Lost Son. Hermann Broch
did not quite belong to their social class. And so the son writes to the father at the very start of their correspondence that he feared the bullies in his class might make him their favorite victim. Nonetheless he was able to gain their respect and a certain popularity through better-than-average performances at tennis and golf. Of course his father did not recognize accomplishments of that sort: He only wanted to see superlative grades in his son’s academic subjects, and with this son they were just not forthcoming. The only thing the father ever reluctantly praised was Armand’s skill at sketching—but not, alas, the boy’s drawings of his favorite subject, automobiles. At one point he arranged a little job for Armand: to design a new letterhead for the canvas factory of his friend Felix Wolf, which was accepted and for which the son received a small fee.
Another reason Armand felt isolated in Clères was that he was the only German-speaking student in his age group there. So he looked forward to vacation in Vienna, where after months away he could speak his native language again. His school had been founded in 1902 by a group of French Anglophiles, and their pedagogical ideal had been influenced by the spirit of the entente cordiale then developing between France and England: French rationality was to be combined with English athleticism. During Armand’s time at the Collège de Normandie, its head was Louis Dedet, a former French rugby star, who did not have a high opinion of German-French friendship. Thus, besides French students, there were some from England, Holland, and Belgium but none from Germany. And only one other student came from Austria, but he was four years younger than Armand: Prince Franz Josef von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, the son of the notorious Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who later worked for Hitler in trying to spread pro-German feeling in England. For the time they were at school, the two Austrian boys had little contact with each other, but in America during the war they became friends.
Into this world of luxury and fashion favored by the European jeunesse dorée in Clères, Hermann Broch would send messages from his own, a world that had almost nothing in common with Armand’s. He urged his son to ponder the meaning of life, to try to arrive at an understanding of civilization, which in Broch’s view resulted from mankind’s struggle to overcome the power of death. Moreover, as in the Chinese religions, his son should bear in mind the obligations of filial love, value the power of knowledge, devote himself to ideas of eternity, strive for the absolute, for eternal truths and values, do productive work like the founders of the great religions and thus gain immortality. Of course the son could not respond to such demands: because of his youth and immaturity, his socialization up to that point, and his interests, such ideas, arising as they did from Broch’s theory of values, were completely alien to him. And indeed, on one of these letters, in which his father expounded on the deeper meaning and purpose of life, the son, probably as a kind of protest, sketched the latest-model automobiles that he had found in automotive magazines or had seen his friends’ parents driving on their visits to the school. In his letters, Armand did not ask his father about eternal values but requested a photograph of the new Mercedes that Broch had bought as a company car at the urging of his brother Friedrich, who like Armand was a car enthusiast and concerned with the more concrete pleasures of life.
Broch soon realized that he had expected too much of his son, philosophically at least. For his part Armand wanted his father’s praise for his accomplishments at tennis and golf, wanted to discuss with him the latest race cars and paint finishes, and recommended that he visit the auto show in Paris. He sent his father an album of his drawings of car bodies, but his father didn’t know what to make of them. The son wanted to explain to his father the fine points of the latest-model Minerva and Hispano-Suiza, Rolls-Royce and Mercedes, Stutz and Lombard, Bucciali and Bugatti, but being from the prior generation, Broch had neither the experience nor the aptitude for such matters. He could not even drive. Rather, he repeatedly urged his son to look at the Crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald in Colmar. This work of art had made a lasting impression on him in his own youth, and in his novel The Sleepwalkers, it plays a thematic role in the thoughts of the character Huguenau. The son’s taste in matters artistic ran to the popular, while the father was a devotee of high culture only.
Once they seemed to be in odd agreement: Broch gave Armand the science fiction novel Le Docteur Lerne, sous-Dieu, by Maurice Renard, surely a far cry from what Broch normally considered literature. But the book was about the dangers of science when it was not bound by ethical considerations, and about the quest for immortality, though only on a physical rather than a spiritual level—and, it featured wild car chases as well. Broch even thought his adolescent son could deal with scenes of explicit sexuality in Renard’s book. But even here, there was no discussing things: the school head made it clear to Armand that reading novels such as this was not allowed. In fact, Broch had also wanted to send his son Jaroslav Hašek’s novel Good Soldier S chweik, just published, but after the Renard contretemps, and perhaps owing to the Hašek book’s many obscenities and vulgarities, he decided not to.
The difference between the two generations becomes even clearer when one holds the son’s wishes up against the father’s expectations. Armand cared more about how he would spend the next school vacation than about scholastic achievement. He was always asking his father for more money for travel, dancing and riding lessons, chocolate, newspapers, albums, a new bicycle; for gifts for others; for clothes and fashion accessories, deemed critically important in the social circles of which he thought himself a member: suits, belts, gloves, shoes of all types—for walking, dancing, tennis, the beach, as well as tennis rackets, golf clubs and so on. For each of these he supplied his father with the exact prices, to show his father that he was not spendthrift but was buying only the most necessary items. Part of his strategy in defending these expenditures was the clever suggestion that his father, who was always urging him to save, simply send him more money, so that then he could save more.
Most of all, though, the son wanted just to have more time with his father. Once, in 1924, Broch arranged an unforgettable three-week vacation trip with Armand through Southern Germany, but after that, there were few encounters of any length between the two. Whenever Armand was in Vienna or Teesdorf on school vacation, his father was preoccupied with the factory, and in the evening he pursued his mathematical and philosophical studies. Much of the son’s refractory behavior probably had to do with the fact that, aside from letter writing, Broch never devoted enough time to him. At school, too, Armand wanted to get away from mathematics, a study for which he had no aptitude, and switch to philosophy, which he thought would be easier. Broch demanded that his son, while on school vacation, spend his time catching up on the material that he hadn’t learned during the last trimester, rather than thinking only about amusement and distraction.
The father expected his son to excel in all subjects, but especially mathematics, which he considered the most important subject of all. Broch wanted Armand to learn many languages, English in particular, and to do it if possible without the help of expensive tutors. But all his warnings and sermons proved fruitless: Armand kept up his leisure-oriented lifestyle. So he failed his first bachot examination, and failed it again on his second and third tries. No wonder his father lost patience with him. But all his railing was useless, only making the situation worse, and Armand often mentioned how bad his father’s reproaches made him feel. What teenager can read such harshly critical letters from his father without incurring significant psychic damage, missives in which he was called a numbskull, twit, idiot, dolt, stupid person and described as aggressively self-righteous, as a six-year-old, as blathering about injustice, as writing “like a pig,” as a con man, an “operator,” a bluffer, a criminal, pea-brained, stupid, ill-bred, sentimental, snobbish, womanish, gushy, mulish, humorless, impertinent, rotten, frivolous, malicious, and addicted to pleasure. And then the father prophesied that the son, like some of his classmates at school, if he didn’t change his ways, would go straight to the dogs and end up as an uncultivated failure.
After tirades like these, even the father felt pangs of conscience, so in other letters he would make appeals for his son’s friendship. Once Broch wrote of a visit he had made to the theater on a business trip to Berlin in early 1928 to see Erwin Piscator’s production of The Good Soldier Schweik, a dramatization of Hašek’s novel. On that trip he also attended a cabaret performance by the Bavarian comedian Karl Valentin—which he liked better than the play, as he wrote his son, because the novel wasn’t really suited for the stage. His son would doubtless