A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch ed. by Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov (review)

In their edited volume A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch, editors Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galin Tihanov deliver a comprehensive scholarly introduction that valiantly strives to render the works of a great Austrian modernist—finally—more accessible to a broad audience. Impressive in both scope and depth, the Companion leaves no stone unturned in its attempt to chronicle both the longevity and scope of Broch's diverse writings and offers both tried-and-true assessments of Broch's major novels alongside new perspectives and disciplinary approaches toward some of the author's less prominent works. The resulting collection is thus a fitting testimony to the breadth of Broch's intellectual engagements, ranging from art and literature to ethics, politics, and social theory. This commitment to comprehensiveness is without question the major success of the volume. The Companion wrangles Broch's complicated, complex aesthetic and oftentimes explicitly philosophical writings into a concise, comprehensible, and exhaustive introductory work.

The Companion is effectively structured chronologically. After Bartram and McGaughey's introduction, which offers a full biographical overview of Broch's life and career, each contribution profiles a subsequent work or critical evolution in Broch's thought according to its date of publication or its emergence as a salient theme in his writings. The scope and focus of these contributions vary from chapter to chapter, and the interpretive impetus accordingly fluctuates between exploring new perspectives, methods, and themes, on the one hand, and relating canonical interpretations on the other. Kathleen L. Komar's examination of Broch's Die Schlafwandler, "Perspectives on Broch's Die Schlafwandler: Narratives of History and the Self," embraces both of these tendencies by offering accepted readings of the trilogy alongside novel, if brief, examinations of the motifs of degrading images and female writers. Two subsequent contributions devoted to Broch's earliest writings aim to define Broch's intellectual affinities discursively. Gunther Martens ("Hermann Broch and the Dilemma of Literature in the Modern Age") returns to a familiar mode of inquiry in Broch scholarship by linking the author's voluminous secondary writings on literature to both Die Schlafwandler and Der Tod des Vergil, while Galin Tihanov attempts to contextualize Broch's relationship to literary modernism vis-à-vis Romantic refrains ("Interrogating Modernity: Hermann Broch's Postromanticism").

Beyond these earlier and better-known works, the Companion also contains a number of contributions that provide thorough yet economical (re-)introductions to some of Broch's underappreciated, overlooked, or overly complex work. Brechtje Beuker's "Broch and the Theater: Die Entsühnung and Aus der Luftgegriffen as Tragic and Comic Dramatizations of the Economic Machine" furnishes a glimpse into Broch's brief theatrical forays and contextualizes his works for the stage within historical trends in economic and social criticism. In "Limits of the Scientific: Broch's Die unbekannte Größe," Gwyneth Cliver explores Broch's short novel Die unbekannte Größe as a referendum on the author's past flirtations with logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. Meanwhile, Judith Ryan ("Hermann Broch's Massenwahnprojekt and Its Relevance for Our Times"), Sebastian Wogenstein ("Human Rights and the Intellectual's Ethical Duty: Broch's Political Writings"), and Jennifer Jenkins ("Broch's Der Tod des Vergil: Art and Power, Language and the Ineffable") deliver glossaries of keywords, passages, and definitions to orient new readers in the nuances of Broch's social theory, political theory, and his novel Der Tod des Vergil.

Finally, a cluster of contributions investigate Broch's devotion to a series of intellectual interlocutors. Appearing in the first half of the Companion, Gisela Brude-Firnau's "Broch's Die Verzauberung: Ludwig Klages and the Bourgeois Mitläufer" traces the narrator's ambivalence in the face of ideology to the anti-urbanism and anti-intellectualism associated with Ludwig Klages and, in turn, Klages's following in National Socialism. Similarly, Judith Sidler's contribution "From the 'Tierkreis-Erzählung' to Die Schuldlosen: The Creation of Broch's Last...