Hermann Broch Visionary in Exile

The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch is along with Kafka and Musil, one of the three greatest Austrian novelists of the 20th century, and indeed one of the century's most gifted novelists in German from whatever country. Broch established his reputation with "The Sleepwalkers", a trilogy of political and philosophical novels that showed his interest in theories of politics. His best-known work is "The Death of Virgil", a challenging, lengthy work that is written in a lyrical, exuberant, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible style, a kind of cerebral stream-of-consciousness reflecting the fevered thoughts of the dying Virgil. Broch also wrote extensively about the art and architecture of the modern age, about Hofmannsthal, and about mass psychology. Broch has a special connection to Yale, as he lived the last years of his life there after having escaped Austria in 1938, and died there. The participants in the Yale Symposium of April 2001 are among the world's most prominent Broch scholars. Fourteen of their presentations have been extensively revised, yielding the essays in this volume, which focus on two areas: Broch as critic, and Broch as novelist and dramatist. The topics include Broch's views on kitsch and art, and on drama, his cultural criticism, his cooperation with Borgese and Arendt, his theory of mass psychology, history as reflected in his works, Ernst Kretschmer's influence on the early novels, Virgil and Celan's "Atemwende", Jean Starr Untermeyer's translation of "Virgil", guilt and the fall in "Those without Guilt", and Broch reception in Japan. Paul Michael Lutzeler is Distinguished University Professor of German at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and is the editor of "Broch's Collected Works". Matthias Konzett is associate professor of German at Yale University; Willy Tiemer is associate professor of German at the University of Delaware, and Christa Sammons is curator of the German literature collections of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.