arm before the infection reaches his torso, and then go ahead. Jaretski takes it pretty philosophically and discusses with one of the doctors whether to try and get a job in an engineering firm or simply volunteer to return to the front where he can be shot and get it over with.

4. Huguenau has by now travelled south away from the front and arrived at a sleepy little town in the valley of a tributary of the Moselle. He has spent the last of his money on smart clothes and a haircut and sets about coming up with money-making schemes. He visits the ramshackle office of the local newspaper, the Kur-Trier Herald, where the seasoned Broch reader has a surprise. For this ailing local paper is edited by none other August Esch, the former book-keeper who was the protagonist of this book’s prequel, The Anarchist (p.356). Esch inherited the newspaper and the buildings it occupies in a legacy, and it is 15 years since we last saw him (in 1903). But he is just as short-tempered and irascible, blaming the military censorship for preventing him publishing the truth, quick to take offence at anyone or anything. We meet his wife, one-time Mother Hentjen, who we last saw on the eve of their marriage, being joylessly ravaged every evening and who Esch occasionally beat when his anger got the better of him. He is tall and lean, with ‘long lank legs’ (p.513).

5. Later, at dinner in the hotel he’s staying in, Huguenau is promoted by devilry to approach the old, grey-haired Major dining nearby, who (he is informed) has authority for the region. For no particular reason, Huguenau finds himself denouncing Esch to the Major, accusing Esch of unpatriotic activities, and claims he’s been sent by higher authorities to carry out an investigation. Intimidated by this smart and confident young man, the old Major blusters and says he’ll introduce Huguenau to some of the local worthies who foregather in the hotel bar on Friday nights. Since Broch is obviously partial to reviving characters from the earlier novels, I immediately suspected that this white-haired and dim old military man might turn out to be Joachim von Pasenow from the first novel, thirty years later… And indeed this suspicion is confirmed in chapter 33 (p.418). Welcome back dim and confused old friend.

6. Hanna Wendler lazily wakes up in ‘Rose Cottage’, stroking her breast under her silk nightclothes before drifting off to sleep again and waking later. She imagines herself as the subject of a rococo painting, or like Goya’s painting of Maja. Presumably these references indicate her social class i.e. educated, upper middle-class. She has a son and several servants. We then learn that her husband, Dr Heinrich Wendling, is a lawyer, and that her listlessness is explained by the fact that he has been absent on the Eastern Front for two years (p.363).

7. Marie is a young Salvation Army girl in Berlin. Her sections are narrated by a first-person narrator who gives eye-witness descriptions of Marie’s life in Berlin in the final months of the war. In chapter 27 we learn that this narrator is Bertrand Müller, Doctor of Philosophy (p.403). That bodes badly. More philosophy, that’s the last thing we need.

8. Disintegration of Values And there’s a recurring section told by another first-person narrator which does nothing but lament the decline and fall of ‘our times’ and ‘the horror of this age’ (p.389) in an irritatingly ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ sort of way. For this moany old devil ‘this age’ is ‘softer and more cowardly than any preceding age’ (p.373) and don’t get him started on ‘modern architecture’! Surely no former age ever greeted its contemporary architecture with such dislike and repugnance (p.389), the architecture of ‘our time’ reveals ‘the non-soul of our non-age’ (p.390).

I got the sense that this narrator or voice is not intended to be Broch’s, it is more self-consciously preening, exaggeratedly that of an aesthete who is happy rattling on about how this or that architectural style reveals ‘the spirit of the age’ etc. These passages might have been immensely useful if they had actually referred to specific buildings or types of architecture current either when the novel is set (1918) or when Broch was writing it (late 1920s). But they don’t. They are very long and curiously empty.

Anyway, we eventually learn that these passages are written by the character Bertrand Müller, and are part of an extended thesis he’s writing (p.439). That explains their über-academic style.

2. A more accessible layout

So that’s the main cast of eight or so characters who are each introduced in the first 20 or so pages, and the next 200+ pages tell us their stories as their lives unfold and, occasionally, intersect.

Apart from being double the length of its predecessor novels, the other immediately distinctive physical thing about The Realist is that it has chapters – lots of them, about 90 chapters, often only a few pages long.

This is in striking contrast to the previous books which were divided into just a handful (4 or 5) of very long acts or divisions. Admittedly these were then broken up into ‘sections’ indicated by breaks in the text, but The Realist is something new. The chapters consciously cut between the characters with each chapter focusing on a different character and on a specific action (or specific topic of waffling burble, in the case of the Disintegration of Values chapters) and is short and focused.

This makes The Realist infinitely more readable than its predecessors with their pages after pages after pages of solid text, sometimes disappearing into such extended passages of religio-philosophy that the reader gets lost and confused.

By contrast, in this book you are never more than a page away from a new chapter and, because they mostly focus on short sharp scenes, the result is much more vivid.

Also, whereas in the previous two novels almost all the dialogue was buried in huge blocks of undifferentiated prose, here the passages of dialogue are broken up so that each new bit of the dialogue, even if it’s only a sentence long, has a new paragraph – the standard way of laying out dialogue in most novels.

Sounds trivial but just these two typographic changes make The Realist look and feel much, much closer to the ‘normal’ type of novel you and I are used to reading.

