Lost Son. Hermann Broch

       EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

      1925. Broch, or the Pedagogue

      HERMANN BROCH (1886–1951) was one of the greatest writers of German in the twentieth century, ranking with Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, and Robert Musil. Like Musil, with whom he is often compared, Broch became a writer after first pursuing a technical and commercial career. The works for which he is best remembered are The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil, the publication of which prompted his being twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.

      Broch felt that his true calling was teaching. He never cared for the career his father had more or less forced upon him, working in the family’s textile business, and as an alternative he set his sights on becoming a university-level professor. His 1933 novel, The Unknown Quantity, has elements of autobiography—to the extent, at least, that the protagonist is an assistant professor of mathematics—and elements also of that frontier where epistemology and mathematics meet. In 1925, when Broch was nearly forty, he matriculated as a student of mathematics and humanities at the University of Vienna and was at the time planning the sale of his family’s textile-weaving factory in Teesdorf near Vienna. He planned to get a doctorate in the faculty of philosophy, but he became so disillusioned by the day-to-day-business of academe that he soon gave up his wish to become a professor. His interest in literature was just as strong as his scientific bent, and he hoped that a wider field of influence would be available to him as an independent writer. When one examines Broch’s philosophical poetics, as expounded in numerous essays and letters from the early 1930s, one is struck by the ethical intentions inherent in his literary efforts. He wants to uncover new realities, and to lend new insights to the understanding of his age, to point out future trends. This basic ethical impulse can be noted in Broch’s novels, The Sleepwalkers, The Spell, The Death of Virgil, and The Guiltless. Even his eventual abandonment of literature, more or less after the 1945 publication of The Death of Virgil, had a pedagogical motivation. During the time of National Socialism—before and during his exile in the United States—he wanted to educate the public through political studies of democracy, through juridical deliberations on human rights, and through psychological analyses of mass hysteria, to help make a contribution to “pest control,” as he called it.

      The offspring of pedagogues do not have an easy time of it, and Armand, the only child from the marriage of Hermann Broch and his wife, Franziska, eventually got to know this better than most. Most families are divided by generational conflict at some point or other, but the gap here dividing the father’s and the son’s views of life seemed unbridgeable. Hermann Broch belonged to the Expressionist generation, for whom the First World War had brought a historical break that marked them for life. Their reaction to this historic catastrophe was characterized by a heightened interest in philosophy and literature, in criticism and utopian ideas. Armand, on the other hand, came of age in the era of the so-called New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit), during the raucous, hedonistic decade of the Roaring Twenties.

      Armand was fourteen when in the fall of 1924 his father sent him to one of the most expensive, elite, and exclusive boarding schools of Europe, the Collège de Normandie in Clères near Rouen. Hermann Broch’s schooling had been nothing like this: He had attended the Technical College for Textile Manufacture in Vienna (1904–6) and the Spinning and Weaving College in Mülhausen (1906–7). Broch’s parents were both Jews, but the family was not observant, and Broch eventually converted formally to Catholicism when he married his aristocratic fiancée Franziska von Rothermann. Although Broch was broadly familiar with Jewish culture, he did not feel particularly “Jewish” himself and raised his son apart from this tradition. The attempt to give his son advantages that he had been denied could perhaps be seen as another facet of Broch’s assimilationist upward social mobility.

      At the Collège de Normandie, however, Armand was surrounded by students from millionaires’ families or the aristocracy, most far wealthier than the merely well-off Brochs. The tone was set by students interested in sport of all kinds: especially fencing, tennis, golf, and riding, or who were crazy about the professional race car drivers in the latest model Mercedes, Fiats, or Renaults, and on school open days, the Collège horse show was a major event. There was no instruction per se in hunting, but there was a school club dedicated to teaching the art of playing the bugle or hunting horn. Dignitaries like the American ambassador were invited to such events, as were celebrities like the air travel pioneers Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine, the first pair to fly across the Atlantic, two weeks after Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight. The students were jazz fans, played saxophone and banjo, danced the Charleston, saw the latest films from Hollywood and Europe in the school movie theater, took extravagant trips, and paid visits to one another at their parents’ castles and villas, and apart from that made sure they acquired the necessary knowledge to pass the baccalauréat—the bachot, as it is informally called—and thus attend and graduate from one of the grandes écoles in France or elite universities in England or America before following in their fathers’ footsteps to run the family business, inherit the family’s ancestral estate, or take a leading role in business, politics, or a government ministry. That was the general rule, and at first Armand seemed no exception. He, too, spent most of his time playing tennis, dancing the Charleston, reading car magazines, and making sketches of the latest model automobiles, taking trips and weekend excursions to fellow students’ villas or French spas, which had by now become the established watering places of high society.

      One friend of Armand’s who is often mentioned in the letters was a classmate, Ernest Labouchère, whose father was an exceedingly rich Dutch banker, and whose grandfather, the chief executive of Standard Oil in France, was married to an heiress and lived in a castle. Armand visited the family on occasional school breaks. The Labouchères’ lifestyle in Paris, in the French countryside, and in Amsterdam was to Armand like a dream come true, and his father had a difficult time bringing his son back down to earth, and to the reality of his own background: that of a minor manufacturing family. Simple etiquette would normally require the Brochs’ inviting young Ernest on a reciprocal visit to Teesdorf, their provincial hometown outside Vienna, and stay in their less-than-baronial superintendent’s residence located directly