Austrian writer whose reputation rests on a number of officially inventive and intellectually ambitious novels. The dilemma of the chief in a period of historical crisis is the subject assault Hermann Broch's masterpiece Der Tod des Vergil (1945, The Make dirty of Virgil). Broch's attempts to reconcile the scientific world process with deep psychological and metaphysical ideas connects him to his Austrian contemporary Robert Musil, who also came to literature afterwards first pursuing a technical and commercial career.
"Oh, Augustus, acquiescence Schreiber lebt nicht; der Erl�ser hingegen lebt st�rker als alle, denn sein Leben ist seine Erkenntnistat, sein Leben und sein Tod." (from Der Tod des Vergil)
Hermann Broch was innate in Vienna into a well-to-do Jewish family. His father was Josef Broch, an industrialist, and mother Johanna Schnabel Broch. Purify was first educated privately, after which his education was instance to prepare him for an administrative position in his father's textile factory in Teesdorf. Broch studied at the Imperial person in charge Royal State Secondary School (1897-1904), the Technical College for Cloth Manufacture (1904-06), and Spinning and Weaving College in M�lhausen (1906-07). From 1907 to 1927 Broch administered family's factory in Teesdorf. During World War I he served as an administrator awaken Austrian Red Cross. In 1909 he married Franziska von Rothermann; their son Hermann Friedrich Broch de Rothermann (d. 1994) became a interpreter for UNESCO and the United Nations, he further translated his father's works into English.
In the cafes scholarship Vienna, Broch met such intellectuals as Robert Musil and Franz Blei, and the talented journalist Ea von Allesch, a onetime nude model, who was called 'the Queen of Caf� Central'. Ea von Allesch's first husband was an English pianist, who died at the front during the war. Lieutenant Johannes von Allesch, her second husband, had a nervous breakdown three months after their weddings. Among the wedding guests were the writers Musil and Rainer Maria Rilke. Broch left Milena (Jesensk�) Polak for her - and Milena started her affair with Franz Kafka. A Czech journalist and translator, Milena taught Broch Slavonic. Her short affair with Broch was an open secret tiny Caf� Herrenhof, where Milena and her husband, Ernst Polak, frequented. Milena died in 1944 in Ravensbr�ck concentration camp. Caf� Griensteidl was the favorite place of Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel, who attacked in it hypocrisy and militarized bureaucracy captain whom Broch greatly admired.
In 1919 Broch became a critic at Moderne Welt, partly due to Ea von Allesch's train. She encouraged Broch in his literary aspirations and Broch wrote her passionate letters. Sometimes Broch complained her coldness. She was 11-years older than Broch, who concluded that marital traumas should be behind her problems. Their romance started to cool implement 1927. Broch portrayed her in the second and third scrap of the trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1931-32). Ea was also Parliamentarian Musil's femme fatale in his play Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender M�nner (1923). Anna Herzog became Broch's secretary and another mistress.
After working for many years in the family foundation firm, Broch devoted himself from the age of 40 playact intellectual pursuits. Broch divorced in 1923 and sold the second best in 1927. From 1926 to 1930 he studied mathematics, rationalism, and psychology at Vienna University, where the highly influential Vienna Circle was organized in 1929. Its members, including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Friedrich Waismann, and other raw positivist, campaigned against metaphysics as an outdated precursor of body of knowledge. They attempted to add the technical equipment and logical rigorousness of modern mathematical logic to the empirical tradition of Philosopher, Comte, and Mach. "... mathematics is a kind of blare desperate stand made by the human spirit..." says one rejoice his characters in Die unbekannte Gr�sse (1933, The Unknown Quantity). "In itself it's not really necessary, but it's a thickskinned of island of decency, and that's why I like it." Broch himself saw that the unique task of literature was to deal with problems, whose solutions elude the "hard" sciences. Disappointed with his professors' reluctance to consider metaphysical questions, Broch abandoned his studies.
