Hermann Broch und die Moderne: Roman, Menschenrecht, Biografie (review)

2011 marked the 125th anniversary of Hermann Broch’s birth and the sixtieth of his death, an occasion that Paul Michael Lützeler marked with the publication of this volume, a selection of essays published during the past ten years. Broch is a giant of Austrian literature and one of the foremost representatives of literary modernism, yet many are familiar only with a narrow segment of his work. His trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1930–1932), appropriately numbered among the great German-language modern novels like Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), and Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–1932; never completed), is perhaps his best-known piece and the work that has defined his literary legacy. Yet Broch’s reputation should rightly rest not only on this novel, but also on his other literary works, including Der Tod des Vergil (1945), as well as on his theoretical and essayistic pieces. Lützeler, noting that Broch’s works have come to be mainly confined to universities, opens his volume by directly posing a provocative question: “Broch lesen—wozu?” Dividing the work into three sections, he then sets out to answer that, demonstrating convincingly not only the breadth of Broch’s work, but also his continued—perhaps even increasing—relevance.

In the first section, Lützeler examines representative moments in Broch’s literary work. His approach combines sensitive close readings with an illumination of specific historical, geographical, and thematic contexts, providing insight into the ways in which these very complex works might be read. He first turns to Die Schlafwandler, reading its opening section, Pasenow oder die Romantik (1930), in terms of both its function as a novel about Berlin and its thematization of urban vs. rural life. Not only does Lützeler present specific examples of the urban geography that underlies the trilogy, but he also makes clear the ways in which Broch approached issues of gender, race, and national identity in this piece, and by extension in his works and his philosophy as a whole. Turning to the trilogy in its entirety, Lützeler compares it to Mann’s Zauberberg, postulating that both function as “Zeitromane,” where the focus lies on the immediate cultural events and tendencies. To Lützeler, both novels center on cultural criticism, focusing on the question “vom Zerfall, vom Ende, vom Tod der europäischen Kultur” (82). Though each author deals with these ideological questions in characteristic ways—with Mann integrating his ideas into the narrative in the form of conversations between Settembrini and Naphta, while Broch presents his through the inserted essay on the “Zerfall der Werte”—Lützeler teases out the points of contact and connects them to the historical moment. In doing so, he demonstrates how the authors wrote as a way of warning—even agitating—against the coming Third Reich.

Though his analysis of Broch’s literary works begins by focusing on the author’s best-known piece, Lützeler then turns to the comedy Aus der Luft gegriffen oder die Geschäfte des Baron Laborde (1934). His reading of the piece as one in which Broch dramatizes the amoral structures that determine modern society because of its economic focus draws attention not only to the generic innovation that it represents—“die zynische Komödie” (94)—but also to its potential relevance today: the unscrupulous machinations of Laborde, the “hero” of the piece, take on new significance when considered in light of recent revelations concerning international finance.

As insightful as this first, literature-focused section is, the second and third sections of the volume, where Lützeler addresses Broch’s essays and his letters respectively, are perhaps even more revealing, particularly to the reader with less in-depth knowledge of the scope of the author’s work. Lützeler opens part 2 by examining Broch’s concept of modernity as characterized by Zweifel and Opposition (110): this doubt, skepticism, and opposition is what, to...