Embracing Democracy: Hermann Broch, Politics, and Exile, 1918 to 1951 by Donald L. Wallace (review)

Any carefully developed scholarly study merits a full reading in detail, but the introductory chapter of Wallace’s book (1–26) has the practical merit of presenting with enough cogency and focus the points expanded later that it could serve on its own as a clear orientation to the subject at large, a lucid short piece outlining all the issues the broad topic of Broch’s political thinking would ever be likely to engage. Not to minimize the value of those later chapters, which support the introduction in relevant detail and forceful polemic, but Wallace’s opening strikes this reader as a valuable stand-alone essay touching on the whole range of Broch’s thought in its origins and modifications, seen from several perspectives.

From the start, Wallace stresses the contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of Broch’s thinking—“optimism pessimistically proclaimed, the individual and the absolute, the death of God and the permanence of God, humanism for an inhumane time” (2). Only the ideals of liberalism equipped Broch to address fascism; only the experience of exile equipped him to universalize the sense of rootedness he found essential to humanity; only his sense of human freedom led him constantly to stress human responsibility. Wallace’s emphasis, which efficiently characterizes the tensions in Broch’s thinking, also anticipates the author’s concluding arguments about the apparent tragedy, if not futility, of Broch’s death with so many projects left incomplete and hardly even taken to cognizance. Anyone pondering Broch must reach the point of—citing the title of Wallace’s last chapter—“Reconsidering Failure in Hermann Broch’s Exile Narrative” (213–47), with its retrospective summary (239–47), of evaluating from what standpoint or under what criteria Broch’s life’s work “succeeded” or “failed.” If these ever-present antinomies perennially keep Broch relegated to the margins of the many disciplines in which he toiled with such staggering effort to such comparatively small effect, they also explain what many readers view as the near-futility of at empting to place him. After all, Broch’s aesthetic was highly distrustful of aesthetics, and it kept changing its fundamental premises, especially in Hugo von Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, as Wallace demonstrates (102–14). Not for nothing did Hannah Arendt, in the booklet accompanying the Zurich edition of his work in 1958, term Broch a Dichter wider Willen. Though that judgment has been subjected to refinement, it captures the contradictions of a novelist whose work, especially The Death of Virgil, indicted in aesthetic form the ethical mendacity of esthetic perfection.

Wallace’s first chapter covers Broch’s attempts “to create a stable, open democracy in which the individual’s human rights and dignities were protected and to guide the individual towards an ethical value system” (9). Frequently dismissed as “old-fashioned” (8), naive, or simplistic (16)—Wallace is citing the judgments of others, not his own—Broch was nonetheless nothing short of prophetic in worrying in the early 1940s whether “the democratic traditions of the United States could survive the growing irrational forces of modernity with appeals only to the Bill of Rights” (16). That degree of prescience in anticipating current politicians’ requisition of the Bill of Rights to stifle individual freedom instead of advancing it may help account for a recent spate of publications on Broch’s political thought. While Wallace is not so crude as to make Broch “merely” prophetic of current crises, that aspect inevitably informs his work, as it does a recent study by Patrick Eiden-Offe (Das Reich der Demokratie). Wallace registers objections to and inconsistencies within Broch’s work but defends his author while conceding the “tragic nature” (213) of Broch’s life and his fervent but unfulfilled quest for a feasible plan of actual governance. The sections on “Total Democracy” (195–212), with its emphasis on the role of the individual citizen, and on “Judging Broch” (234–238), arguing that his early death prevented his influence...