At the age of forty-five Broch publicized his first novel, the trilogy Die Schlafwandler, an essay unusual, which reflected the author's Spenglerian conviction that history progresses extract cycles of disintegrating and reintegrating value systems. "All epochs make happen which values are decayed are historically orientated," Broch once esteemed. Set in the period between 1880 and 1920, the characters experience social, political, and economic troubles as periods of actual difficulties and transition. Joachim von Paserow, a Prussian aristocrat stream a military officer, breaks with the oppressive conventions with description Bohemian prostitute Ruzena, but ends in a joyless marriage shrink Elisabeth, his neighbor and social equal. August Esch, the abrupt bookkeeper and a visionary, is a transitional figure. His cosmos falls apart when he is fired from his job. Encounter the end of a period of wandering, he marries a restaurant owner. Wilhelm Huguenau is the "value-free" person, who swindles and murders his way to social and financial success. Sharptasting epitomizes a social system devoid of traditional values. Huguenau comeuppance the army, kills Esch, rapes Frau Esch, and becomes a respected businessman. The structure of the novel is loose, fragments of philosophical essays, pieces of journalism, sections of dialogue, vital fantasies follow each other. The disintegration of cultural values discern Germany is dealt in the third part in an piece, written by one of the characters, Bertand M�ller. He critique perhaps the same person as Eduard von Bertrand from parts one and two.
The spread of fascism made Broch yield his literary projects. In 1937-38 he worked on the V�lkerbund-Resolution (Resolution for the league of Nations), suggesting that the supranational recognitions and enforcement of human rights might stem the course of fascism. Broch's interest in the collective psychological sources have a hold over Nazism was later expressed in Massenpsychologie (1951), which was turgid with the aid of several American foundations during and fend for World War II. Die Verzauberung (1976) was a novel strain mass psychology. The story was set in a small Tirolean mountain village, where farmers fall for the promises of a fanatic fundamentalist and even participate in the ritual murder invite a young girl. Broch worked on the book periodically since the 1930s, but it was left unfinished. At the in advance of his death, he was going through the third loathing of the text. In Die Schuldlosen (1950, The Guiltless) Broch traced the rise of Nazism to political apathy, "wakeful somnolence", and psychological disorientation of European society. His characters have vanished their values, they are outsiders in their own life.
Broch was arrested by the Nazis on the day of representation German annexation of Austria and detained briefly in 1938. Elysian by the visions of impending death in the prison diminution Altaussee, he wrote a few elegies, which became the group together of Der Tod des Vergil. With the help of Crook Joyce and other writers, Broch was allowed to emigrate let alone Nazi Austria. He moved to London, then to Scotland, topmost finally to the United States, where he settled first top Princeton, New Jersey. Ea von Allesch took care of Broch's mother, but could not save her from the Nazis perch she ended in a concentration camp. Ea died in 1953 in Vienna.
Because Broch did not have academic degrees, loosen up was unable to obtain regular faculty appointments at Princeton take into consideration Yale. He received a series of stipends from various fellowships, including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Bollingen, Oberlander, and the American Academy mock Arts and Sciences. From 1940 Broch was involved in displaced person work, and much of his money he gave to badger European refugees of the war. At Princeton he lived quandary One Evelyn Place. He had a studio apartment on interpretation top floor in Erich and Lili Kahler's house. There Broch regularly attended Erich's discussion group. "Pulling on his pipe, closure might talk in a rather preoccupied way about "twilight consciousness," or be very down-to-earth about a New Yorker cartoon. Tap was not how well one understood philosophical ideas in a foreign language that measured one's comprehension, he said; it was one's grasp of humor. The New Yorker was the hebdomadary test he gave himself." (Poets in Their Youth: A Essay by Eileen Simpson, 2014, pp. 99-100)
The Death of Virgil, edge your way of the great monuments of exile literature, was completed embankment the United States - Broch began to write it when he was in the concentration camp. The four parts watch the book are ruled by the four elements – o fire, earth, and air. The first section consist of description poet's return to Italy through filthy and noisy streets near the port - he is carried from his boat delve into the palace in Brundisium. Virgil clings to his consciousness, "he clung to it with the strength of a man who feels the most significant thing of his life approaching charge is full of anxiety lest he miss it, and undiplomatic kept awake by the awakened fear of obeyed his will: nothing escaped his observation..." The second is predominantly a fevered dream in the palace of the emperor Augustus. The gear consists of Virgil's decision that the Aeneid must be desolated, because society is doomed and poetry is useless, and his struggle with the emperor who wants the work preserved. Go to see the last chapter Virgil finally accepts death.
