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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 on the weaving mill grounds. His fellow students knew intuitively that Armand 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 have loved getting letters like this more often, for Valentin’s sketches belonged to the type of popular art that Armand liked. Broch also reacted loyally when his son failed his bachot examination for the first time, keeping the bad news a secret from family and friends and devoting all his efforts to arranging a repeat of the exam. Armand was granted an extension of his study at the Collège de Normandie, and when that didn’t work, the father financed a year’s study in Paris for his son. Ultimately Broch was even understanding of Armand’s desire to turn from mathematics to focus on philosophy. Here, too, he provided him every imaginable support. Not only did he recommend books on Kantianism and Neo-Kantianism, and try to make them accessible to him, but he also appealed to prominent scholars at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, to take Armand into their seminars and private tutorials. Thus, in spring 1928 Jean Baruzi, a leading sociologist of religion of his time, became Armand’s mentor. He also was allowed to attend private seminars with Maurice Blondel, a luminary in the field of theist metaphysics, and seminars with André Siegfried, one of the founders of modern political science. Broch was aware that all this effort was not required to pass the bachot. However, since he thought that his son had a genuine interest in philosophical inquiry, he tried to help him with all the means at his disposal.

Hermann Broch’s interest in psychoanalysis began in 1928. He entered analysis in Vienna with a pupil of Freud’s, Hedwig Schaxel-Hoffer, and these consultations helped him with his decision to become a writer. Since Broch suspected that his son suffered from acute learning disabilities, around the same time he paid for Armand to have an expensive analysis with Rudolph Maurice Löwenstein, the renowned proponent of Ego psychology and the co-founder of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. (Löwenstein gave psychoanalytic training to Jacques Lacan, among others.) But Armand felt the psychologist didn’t understand him and presumably was unable to help solve or reduce his alleged learning disabilities, and so young Broch’s excursions into philosophy, the history of religion, and political science remained dilettantish and half-hearted. They were of no use for passing the bachot examination. Perhaps he had only feigned an interest in philosophy so his father would finance his year in Paris: a series of remarks in his letters of 1928 reveal that Armand cared more for the pleasures of life in the French capital than for the work of his seminars and exam preparations. All his plans were eventually ruined, as Broch correctly notes in the last of the letters in this collection, by the unbridled hedonism of his son.

And this, in fact, the Brochs could no longer afford. The letters between father and son attest to the dwindling fortunes of the Broch family. Up until 1924/25, the economic boom of the postwar years continued. The weaving mill at Teesdorf had ordered great quantities of cotton from abroad before the First World War, and after the war these were delivered at 1914 prices. So at first, because of the inflationary effects of the war, between 1919 and 1924, the cotton-weaving factory brought in great profits to the Brochs. But this windfall stopped by the mid-1920s. Now the profit margins grew slimmer and slimmer, and the start of the economic crises brought the firm into difficulty. If the economic upheavals of 1924 had been predictable, Armand probably never would have been sent to the expensive Collège de Normandie (tuition 12,000 francs a year). While father and son both chose the Orient Express as a matter of course for their travels between Paris and Vienna in 1924/25, by 1926 they could barely afford to travel second class on passenger trains, and Broch demanded that Armand travel third class. Of course this mode of travel was kept a dark secret from his fellow students and teachers, who would have ridiculed and despised Armand if they had known he used such a “proletarian” mode of travel. Traveling third class becomes a theme for a whole series of these letters. The son protested with every imaginable argument, but the father remained firm. In 1924 Armand had been promised that he would be given a chic Austro-Fiat (the dream car of his childhood) for good scholastic performance, but now even his request for an auxiliary motor for his bicycle was turned down. Hardly a single letter left the desk in Teesdorf for Clères in 1926 that did not discuss the economic downturn, that did not mention cares and catastrophes, hard times, pressing money problems, financing difficulties, the hopelessness of the industrial crisis, labor unrest, tough negotiations in the sale of the factory, and finally the modest remains of the family fortune. The Teesdorf mill was sold in 1927 to Broch’s boyhood friend Felix Wolf, who owned mills and foundries in the Tannwald in Czechoslovakia. This was a depressing fact for Armand, for until then he had seen himself as the sole heir to the factory and had always hoped to take over the firm when he was an adult.

