Hermann Broch

by Theodore Ziolkowski

Columbia Essays on Modern Writers is a series of critical studies of English, Continental, and other writers whose works are of contemporary artistic and intellectual significance. This entry in the series – Book No. 3 – looks at the life and works of Hermann Broch, a twentieth-century Austrian writer, considered one of the major Modernists. Industrialist and poet, mathematician and mystic, rationalist and irrationalist – these are the points of Hermann Broch’s emotional compass. His attempt to chart them successively in philosophy, literature, and political action constitutes the basic impulse of his life. Broch longed for totality and simultaneity – the two words that occur most frequently in his writing. He wanted to encompass all of life – and all at once. This accounts for his literary gigantism, that Gargantua touch inflating everything he undertook to elephantine proportions. Broch never made his works easy for the reader. On the other hand, Broch never made life or writing easy for himself. He was conscious of a mission in life, to which he devoted himself with absolute consistency and an almost messianic zeal. Yet the reader who is willing to follow Broch into the mazes of his work – whether the analytic landscape of “The Sleepwalkers” or the luxuriant jungle of “The Death of Vergil” – and to succumb to the curious synthesis of rationalism and mysticism, will come away enriched by a new dimension. Broch’s vision of the immanence of death will probably be regarded as his most original contribution to human experience. His evocation of the totality and simultaneity of life is his greatest achievement in literature.

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964