Hermann Broch (Austrian German: [brɔx]; November 1, 1886, to May 30, 1951) was an Austrian writer. He is most famous for two important books called The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler, 1930–32) and The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil, 1945).
Life
Hermann Broch was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to a wealthy Jewish family. He worked briefly in his family's factory but continued to write stories and books in his free time. As the oldest son, he was expected to manage his father’s textile factory in Teesdorf. To prepare for this role, he studied at a technical school that taught textile manufacturing and a college that focused on spinning and weaving.
In 1909, Broch changed his religion to Roman Catholicism and married Franziska von Rothermann, the daughter of a respected manufacturer. The next year, their son Hermann Friedrich Maria was born. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1923. In 1927, Broch sold the family’s textile factory and began studying mathematics, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Vienna. Around the age of 40, he started a full-time career as a writer. At 45, his first major work, a trilogy called The Sleepwalkers, was published in three volumes by Daniel Brody for the Rhein Verlag in Munich between 1930 and 1932.
Broch was friends with many famous writers, thinkers, and artists of his time, including Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elias Canetti, Leo Perutz, Franz Blei, and writer Ea von Allesch.
After Austria was taken over by the Nazis on March 12, 1938, Broch was arrested in the Alpine town of Bad Aussee for possessing a socialist magazine. He was held in a local jail from March 13 to March 31. Later, a group of friends, including James Joyce, Thornton Wilder, and translators Edwin and Willa Muir, helped him leave Austria. He first moved to Britain and then to the United States, where he wrote his novel The Death of Virgil and a collection of short stories called The Guiltless. While in exile, Broch also wrote about politics and studied mass psychology, similar to Elias Canetti and Hannah Arendt. His essay on mass behavior was never completed. Broch’s work on mass psychology was part of a larger effort to support democracy, human rights, and human dignity as essential values in a world without religion.
From August 15 to September 15, 1939, Broch stayed at the Albert Einstein House on 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey, while the Einsteins were away. From 1942 to 1948, he lived in an attic apartment at One Evelyn Place in Princeton, New Jersey, in the home of Eric and Lili Kahler. Broch died in 1951 in New Haven, Connecticut. He is buried in Killingworth, Connecticut, at a cemetery on Roast Meat Hill Road. In 1950, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Work
Broch's first major literary work was the trilogy The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler), published in three volumes from 1930 to 1932. Broch uses the essay "Zerfall der Werte" ("The Disintegration of Values") in the final novel to explain the trilogy's structure and its approach to modern culture. The trilogy has been praised by Milan Kundera, whose writing has been greatly influenced by Broch.
One of his most important works, The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil), was first published in June 1945 in both its English translation and original German. Broch began writing the text as a short radio lecture in 1937 and expanded and revised it over the next eight years. During this time, Broch faced a brief imprisonment in an Austrian prison after the Austrian Anschluss, fled to Scotland via England, and eventually moved to the United States. This long and complex novel mixes real events with hallucinations, poetry, and prose. It reenacts the last 18 hours of the Roman poet Virgil's life in the port of Brundisium (Brindisi). In this story, Virgil, shocked by the harm (Unheil) in the society he praises in his Aeneid, decides to burn his epic. However, his close friend and emperor Augustus prevents him before Virgil dies. The final chapter shows Virgil's final hallucinations, in which he travels to a distant land and sees the biblical creation story happening in reverse.
Broch's last work published before his death was The Guiltless (Die Schuldlosen, 1950), a collection of stories. An incomplete novel was published after his death in German as Der Versucher in 1953, Demeter in 1967, Bergroman in 1969, and Die Verzauberung in 1976. The first manuscript was translated into English by Broch's son, H.F. Broch de Rothermann, and published in 1987 as The Spell.
Broch uses many different writing styles, from the gentle parody of Theodor Fontane in the first volume of The Sleepwalkers to the essay-like sections in the third volume and the dream-like poetry in The Death of Virgil.
Selected bibliography
A complete collection of works in German, titled "Kommentierte Werkausgabe," was edited by Paul Michael Lützeler. It was published in Frankfurt am Main by Suhrkamp from 1974 to 1981.