3. The plot

Huguenau inveigles himself with Esch and gets the local worthies to form a business consortium which partly buys Esch out of the newspaper, installing Huguenau as editor and giving him accommodation in Esch’s house where is daily fed by Esch’s wife, the shapeless, silent hausfrau Gertrud (Mother Hentjen of The Anarchist, 15 years on).

Despite this Huguenau also wants to suck up the local military authority, Major von Pasenow. Now we know, from having followed him for 150 pages in The Romantic that von Pasenow is a moron who consistently fails to understand everything around him and this is what happens when Huguenau writes a cunning clever letter to the Major accusing Esch of consorting with traitorous types i.e. going to a beer cellar with a few mates and discussing how the war is going badly and whether it’s likely to end. Huguenau miscalculates because von Pasenow is too dim to be suspicious of Esch but instead is (rightly) suspicious of Huguenau’s motives in sending the letter.

Ludwig Gödicke attends the funeral of a well-liked young soldier who’d been in the hospital as Gödicke. the funeral prompts Gödicke to utter his first words and he tries to climb down into the open grave. Huguenau attends the funeral so the reader begins to realise that all these characters are in the same town.

Huguenau is bored of editing the newspaper which, after all has little or nothing to put in it. He has a brainwave, which is to set up a patriotic charity. That Friday he corrals the local worthies into setting it up, naming it the Moselle Memorial Association. He also has the idea of setting up an ‘Iron Bismarck’ in the town square, the name Germans gave to blocks of wood they set up and then citizens hammered nails into, whilst making a contribution to the fund/charity.

Sucking up to the Major, Huguenau had invited him to contribute an article to the Kur-Trier Herald, so the Major wrote an extended sermon with many quotes from the Bible. This has a powerful impact on Esch, who sets up a Bible Study group and asks the Major to lead it. Here, as everywhere else in the trilogy, there is a complete absence of irony or wit or self-awareness or charity or sympathy or kindness. Esch and von Pasenow bark at each other like dogs.

The young soldier who died in the hospital, his brother is the meek and mild watch-repairer Samwald, who takes to visiting the hospital, repairing watches for the staff and inmates, and strangely drawn to the silent Gödicke. They often sit on a bench in the sun in silence. One day Samwald takes Gödicke by the hand into the town and to the editorial offices of the Kur-Trier Herald, up a ladder in a sort of farm courtyard. Samwald, it turns out, is part of Esch’s Bible Studies group.

A strange scene where the Major, Esch, Frau Esch and Huguenau sit round chatting, described in the format of a play script, in which the Major and Esch talk nothing but religious salvationism / theology, and all four end up singing a Salvation Army hymn.

A Celebration drink and dance in a biergarden, where many of the characters, plus the three or four named doctors who are treating Gödicke (doctors Kessel, Kühlenbeck, Flurschütz) and the nurses (Sister Mathilde, Sister Clara) mix and mingle. I wish I could say there was one shred of humour, banter, repartee or warmth in this scene, but there isn’t.

Major von Pasenow attends the Bible Group led by Esch. Like all the other religious meetings, it is hysteria-ridden, dominated by imagery of death, the grave, the Evil One and so on. Broch’s depiction of German religious believers is terrifying because they are constantly at an extremity of horror and terror.

Basically, Huguenau tries a variety of tactics to incriminate Esch in the eyes of the Major in order, I think, to have him locked up as a traitor so Huguenau can inherit the whole of the newspaper, printing press and buildings. However, this is never going to happen because Esch and von Pasenow share the same morbid, over-excitable morbid Christian hysteria. Here’s a brief look inside Major von Pasenow’s mind.

Yet strong as was the effort he made to bring his thoughts under control, it was not strong enough to master the contradictory orders and service instructions before him; he was incapable of resolving the contradictions. Chaos was invading the world on every side and chaos was spreading over his thoughts and over the world, darkness was spreading, and the advance of darkness sounded like the agony of a painful death, like a death-rattle in which only one thing was audible, only one thing certain, the downfall of the Fatherland – oh, how the darkness was rising and the chaos, and out of that chaos, as if from a sink of poisonous gases, there grinned the visage of Huguenau, the visage of the traitor, the instrument of divine wrath, the author of all the encroaching evil. (p.582)

Meanwhile, the stories of other characters advance. I found it hard to understand the Berlin scenes. The first-person narrator, Bertrand Müller, appears to be living in a boarding house with various Jews, old and young. He has an antagonistic relationship (as far as I can tell every single relationship in all three books is antagonistic; nobody seems to just get on with each other) with an elderly scholarly Jew, Dr Samson Litwak and also, in some obscure way, appears to be supervising or looking over a burgeoning relationship between the Salvation Army girl, Marie, and a young Jewish man Nuchem Sussin.

And Hanna Wendler’s husband, the long-absent lawyer and lieutenant in the army, Heinrich, turns up on leave. Here Broch is on form, describing the strangeness of her attitude to him, her sense of distance from herself, her sense that everything she experiences is somehow secondary. Plus, they appear to have a classy and erotic sex life (p.539).

History has been ticking along in the background. As in the other novels Broch has subtly indicated the passage of the seasons from spring through a glorious high summer and into autumn. Except this time the year in question is 1918 so we know that the year is not going to end well for the German side and the German characters.

