Hermann Broch

Hermann Broch (1886–1951) was an Austrian novelist and essayist whose experimental fiction examined the collapse of shared values, especially in The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil.

The Sleepwalkers: Hermann Broch’s trilogy of novels, published from 1930 to 1932, traces the breakdown of European values from 1888 to 1918. Its three-part structure makes the disintegration of values the organizing principle of Broch’s fiction.
Polyphonic novel: A novelistic form that brings multiple voices and perspectives into sustained relation without reducing them to one viewpoint. Broch uses shifts among voices and forms to register competing value systems.
Vienna: The capital of Austria, a major center of European intellectual and artistic life around 1900. Broch’s early life and intellectual formation unfolded in Vienna’s rapidly changing cultural world.
Robert Musil: An Austrian novelist and essayist best known for the unfinished modernist novel The Man Without Qualities. Musil and Broch pursued ambitious novel forms amid the same crisis of European culture.
Anschluss: Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938. The annexation led to Broch’s arrest and forced flight from Austria.
The Death of Virgil: Hermann Broch’s novel imagines the Roman poet Virgil’s final hours as he questions whether art can justify itself. This late novel concentrates Broch’s inquiry into art, ethics, and historical responsibility.
Stream of consciousness: A narrative technique that represents the flow of a character’s thoughts, perceptions, and associations. Its inward movement helps render Virgil’s unsettled perceptions during his final hours.
Austro-Hungarian Empire: A Central European monarchy that existed from 1867 until its dissolution in 1918. Broch’s youth belonged to the empire whose collapse framed his generation’s historical rupture.
James Joyce: An Irish modernist writer whose novels include Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Broch admired Joyce’s formal innovations and engaged with the possibilities of the modernist novel.
Nazi Germany: The German state under Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship from 1933 to 1945. Nazi rule made Broch’s Austrian Jewish identity a direct threat and shaped his exile.

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