Father and son were unable to find a basis for a common understanding. The way Broch saw it, his son had failed at the very start of his life, and Broch had failed as a pedagogue. Their relationship was complicated by Armand’s sense that he had been disinherited by the sale of the factory. So it was no wonder that he looked about for a substitute father, whom he found in his uncle Rudolf von Rothermann, his mother’s brother, who was an estate owner and beet sugar producer in the Burgenland of Hungary. Rudolf was childless, and he had taken a fancy to Armand, whose philosophical attitude of dolce far niente he shared. He adopted Armand in the early 1930s, and the uncle’s estate in Csepreg became a kind of second home for the young man. Armand was over twenty-one by then and did not need the permission of his parents for the adoption; and in any event they were not opposed. The reason for the adoption was in part to allow Rudolf von Rothermann to leave his considerable fortune to his nephew. (This never occurred, however, since after the war the Hungarian government seized all private holdings like this one.) After the adoption, Armand called himself H. F. (Hermann Friedrich) Broch de Rothermann. Of course, he could not resign himself to working on the estate, which would presumably have involved managing the estate’s production facilities, and took to making peregrinations throughout Europe: Austria, Italy, Greece, and France.

By the summer of 1928, when the correspondence between Clères or Paris and Teesdorf or Vienna broke off, father and son were both facing ruin: Armand was nearly eighteen and didn’t know what to do with his life, but the father, too, just forty-two, was also in a precarious situation. He had broken off his old career as an industrialist, but there was no guarantee that the start of his new career as a writer would be successful. In addition, the ten-year relationship with his mistress, Ea von Allesch, was ending. From this point forward, father and son attempted to go their separate ways, the father with more success than the son, who, in the years after leaving his uncle’s estate at Csepreg, started countless jobs with various agencies and firms (primarily in the tourism or automotive sales industries), but whatever he tried—at least up to his fortieth year—never lasted long. He remained as much a financial burden on his father as ever. Occasionally they would work on something together, for instance the stage comedy Es bleibt alles beim Alten (Things Never Really Change) of 1934 (a comedy with a biographical strain, dealing, as it does, with an indulgent father and spoiled son, for which the son suggested the title), and eventually they shared the common fate of exile in America.

In exile, too, father fared better than son. After his detention in Austria by the Nazis in 1938, Broch eventually was able to flee first to Britain, partly through the intercession of James Joyce, and finally to America, with the help of Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, among others. When Broch died in 1951, Armand was forty, and it was only then, it seemed, that he was able to mold a professional career for himself. He became a successful tour guide with luxury travel firms catering to socially prominent clients and members of the jet set, groups whose peculiarities he had become familiar with in his days at the Collège de Normandie. Having lived for extended periods in France, Italy, Greece, and America, he spoke the languages of these places fluently. In a surprising show of enthusiasm for work, he founded a translation bureau in New York and worked as a simultaneous translator at international conferences. And, importantly, he proved to be a worthy literary executor of his father’s work. In old age he took up literary translation, bringing works of Elias Canetti and Gregor von Rezzori from German to English. The crowning achievement of this activity was his translation, The Spell, published in 1987, of his father’s 1935 novel Die Verzauberung.

Tennis remained Armand’s favorite hobby, the sport in which he had enjoyed his first successes at the Collège de Normandie and in which he won many trophies. He also remained a lover of fancy cars into old age. Armand was indebted to his father for his school years in Clères and Paris, and without his help he would not have received the documents he needed to emigrate in 1941, when he was interned in a French camp for enemy aliens. Broch had already fled to America three years earlier and was able to be an advocate for him there.

This correspondence of father and son will be of interest above all to those who know Hermann Broch’s work, as there is hardly any other epistolatory evidence from the years 1925 to 1928 that reveals anything about the author’s situation at that time. The Brochs, father and son, embody the harsh conflicts between the representatives of the Expressionist generation and the proponents of the young New Objectivity. The son that Broch could not understand became more or less lost to him, and Armand experienced this confrontation as losing his father. Their opposing positions became exacerbated by the ever-growing economic crisis, which the son did not wish to recognize (his fellow students at the elite school apparently did not discuss such things) but which the father felt to be an existential threat. Twenty years later, Broch gave the title “Verlorener Sohn” (“Lost Son”) to one of the novellas that make up his 1950 novel, Die Schuldlosen (The Guiltless), and this story is also an expression of his relationship with Armand.