In October Huguenau is finally caught out. His name appears on a long list of deserters distributed to local authorities which ends up on Major von Pasenow’s desk. Pasenow is dim and dense, which is why he is scared and overcome with horror much of the time – he just doesn’t understand the world. So it is characteristic that a) he’s not sure he’s read the list properly b) he is then crushed by indecision as to what to do about it during which – instead of acting decisively, he characteristically invokes the horrors of the universe and the terror of the Antichrist and sees Huguenau as a great devil and traitor who is responsible for Germany’s defeat – in other words exactly the kind of hysterical over-reaction we’ve come to expect from a Broch character.

When the Major finally calls Huguenau in to explain himself, the portly little man immediately goes on the offensive, making up a story that his papers were taken off him when he was chosen for intelligence work in this town and he’s been waiting ever since for them to catch up with him, you know what army bureaucracy is like.

The Major doesn’t really believe this brazen bluff, but he is so ineffectual that he doesn’t know what to do next. After Huguenau has strolled out, bold as brass, Major von Pasenow is so overcome with despair at his role in consorting with a traitor etc, that he gets his service revolver out of a drawer, with thoughts of shooting himself there and then.

This is the kind of hysterical over-reaction which is so typical of Broch’s characters throughout the trilogy.

Meanwhile, back at the printing press some of the workmen Huguenau employs to work the press are a bit surly and mumbling about the low wages he gives them. News of the Bolshevik revolution has of course been in the press for over a year, but now there’s talk of class war spreading among German workers. So that evening Huguenau makes the strategic move of going along to the local bierkellar and tries to ingratiate himself into the workers’ (Lindner, Liebel) good graces.

I think Huguenau is intended to be a cynical, amoralist whose ruthless concern for number one and paring away of all unnecessary moral restrictions is strongly to be deprecated, but I admire his inventiveness and his chutzpah.

Then the war ends and there is anarchy. Broch describes ‘the events’ of 2, 3 and 4 November in the little town, namely attacks by armed workers on the barracks and the prison. Huguenau had been deputised by the military authorities, handed a gun and told to defend a bridge but when a crowd of armed workers approaches, he quickly joins them and leads the attack on the prison. His euphoria turns to nausea when he sees one of the prison warders dragged out of hiding by the mob and set upon, pinned to the ground and beaten with an iron bar. He flees.

Down the pub the workers had mentioned a new lung disease which has carried off several friends. They joke about it being the Apocalypse. We, the readers, know it is the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Now we see sexy and semi-detached Hanna Wendler in bed with a fever. The explosion in the barracks blows in the windows of her house and she takes shelter in the kitchen with the servants and her son.

Esch sets off with his gun towards the prison but sees the mob coming and hides. Then he hears a crash and returns to find the mob have made the Major’s car crash into a ditch, rolling on its side, killing the driver and a soldier. With another soldier he manages to lift the car and extract the body of the Major, still breathing but unconscious. When he comes too, he can’t move but babbles something about a horse which has fallen, broken its leg and needs to be shot. The reader remembers that this refers to an incident from von Pasenow’s boyhood when he had an accident with his brother Helmuth’s horse, which had to be put down (p.611).

Huguenau rushes back to the buildings with his precious printing press and finds it is solid and untouched, but the living quarters he shares with Herr and Frau Esch have been wrecked by the mob. She emerges weeping from the wreckage, they are both unsettled by the chaos around them and before they know it she is unbuckling her corsets and they fall onto the sofa and have sex.

Meanwhile Eash tends the semi-conscious Major, gets one of the soldiers who’d been in the car to help carry him back to his house, the printworks and his rooms in the courtyard. Here Esch carefully carries the Major into a basement, lays him on a rug, quietly closes the trapdoor and sets off back to the scene of the crash to help the other wounded soldier.

He doesn’t know that Huguenau has spied him from up in the house and now follows him silently through the streets of the town, garishly lit by flames from the Town Hall which the rioters have set on fire. Beaten survivors stagger past them. In a dark street Huguenau leaps forward and bayonets Esch in the back. The stricken man falls without a sound and dies face down in the mud.

Oh. Maybe I don’t admire Huguenau’s cheek and chutzpah. He was more sterotypically German than I had realised. He is a brute. He has turned into Mack the Knife.

A looter climbs the wall to break into Rose Cottage but is repelled by the ghostly sight of Hanna Wendler sleepwalking towards him. She is helped back into the house by the servants. Next day she dies of flu complicated by pneumonia (p.616).

Huguenau saw Esch place the Major in the potato cellar. Now Huguenau goes down into it and tends the Major. The latter can’t speak or move, but this doesn’t stop Huguenau delivering a lengthy diatribe about how badly he’s been treated, and tenderly caring for him by fetching milk from a distraught Frau Esch. The tender care of a psychopath.

The final Disintegration of Values chapter asserts that cultures are created out of a synthesis or balance of the Rational and the Irrational. When a balance is achieved, you have art and style (I think he thinks the Middle Ages was just such a period; the author of the Disintegration chapters appears to think the Middle Ages was the high point of integrated belief system and society, and the Renaissance inaugurated the rise of the Individual, individuals who tend to develop their own ‘private theologies’, and it’s been downhill ever since).

Then the two elements expand, over-reach themselves. The Triumph of the Irrational is marked by the dwindling of common shared culture, everyone becomes an atom. This three-page excursus leads up to presenting Huguenau as an epitome, an embodiment of the Disintegration of Values of Our Time.