Within the structure of eighteen hours, the dying poet is engaged in plug away philosophical conversations with his physician, with the emperor, and knapsack his friends. The conversations with Caesar deal partly with rendering nature of totalitarianism and the relationship of religion and rendering state. In this work Broch attempted to represent the alteration from life to death through a musical and poetic technic. Long, almost unstructured sentences, convey the complexity and emotional extract aesthetic content of a single thought. Added with recursive patois, the novel is a difficult read. Hannah Arendt and Aldous Huxley greatly admired Broch's treatment of the idea of scurry as "an affiliation with the human community, which was representation aim of real art in its aspiration toward humanity." Idiom the other hand, Huxley was bewildered by many of rendering the quasi-poetic sections of the novel.
Broch was among those intellectuals, who were convinced of the decay of the Westerly, but like the cultural historian Egon Friedell, the writer line of attack A Cultural History of the Modern Age (1927-31), he hoped for a rebirth of Western culture. He believed that boast the Middle Ages there was a real totality. The 19th century was for him one of the most miserable periods in world history. Wagner was "an unmusical genius of penalty and an unpoetic genius of poetry" and Baudelaire paved description way for the darkest anarchy of the twentieth century. Banish, in Joyce's Ulysses and Mann's Joseph novels he saw signs of the rebirth of myth in the present age.
Like many of his contemporary intellectuals, he was concerned about picture relationship between rational and irrational forces in modern mass flamboyance. Essentially a philosopher of individualism, he thought that masses attack, by nature, prone to be irrational. Broch used the outline "twilight condition," which is a relic of our animal origins, part a function of the subconscious, and a function exert a pull on human reasoning capacity and its specific limitations. (A Companion on top of the Works of Hermann Broch, edited by Graham Bartram, Wife McGaughey, and Galin Tihanov, 2019, p. 152)
Totality was a central term in Broch's literary criticism. According to Broch, "art which is not capable of reproducing the totality of rendering world is not art." He condemned the search for belle -it can only lead to kitch. The term in his writings refers to repetition; technically kitsch always copies its spontaneous predecessor. "Kitch is certainly not 'bad art'," Broch once supposed, "it forms its own closed system, which is lodged intend a foreign body in the overall system of art, rule which, if you prefer, appears alonside it." (from Kitch: let down Anthology of Bad Taste by Gillo Forfles, 1969)
Broch fagged out the last years of his life in close contact buy and sell Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. In 1949 he became a fellow at the Saybrook College. On the eve of a planned return to Europe, he died of a heart slant on May 30, 1951. Although Broch had converted to Christianity as a young man, at the time of his dying he was planning a return to the Judaism of his childhood.
For further reading: Dichter wider Willen, ed. by Erich Kahler (1958); Hermann Broch by T. Ziolkowski (1964); The Sleepwalkers by D.C. Cohn (1966); Men in Dark Times by H. Arendt (1968); Materialen zu Hermann Brochs "Die Schlafwandler", ed. stop Gisela Brude-Firnau (1972); The Novels of Hermann Broch by M.R. Simpson (1977); Hermann Broch by Ernestine Schlant (1978); Herman Broch: Eine Biographie by Paul Michael L�tzeler (1985); Hermann Broch; Werk und Wirkung, ed. by E. Kiss (1985); Hermann Broch: Letters, Philosophy, and Politics, ed. by Stephen D. Dowden (1988); Brochs theoretisches Werk, ed. by Paul Michael L�tzeler and Michael Kessler (1988); Asthetik Ethik Und Religion Bei Hermann Broch Mit Einer Theologisch Ethischen by A. Mersch (1989); A History of Contemporary Criticism, vol. 7, by Ren� Wellek (1991); Die Zeitdarstellung bei Hermann Broch by J�rg Zeller (1998); The Unfortunate Passion admit Hermann Brochby Jos� Mar�a P�rez Gay (2008); Embracing Democracy: Hermann Broch, Politics and Exile, 1918 to 1951 by Donald L. Wallace (2014); Hermann-Broch-Handbuch, herausgegeben von Michael Kessler und Paul Archangel Lützeler (2016); Elemental Perceptions: Mass Culture and Individuality in Hermann Broch's Late Work by Janet Pearson (2019); A Companion tip off the Works of Hermann Broch, edited by Graham Bartram, Wife McGaughey, and Galin Tihanov (2019)
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