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Broch Sleepwalkers - Exile PDF
Broch Sleepwalkers - Exile PDF
On May 9th of 1951, the Austrian emigrant Hermann Broch wrote a letter to his
publisher, Daniel Brody. Broch, who had been living in New York since 1938, was
considering returning to Europe, but still hesitated, and expressed his doubts in a
joke that may be read emblematically:
Two friends travel across the Atlantic, one from Europe to America, the other in the other
direction. By chance, the two ships meet in the middle, all passengers stand at the rail and
wave to each others. As the two friends recognize each other, both shout with one voice:
“Are you meschugge?” (Broch and Brody 1971, 1055–1056)1
This seems to express a basic truth about exile: that both directions of the passage
remain problematic. Neither is it possible for the emigrant to return ‘home’, since
home might have changed dramatically and might actually not even exist any
longer as home. Nor does it make sense to go abroad, into the open, into the land
of freedom, at least not for a writer and a political intellectual. For Broch realizes
very well how little his influence in exile is and how important it might be to come
closer to his literary audience. If the joke makes sense, the exile it figures is not
simply a condition of homelessness, of being different and in difference, but a
more complex situation. It is a double bind, and especially after 1945, when exile
was no longer a question of fate, but of choice, many intellectuals had to face this
double bind. Broch, however, would not have to make a choice, because just one
month after putting his jest to paper, he died in exile.
Given this double bind, the condition of exile is still not merely a negative
condition. What nonetheless remains is the movement between both shores of the
Atlantic as well as between the different dimensions of the question of home and
exile. As we will see, Broch carefully balances his writings in various regards: He
tries to make sense of the American experience without loosing ties to Europe, he
tries to combine political activity with poetic practice, he tries to get his writings
translated into English and he maintains contact with European publishers, as
here with Brody, who was in Zurich by that time.
1 Apart from The Death of Virgil all citations of Broch are translated by Timothy Kyle Boyd.
DOI 10.1515/YEJLS-2015-0011
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172 Daniel Weidner
2 cf. