Hermann Broch

Hermann Broch (November 1, 1886 – May 30, 1951) was a 20th-century Austrian writer, considered one of the major Modernists.

Life
Broch was born in Vienna to a prosperous Jewish family and worked for some time in his family's factory, though he maintained his literary interests privately. He was predestined to work in his father's textile factory in Teesdorf, therefore, he attended a technical college for textile manufacture and a spinning and weaving college.

In 1909 he married Franziska von Rothermann, a daughter of a knighted manufacturer. The following year, their son Hermann Friedrich Maria was born. Later, Broch began to see other women and the marriage ended in divorce in 1923.

He was acquainted with Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elias Canetti, Franz Blei and his devoted friend and inspiration, writer and former nude model Ea von Allesch and many others. In 1927 he sold the textile factory and decided to study mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna. He embarked on a full-time literary career only around the age of 40. At the age of 45, he published his first novel, The Sleepwalkers.

With the annexation of Austria by the Nazis (1938), Broch was arrested, but a movement organized by friends - including James Joyce - managed to have him released and allowed to emigrate; first to Britain and then to the United States, where he finished his novel The Death of Virgil and began to work, similarly to Elias Canetti, on an essay on mass behaviour, which remained unfinished. He converted to Roman Catholicism.

Hermann Broch died in 1951 in New Haven, Connecticut. He is buried in Killingworth, Connecticut, in the cemetery on Roast Meat Hill Road. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Work
One of his major works, The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil), which he began to write while imprisoned in a concentration camp, was first published in the U.S., in an English translation, in 1945. This great, difficult novel, in which reality and hallucination, poetry and prose are inextricably mingled, reenacts the last hours of life of the Roman poet Virgil, in the port of Brundisium (Brindisi), where he accompanied Augustus, his decision – frustrated by the emperor – to burn his Aeneid, and his final reconciliation with his destiny. The French composer Jean Barraqué composed a number of works inspired by The Death of Virgil.

However, Erich Heller observed that if "The Death of Virgil is his masterpiece... it is a very problematical one, for it attempts to give literary shape to the author's growing aversion to literature. In the very year the novel appeared, Broch confessed to 'a deep revulsion' from literature as such – 'the domain of vanity and mendacity'. Written with a paradoxical, lyrical exuberance, it is the imaginary record of the poet’s last day and his renunciation of poetry. He commands the manuscript of the Aeneid to be destroyed, not because it is incomplete or imperfect, but because it is poetry and not 'knowledge'. He even says his Georgics are useless, inferior to any expert treatise on agriculture. His friend the Emperor Augustus undoes his design and his works are saved." (Erich Heller, "Hitler in a very Small Town", New York Times, January 25, 1987.)

Other important works by Broch are The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler, 1932), and The Guiltless (Die Schuldlosen, 1950). The Sleepwalkers is a trilogy, where Broch takes "the degeneration of values" as his main theme. The trilogy has been praised by Milan Kundera, whose own writing has been greatly influenced by Broch. Broch demonstrates mastery of a wide range of styles, from the gentle parody of Theodor Fontane in the first volume of The Sleepwalkers through the essayistic segments of the third volume to the dithyrambic phantasmagoria of The Death of Virgil.