Hermann Broch

"Murder, lust, shame, hypocrisy, and suicide are at the center of The Guiltless, Hermann Broch's postwar novel about the disintegration of European society in the three decades preceding the Second World War. Broch's characters - an apathetic man who can barely remember his own name; a high-school teacher and his lover who return from the brink of a suicide pact to carry on a dishonest relationship; Zerline, a lady's maid who enslaves her mistresses, prostitutes the young country girl Melitta, and metes out her own justice against the "empty wickedness" of her betters - are trapped in their indifference, prisoners of a sort of "wakeful somnolence." These men and women may mention the "imbecile Hitler," yet they prefer a nap or sexual encounter to any social action. Broch thought the kind of ethical perversity and political apathy exhibited by his characters paved the way for Nazism. He believed in the purifying power of writing and hoped that by revealing Germany's underlying guilt he could purge indifference from his own and future generations. In The Guiltless, Broch captures how apathy and ennui - very human failings - evolve into something dehumanizing and dangerous." --Book Jacket.

With his epic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher the equal of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss. Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer (The Romantic), a disgruntled bookkeeper and would-be assassin (The Anarchist), or an opportunistic war-deserter (The Relaist), Broch immerses himself in the twists of his characters' psyches, and at the same time soars above them, to produce a prophetic portrait of a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals, and reason.

Hermann Broch (1886-1951) is best known for his two major modernist works, The Sleepwalkers (3 vols., 1930-1932) and The Death of Virgil (1945), which frame a lifetime of ethical, cultural, political, and social thought. A textile manufacturer by trade, Broch entered the literary scene late in life with an experimental view of the novel that strove towards totality and vividly depicted Europe's cultural disintegration. As fascism took over and Broch, a Viennese Jew, was forced into exile, his view of literature as transformative was challenged, but his commitment to presenting an ethical view of the crises of his time was unwavering. An important mentor and interlocutor for contemporaries such as Arendt and Canetti as well as a continued inspiration for contemporary authors, Broch wrote to better understand and shape the political and cultural conditions for a postfascist world. This volume covers the major literary works and constitutes the first comprehensive introduction in English to Broch's political, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical writings. Contributors: Graham Bartram, Brechtje Beuker, Gisela Brude-Firnau, Gwyneth Cliver, Jennifer Jenkins, Kathleen L. Komar, Paul Michael Lützeler, Gunther Martens, Sarah McGaughey, Judith Ryan, Judith Sidler, Galin Tihanov, Sebastian Wogenstein. Graham Bartram retired as Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Lancaster, UK. Sarah McGaughey is Associate Professor of German at Dickinson College, USA. Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Hermann Broch (1886-1951) is remembered among English-speaking readers for his novels The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil, and among German-speaking readers for his novels as well as his works on moral and political philosophy, his aesthetic theory, and his varied criticism. This study reveals Broch as a major historian as well, one who believes that true historical understanding requires the faculties of both poet and philosopher. Through an analysis of the changing thought and career of the Austrian poet, librettist, and essaist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Broch attempts to define and analyze the major intellectual issues of the European fin de siècle, a period that he characterizes according to the Nietzschean concepts of the breakdown of rationality and the loss of a central value system. The result is a major examination of European thought as well as a comparative study of political systems and artistic styles.

Studies of one of the foremost 20c Austrian writers, as a critic and as a novelist and dramatist. The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch ranks with Kafka and Musil among the three greatest 20th-century Austrian novelists and belongs to the century's most gifted novelists in German from whatever country. He established his reputation with The Sleepwalkers, a trilogy of political and philosophical novels. His best-known work is The Death of Virgil, a long, challenging work in a lyrical, exuberant, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible style, akind of cerebral stream-of-consciousness of the dying Virgil. Broch also wrote extensively about modern art and architecture, Hofmannsthal, and mass psychology. He has a special connection to Yale, as he lived the last years of his life there after having escaped Austria in 1938. The participants in the Yale Symposium of April 2001 are among the world's most prominent Broch scholars. Fourteen of their presentations have been extensively revised for this volume, which focuses on Broch as critic and as novelist and dramatist. Topics include Broch's views on kitsch and art, and on drama; his cultural criticism; his cooperation with Borgese and Arendt; his theory of mass psychology; history in his works, Ernst Kretschmer's influence on him; Virgil and Celan's Atemwende; Jean Starr Untermeyer's translation of Virgil; guilt and the fall in Those without Gui Paul Michael Lützeler is Distinguished University Professor of German at Washington University St. Louis and editor of Broch's collected works. MATTHIAS KONZETT is associate professor of German at Yale; WILLY RIEMER is associate professor of German at the University of Delaware, and CHRISTA SAMMONS is curator of the German collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Hermann Broch achieved international recognition for his brilliant use of innovative literary techniques to present the entire range of human experience, from the biological to the metaphysical. Concerned with the problem of ethical responsibility in a world with no unified system of values, he turned to literature as the appropriate form for considering those human problems not subject to rational treatment. Late in life, Broch began questioning his artistic pursuits and turned from literature to devote himself to political theory. While he is well known and highly regarded throughout the world as a novelist, he was equally accomplished as an essayist. These six essays give us a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most original thinkers.

The first English-language monograph on Hermann Broch's literary and theoretical work on mass hysteria.

I'm not, at heart, a jumper; it's not my sort of thing . . . I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I'd go home, attend my sister's wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip her into whatever she wore, take the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace when it became a question of speaking now of forever holding it.' It is the hottest June on record and the longest day of the year. Cassandra Edwards -tormented, intelligent, mordantly witty - leaves her graduate studies and her Berkeley flat to drive through the scorching heat to her family's ranch. There they are all assembled: her philosopher father, smelling sweetly of five-star Hennessy; her kind, fussy grandmother; her beloved, identical twin sister Judith, who is about to be married - unless Cassandra can help it.