As if to ram home the Author’s Message, the narrator then goes on to quote a letter Huguenau wrote some time later from his home town, in his ornate, correct and formal way bullying Frau Esch (whose husband he murdered, and who he raped) into buying the shares in the newspaper company which Huguenau had fraudulently acquired off Esch at the start of the novel. He is, in other words, a heartless swine.

And Broch rams home his Author’s Message by pointing out that none of his colleagues in the business community would have seen anything wrong with the letter or the scheming way Huguenau ran his business or married for convenience an heiress and promptly adopted her family’s Protestant beliefs.

Broch appears to think the worst thing about late 1920s Germany was slippery businessmen. Wrong, wasn’t he? Less than a year after this book was published, Hitler came to power.

And the book ends with a kind of 16-page philosophical sermon which, as far as I can tell, extensively uses Hegel’s idea of the Dialectic, the opposition of thesis and antithesis – in this case, the Rational and the Irrational – to mount a sustained attack on Protestantism, communism and business ethics as all fallings-away from the true teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, the One True Church, the home of all true values, from which man has fallen into a wilderness of alienation.

In other words, Broch appears to have been as Roman Catholic a novelist as Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, only – being German – his characters are much more brutish, angry and violent and – being German – his philosophical moments are couched in the extraordinarily bombastic and impenetrably pretentious verbosity of German Idealist philosophy.

In the last pages we don’t hear anything more about the various characters – Frau Esch, the Major, Ludwig Gödicke, Lieutenant Jaretzki, the doctors or nurses and so on. The novel ends on a sustained hymn to a kind of Hegelian Catholicism.

4. ‘Modernist’ techniques

All the commentaries on Broch associate him with the high Modernism of James Joyce, and emphasise that The Realist uses funky ‘modernist’ techniques such as having more than one narrative voice i.e. a few of the chapters feature a character speaking in the first person – and that in the classic modernist style it’s a collage including other ‘types’ of texts, including a newspaper article, a letter, all the Disintegrated Values chapters which are, in effect, excerpts from a work of philosophy, and excerpts from a long poem in rhyming couplets which pop up in the Marie in Berlin chapters, and at one point turns into a script with stage directions and only dialogue (pp.497-505).

This sort of thing happens a dozen times but, frankly, it’s chickenfeed compared to Ulysses, it’s barely noticeable as experimentation, since all these techniques were incorporated into novels generations ago – incorporating letters and journal entries was done by Daniel Defoe in the 1720s – a lot of the earliest novels were written entirely in the forms of letters – so we have read hundreds of novels which are at least if not more ‘hypertextual’ without any song and dance. Put another way, the reader barely notices these supposedly ‘modernist’ aspects of the text.

By far the more salient aspect of the book, as of its predecessors, is its inclusion of huge gobbets of religio-philosophical speculation.

5. Broch’s pseudo-philosophy

By this time I had formed the opinion that Broch is at his weakest when he launches into prolonged passages about human nature and the human soul and ‘the soul of the age’ and ‘the spirit of our times’ etc etc. In case you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a little taste of one of the Disintegration of Values chapters:

War is war, l’art pour l’art, in politics there’s no room for compunction, business is business – all these signify the same thing, all these appertain to the same aggressive and radical spirit, informed by that uncanny, I might almost say that metaphysical, lack of consideration for consequences, that ruthless logic directed on the object and on the object alone, which looks neither to the right nor to the left; and this, after all, is the style of thinking that characterises our age.

One cannot escape from this brutal and aggressive logic that exhibits in all the values and non-values of our age, not even by withdrawing into the solitude of a castle or of a Jewish dwelling; yet a man who shrinks from knowledge, that is to say, a romantic, a man who must have a bounded world, a closed system of values, and who seeks in the past the completeness he longs for, such a man has good reason for turning to the Middle Ages. For the Middle Ages possessed the ideal centre of values that he requires, possessed a supreme value of which all other values were subordinate: the belief in the Christian God. Cosmogony was as dependent on that central value (more, it could be scholastically deduced from it) as man himself; man with all his activities formed a part of the whole world-order which was merely the reflected image of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, the closed and finite symbol of an eternal and infinite harmony. The dictum ‘business is business’ was not permitted to the medieval artist, competitive struggle being forbidden to him; the medieval artist knew nothing of l’art pour l’art, but only that he must serve his faith; medieval warfare claimed absolute authority only when it was waged in the service of the faith. It was a world reposing on faith, a final not a causal world, a world founded on being, not on becoming; and its social structure, its art, the sentiments that bound it together, in short, its whole system of values, was subordinated to the all-embracing living value of faith; the faith was the point of plausibility in which every line of enquiry ended, the faith was what enforced logic and gave it that specific colouring, that style-creating impulse, which expresses itself not only in a certain style of thinking, but continues to shape a style characterising the whole epoch for so long as the faith survives.

But thought dared to take the step from monotheism into the abstract, and God, the personal God made visible in the finite infinity of the Trinity, became an entity whose name could no longer be spoken and whose image could no longer be fashioned, an entity that ascended into the infinite neutrality of the Absolute and there was lost to sight in the dread vastness of Being, no longer immanent but beyond the reach of man. (pp.146-147)

The infinite neutrality of the Absolute. The dread vastness of Being. They’re certainly what you want to read about in a novel.

