Hermann-Broch-Handbuch ed. by Michael Kessler and Paul Michael Lützeler (review)

Based on anecdotal evidence, such as conversations with students and colleagues, I can report that the proliferation of author-handbooks in recent years is not uniformly praised. The criticisms are not difficult to imagine, especially the anxiety about the ways in which these volumes can actually deter scholarship by contributing to potentially outmoded dynamics of authority and canonization. There is also an obvious risk of enthroning a certain moment of scholarship and reception, including its inevitable oversights and biases. Every handbook will become dated, for a wide variety of mostly unpredictable reasons. In the best case, the aging of a handbook would be a caused by active scholarship, which continues to produce new theses and perspectives. Less optimistically, one might argue that especially a reliable handbook may encourage future generations of scholars to rely on it at the expense of primary and secondary sources.

Against such entirely reasonable concerns, I would argue that in the twenty-first century there is a need for scholarly sources that can compete with Wikipedia and comparable sources in terms of range, convenience, and overall usefulness. Even if handbooks only (at best) reflect the current state of a given scholarly topic or author, the evident aging of the traditions of literary scholarship of the twentieth century make such consolidations essential. I imagine the typical handbook user as a serious scholar looking for orientation, bibliographical support, and specific entry points for research. The role of handbooks also inevitably varies according to the degree of canonicity and the situation of the corpus and its reception. Fundamental figures such as Goethe, for example, are evidently less manageable because of large outputs, vast interdisciplinary receptions, and centuries of international scholarly critical analysis. This example suggests the corresponding utility of handbooks in the case of less well known, "difficult," neglected, or marginally canonical authors.

Hermann Broch allows such a hypothesis to be tested. I am not a Broch specialist in any strict sense, but reading the Hermann-Broch-Handbuch, I was surprised how many of the topics and works addressed I was already familiar with, whether first or second hand, based on recent or decades-old encounters, complete or partial readings. This is also the first handbook that I have ever read in its entirety—and perhaps it will be the last. However, I can attest that it was a valuable reading, which allowed me to refresh existing knowledge while identifying gaps and areas for possible future exploration. An example of the latter is Broch's little-known theatrical works, for which Paul Michael Lützeler persuasively advocates.

It is hard to imagine a reader of the Broch-Handbuch who does not have some preexisting interest in Broch. This is unfortunate, perhaps, insofar as the BrochHandbuch is more than a specialized author-book. The breadth of Broch's knowledge and interests is inevitably reflected by the handbook format. He is a figure whose life and work are located precisely at the center of literary and artistic modernism, twentieth-century history, and politics. Thus the overall reach of this handbook is much wider than one might casually assume. In particular, Broch's view of the rise of fascism, which is reflected throughout his work, echoes the urgencies and exigencies of 2017. In the context of an interpretive synthesis of Broch's novel of religious mass delusion, Die Verzauberung, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer writes: "Aus dem Bedürfnis zu glauben erwachse auch die Kraft, glauben zu können, ebenso lauere auch die Gefahr, sich verführen zu lassen" (129).

In comparison with other handbooks, the approach of the Broch-Handbuch tends slightly, especially in the contributions on individual literary texts, toward the genre of essay collection or Sammelband. This is not a disadvantage, however. Rather than a collection of faceless "entries," the Broch-Handbuch's presentation of discrete authorial and scholarly identities makes it more engaging to read. It is more than a series of factual statements about Hermann...