There’s more, lots and lots more, hundreds of pages more just like this. I can see four objections to the acres of swamp prose like this.

Aesthetically, it is out of place to swamp a novel with tracts of philosophy. If you want to write philosophy, put it in a philosophy essay or book. In a sense putting it in a novel is cheating because here a) it’s not going to be judged as pure philosophy by your professional peers b) if there are errors or inadequacies in it you can always explain them away saying that’s a requirement of its fictional setting.
It destroys the rhythm of the stories of the actual characters, you know, the things novels are usually written about.
Most damning, it’s not very original. To say that society was more integrated and authentic in the Middle Ages is one of the most trite and hackneyed pieces of social criticism imaginable. Victorian cultural critics from Disraeli to Carlyle were saying the same sort of thing by the 1840s, 90 years before Broch.
So to summarise, these are hackneyed, clichéd ideas served up in long-winded prose which translates badly into English, and interrupt the flow of the narrative.

In the second book in the trilogy, The Anarchist, I initially thought the religio-philosophical musing belonged solely to the character Esch, but then the narrator began launching into them unprompted and separate from his characters, and I began to have the horrible realisation that Broch himself appears to believe the pompous, pretentious, Christian pseudo-philosophy he serves up, hundreds of pages of it:

Is it this radical religiosity, dumb and striped of ornament, this conception of an infinity conditioned by severity and severity and by severity alone, that determines the style of our new epoch? Is this ruthlessness of the divine principle a symptom of the infinite recession of the focus of plausibility? Is this immolation of all sensory content to be regarded as the root-cause of the prevailing disintegration of values? Yes. (p.526)

Therefore I (initially) liked The Realist because these kinds of passages were hived off to one side in chapters which were clearly marked Disintegration of Values, so they were easy to skim read or skip altogether (after a close reading of half a dozen of them revealed that they had little or nothing of interest to contribute to the book).

6. Humourless hysteria

It is hard to convey how cold, charmless and humourless these books are. The tone is monotonous, departing from a flat factual description only to switch from brutal to homicidal, via paranoia and hysteria.

For example, Huguenau gets his new war charity to organise a drink and dance celebration at the Stadthalle. Most of the characters are present, plus local worthies and their wives, there is drinking, there is flirting, there is dancing. Now almost any novelist you can imagine might have made this the opportunity for humour, but not Broch. For him it is a trigger for the religious hysteria and psychopathic righteousness of Major von Pasenow.

Sitting at his table watching the dancers mooch around the dance floor, the Major has a nightmare vision. Filled with ‘growing horror’ he becomes convinced that the sight of people dancing and having a good time in front of him is a vision of ‘corruption’, every face becomes a ‘featureless pit’ from which there is no rescue. From these grotesquely adolescent immature thoughts arises the wish to ‘destroy this demoniacal rabble’, ‘to exterminate them, to see them lying at his feet’ (p.515).

And all this is prompted by a town dance, a relaxed and happy social event. But in this Broch character it triggers a kind of mad, religiose hysteria.

At times the madness of many of these characters is terrifying, not because they’re scary, but because behind them rise the shadows of Warsaw and Lidice and Oradour-sur-Glane and all the other places and populations which Broch’s humourless, hysterical, hell-bent fellow Germans set about destroying and exterminating just a few years later.

(And it’s a reminder why The Romantic, the first book in the trilogy which focuses on Joachim von Pasenow’s increasingly hysterical religious mania, is such a hard read. And also why these books are emphatically not ‘the portrait of a generation’ or an entire society, but cameos of a handful of religious nutcases and psychopaths.)

7. Drawing strands together

The volume containing all three novels is a long book. The reader has to process much information, and information of different types – from descriptions of individual landscapes and scenes, to the cumulative impression made by characters major and minor, through to the two major obstacles of 1. extended descriptions of the weird, deranged psyches of major characters e.g. both von Pasenow and Esch, and 2. in the Realist, extended passages of philosophical speculation and/or cultural criticism (about the artistic bankruptcy of ‘our age’).

I’ve tended to emphasise the problems and the longeurs, but there are many many pleasurable moments to be had, moments of subtle psychological insight and descriptions of rooms, city streets and landscapes.

And one of the pleasures is that Broch has gone to some pains to sew threads into the text, to litter it with reminiscences and echoes. Having slogged through all three books, recognising these is like seeing stars in the sky.

For example, at a musical concert, the elderly Major von Pasenow mentions the music of Spohr and we remember that it was a piece by Spohr which his wife-to-be, Elisabeth, played when Pasenow visited her and her parents in the summer of 1888 in the first novel (p.93)

In another fleeting moment Pasenow uses a phrase about love requiring a lack of intimacy and familiarity, which we recall his cynical, worldly friend Eduard Bertrand using in the first novel.

A little more than fleeting is the major echo event when the (as usual) confused and perplexed von Pasenow has his interview with Huguenau during which he fails to know what to do about Huguenau being a deserter, collapses in self-loathing and despair and gets out his service revolver to shoot himself. First he tries to write a suicide note but, characteristically useless even at this, presses the pen so hard he breaks the nib, and when he next tries to dip it in the ink pot, spills the pot releasing a stream of black ink all over his desk (p.585).

The reader remembers that this – trying to write a letter, breaking the nib and knocking over the ink pot – is exactly what his father did in his fury when Joachim refused to come back from Berlin and take over the running of the family farm in the first novel (pp.104-5). The echo extends even to the words: old Herr von Pasenow in the first book is found spluttering ‘Out with him, out with him’ about his son, while 500 pages and thirty years later his son is found spluttering exactly the same words, about Huguenau, ‘Out with him (p.584).

These moments remind you that, beneath the philosophical verbiage and tucked between the characters’ often hysterical over-reactions and blunt aggressive dialogue, there is actually a novel, a work of fiction about characters.

If Broch submitted this to a modern editor I suspect they’d tell him to delete all the philosophy. But the philosophical sections and the regular philosophical meditations on the thoughts and ideas of his characters, are largely what characterise the book.

The problem is that almost all the ‘philosophy’ is bunk. It rotates around ideas of God and the Infinite and the Absolute which might resonate in a country with a strong tradition of Idealist philosophy (i.e. Germany) but which means nothing to an Anglo-Saxon reader. E.g:

‘Hegel says: it is infinite love that makes God identify Himself with what is alien to Him so as to annihilate it. So Hegel says… and then the Absolute religion will come.’ (p.624)

I reread the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre not so long ago. Sartre starts from a not dissimilar position from Broch, his characters plagued with an unusual, hallucinatory, highly alienated relationship with reality. The difference is that out of his intensely alienated relationship with ‘reality’ and language, Sartre created an entirely new worldview, expressed in a difficult-to-understand but genuinely new philosophy.

Broch, through his characters and his long-winded investigations of alienated mental states, starts from a similar place but his philosophy reaches back, back, back, to the German Idealist tradition and, above all, to a kind of troubled Catholic Christian faith which he and his confused characters circle round endlessly, like moths round a flame.

Sartre is forward-looking, Broch is backward-looking. As a result, Sartre is still read, quoted and studied; Broch is largely forgotten.

Credit

20th century German literature

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

The Weimar Republic

The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera (1986)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes (1983)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Dialogue on the Art of the Novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Notes inspired ‘The Sleepwalkers’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Dialogue on the Art of Composition (1983)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Somewhere behind (1979)

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

boundless labyrinth
a man’s life becomes a shadow of a truth held elsewhere (in the boundless bureaucracy), which tends to make his life’s meaning theological. Or pseudo-theological
the punished seek the offence, want to find out what it is they have done
when Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends everyone laughed including the author. Kafka takes us inside a joke which looks funny from the outside, but…

Fundamentally his stories are about the dehumanisation of the individual by faceless powers.

What strikes Kundera is that accurately predicted an entire aspect of man in the 20th century without trying to. All his friends were deeply political, avant-garde, communist etc, thought endlessly about the future society. But all of their works are lost. Kafka, in complete contrast, was a very private man, obsessed above all with his own personal life, with the domineering presence of his father and his tricky love life. With no thought of the future or society at large, he created works which turned out to be prophetic of the experience of all humanity in the 20th century and beyond.

This Kundera takes to be a prime example of the radical autonomy of the novel, whose practitioners are capable of finding and naming aspects of the existential potential of humanity, which no other science or discipline can.

6. Sixty-Three Words (1986)

As Kundera became famous, and his books published in foreign languages, he became appalled by the quality of the translations. (The English version of The Joke particularly traumatised him; the English publisher cut all the reflective passages, eliminated the musicological chapters, and changed the order of the parts! In the 1980s he decided to take some time out from writing and undertake a comprehensive review of all translations of his books with a view to producing definitive versions.

Specific words are more important to Kundera than other novelists because his novels are often highly philosophical. In fact, he boils it down: a novel is a meditation on certain themes; and these themes are expressed in words. Change the words, you screw up the meditations, you wreck the novel.

A friendly publisher, watching him slog away at this work for years, said, ‘Since you’re going over all your works with a fine toothcomb, why don’t you make a personal list of the words and ideas which mean most to you?’

And so he produced this very entertaining and easy-to-read collection of short articles, reflections and quotes relating to Milan Kundera’s keywords:

aphorism
beauty
being – friends advised him to remove ‘being’ from the title of The Unbearable Lightness of Being’: but it is designed to be a meditation on the existential quality of being. What if Shakespeare had written: To live or not to live… Too superficial. He was trying to get at the absolute root of our existence.
betrayal
border
Central Europe – the Counter-Reformation baroque dominated the area ensuring no Enlightenment, but on the other hand it was the epicentre of European classical music. Throughout the book he is struck by the way the great modern central European novelists – Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz – were anti-Romantic and modern just not in the way of the flashy avant-gardes of Rome or Paris. Then after 1945 central Europe was extinguished and – as he was writing this list – was a prophetic type of the extinguishment of all Europe. Now we know this didn’t happen.
collaborator – he says the word ‘collaborator’ was only coined in 1944, and immediately defined an entire attitude towards modernity. Nowadays he reviles collaborators with the mass media and advertising who he thinks are crushing humanity. (Looking it up I see the word ‘collaborator’ was first recorded in English in 1802. This is one of the many examples where Kundera pays great attention to a word and everything he says about it turns out to be untrue for English. It makes reading these essays, and his ovels, a sometimes slippery business.)
comic
Czechoslovakia – he never uses the word in his fiction, it is too young (the word and country were, after all, only created in 1918, after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed). He always uses ‘Bohemia’ or ‘Moravia’.
definition
elitism – the Western world is being handed over to the control of a mass media elite. Every time I read his diatribes against the media, paparazzi and the intrusion into people’s private lives, I wonder what he makes of the Facebook and twitter age.
Europe – his books are streaked with cultural pessimism. Here is another example. He thinks Europe is over and European culture already lost. Well, that’s what every generation of intellectuals thinks. 40 years later Europe is still here.
excitement
fate
flow
forgetting – In my review of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I pointed out that Mirek rails against forgetting as deployed by the state (sacking historians) but is himself actively engaged in trying to erase his past (claiming back his love letters to an old flame). Kundera confirms my perception. Totalitarian regimes want to control the past (‘Orwell’s famous theme’), but what his story shows is that so do people. It is a profound part of human nature.
graphomania – he rails against the way everyone is a writer nowadays, and says it has nothing to do with writing (i.e. the very careful consideration of form which he has shown us in the other essays in this book) but a primitive and crude will to impose your views on everyone else.
hat
hatstand
ideas – his despair at those who reduce works to ideas alone. No, it is how they are treated, and his sense of the complexity of treatment is brought out in the extended comparison of his novels to complicated late Beethoven string quartets in 4. Dialogue on the Art of Composition
idyll
imagination
inexperience – a working title for The Unbearable Lightness of Being was The Planet of Inexperience. Why? Because none of us have done this before. We’re all making it up as we go along. That’s what’s so terrifying, so vertiginous.
infantocracy
interview – as comes over in a scene in Immortality, he hates press interviews because the interviewer is only interested in their own agenda and in twisting and distorting the interviewees’ responses. Thus in 1985 he made a decision to give no more interviews and only allow his views to be published as dialogues which he had carefully gone over, refined and copyrighted. Hence parts two and four of this book, although they have a third party asking questions, are in the form of a dialogue and were carefully polished.
irony
kitsch – he’s obsessed with this idea which forms the core – is the theme being meditated on – in part six of the Unbearable Lightness of Being. It consists of two parts: step one is eliminating ‘shit’ from the world (he uses the word ‘shit’) in order to make it perfect and wonderful, as in Communist leaders taking a May Day parade or TV adverts. Step two is looking at this shallow, lying version of the world and bursting into tears at its beauty. Kitsch is ‘the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection.’ (p.135)
laughter – For Rabelais, the comic and the merry were one. Slowly literature became more serious, the eighteenth century preferring wit, the Romantics preferring passion, the nineteenth century preferring realism. Now ‘the European history of laughter is coming to an end’. (p.136) That is so preposterous a thought I laughed out loud.
letters
lightness
lyric
lyricism
macho
meditation – his cultural pessimism is revealed again when he claims that ‘to base a novel on sustained meditation goes against the spirit of the twentieth century, which no longer likes to think at all. (p.139)
message
misogynist – gynophobia (hatred of women) is a potential of human nature as is androphobia (hatred of men), but feminists have reduced misogyny to the status of an insult and thus closed off exploration of a part of human nature.
misomusist – someone who has no feel for art or literature or music and so wants to take their revenge on it
modern
nonbeing
nonthought – the media’s nonthought
novel and poetry – the greatest of the nivelists -become-poets are violently anti-lyrical: Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka (don’t think that’s true of Joyce whose prose is trmeendously lyrical)
novel – the European novel
novelist and writer
novelist and his life – quotes from a series of novelists all wishing their lives to remain secret and obscure: all attention should be on the works. Despite this, the army of biographers swells daily. The moment Kafka attracts more attention that Josef K, cultural death begins.
obscenity
Octavio – the Mexican writer, Octavio Paz
old age – frees you to do and say what you want.
opus
repetitions
rewriting – for the mass media, is desecration. ‘Death to all those who dare rewrite what has been written!’ Jacques and His Master
rhythm – the amazing subtlety of rhythm in classical music compared to the tedious primitivism of rock music. Tut tut.
Soviet – the Germans and Poles have produced writers who lament the German and Polish spirit. The Russians will never do that. They can’t. Every single one of them is a Russian chauvinist.
Temps Modernes – his cultural pessimism blooms: ‘we are living at the end of the Modern Era; the end of art as conceived as an irreplaceable expression of personal originality; the end that heralds an era of unparalleled uniformity’ (p.150)
transparency – the word and concept in whose name the mass media are destroying privacy
ugly
uniform
value – ‘To examine a value means: to try to demaracte and give name to the discoveries, the innovations, the new light that a work casts on the human world.’ (p.152)
vulgarity
work
youth

7. Jerusalem Address: the Novel and Europe (1985)

In the Spring of 1985 Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. He went to Jerusalem to deliver this thank you address. It is a short, extremely punch defense of the novel as a form devoted to saving the human spirit of enquiry in dark times.

In a whistlestop overview of European history, he asserts that the novel was born at the birth of the modern era when, with religious belief receding, man for the first time grasped his plight as a being abandoned on earth: the novel was an investigation of this plight and has remained so ever since.

The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth… but where everyone has the right to be understood. (p.159)

Every novel, like it or not, offers some answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie? (p.161)

But the novel, like the life of the mind, has its enemies. Namely the producers of kitsch and what Rabelais called the agélastes, people who have no sense of humour and do not laugh. He doesn’t say it but I interpret this to mean those who espouse identity politics and political correctness. Thou Must Not Laugh At These Serious Subjects, say the politically correct, and then reel off a list which suits themselves. And kitsch:

Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for the banality of what we think and feel. (p.163)

The greatest promoter of kitsch is the mass media which turns the huge human variety into half a dozen set narratives designed to make us burst into tears. We are confronted by a three-headed monster: the agélastes, the nonthought of received ideas, and kitsch.

Kundera sees European culture as being under threat from these three forces, and identifies what is most precious about it (European culture), namely:

its respect for the individual
for the individual’s original thought
for the right of the individual to a private life

Against the three-headed monster, and defending these precious freedoms, is set the Novel, a sustained investigation by some of the greatest minds, into all aspects of human existence, the human predicament, into human life and interactions, into human culture.

Central ideas

The novel is an investigation into man’s Lebenwelt – his life-being.

Novelists are discoverers and explorer of the capabilities, the potentialities, of human existence.

Conclusions

1. Fascinating conception of the novel as a sustained investigation into the nature of the self, conducted through a series of historical eras each with a corresponding focus and interest.

2. Fascinating trot through the history of the European novel, specially the way it mentions novelists we in England are not so familiar with, such as Hermann Broch or Diderot or Novalis, or gives a mid-European interpretation to those we have heard of like Kafka or Joyce.

3. Fascinating insight into not only his own working practice, but what he thinks he’s doing; how he sees his novels continuing and furthering the never-ending quest of discovery which he sees as the novel’s historic mission.

But what none of this fancy talk brings out at all, is the way Milan Kundera’s novels are obsessed with sex. It is extraordinary that neither Sex nor Eroticism appear in his list of 63 words since his powerfully erotic (and shameful and traumatic and mysterious and ironic) explorations of human sexuality are what many people associate Kundera’s novels with.

Last thoughts

Changes your perspective It’s a short book, only 165 pages with big gaps between the sections, but it does a very good job of explaining how Kundera sees the history and function of the novel, as an investigation into the existential plight of humanity. It changed my mental image of Kundera from being an erotic novelist to being more like an existentialist thinker-cum-writer in the tradition of Sartre.

The gap between Britain and Europe There is a subtler takeaway, which is to bring out how very different we, the British, are from the Europeans. True, he mentions a few of our authors – the eighteenth century trio of Richardson, Fielding and Sterne – but no Defoe, Austen, Scott or Dickens.

The real point is that he assumes all European intellectuals will have read widely in European literature – from Dante and Boccaccio through Cervantes and into the eighteenth century of Diderot, Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade. And when you read the French founders of critical theory, Barthes or Derrida, or the influential historian Foucault, they obviously refer to this tradition.

But it remains completely alien to us in Britain. Not many of us read Diderot or Novalis or Lermontov or even Goethe. We’ve all heard of Flaubert and Baudelaire because, in fact, they’re relatively easy to read – but not many of us have read Broch or Musil, and certainly not Gombrowicz. Though all literature students should have heard of Thomas Mann I wonder how many have read any of his novels.

My point being that, as you read on into the book, you become aware of the gulf between this huge reservoir of writers, novels and texts in the European languages – French, German and Russian – and the almost oppressively Anglo-Saxon cultural world we inhabit, not only packed with Shakespeare and Dickens, but also drenched in American writers, not least the shibboleths of modern American identity politics such as Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou.

Reading this book fills your mind with ideas about the European tradition. But at the same time it makes you aware of how very different and apart we, in Britain, are, from that tradition. Some of us may have read some of it; but none of us, I think, can claim to be of it.

Credit

The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera was first published in French in 1986. The English translation was published by Grove Press in the USA and Faber and Faber in the UK in 1988. All references are to the 1990 Faber paperback edition.

Milan Kundera’s books

1967 The Joke
1969 Life Is Elsewhere
1969 Laughable Loves (short stories)

1972 The Farewell Party
1978 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1986 The Art of the Novel (essays)

1990 Immortality
1995 Slowness
1998 Identity

2000 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Wilhelm Huguenau

The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch (1945)

The Sleepwalkers

Broch flees Austria

Schematics

Modernist?

The Jean Starr Untermeyer translation

Long sentences

Thought-groups

In the warehouse district

Pigs and slaves

German brutalism

Phenomenology

Lyricism

Plot summary

Credit

Hermann Broch reviews

Reviews of 20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

Exhibitions

Books

German history

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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

Credit

20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

German history

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The Realist (1918) by Hermann Broch (1931)

1. The cast

2. A more accessible layout

3. The plot

4. ‘Modernist’ techniques

5. Broch’s pseudo-philosophy

6. Humourless hysteria

7. Drawing strands together

Credit

20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

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The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera (1986)

1. The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes (1983)

2. Dialogue on the Art of the Novel

3. Notes inspired ‘The Sleepwalkers’

4. Dialogue on the Art of Composition (1983)

5. Somewhere behind (1979)

6. Sixty-Three Words (1986)

7. Jerusalem Address: the Novel and Europe (1985)

Central ideas

Conclusions

Last thoughts

Credit

Related links

Milan Kundera’s books

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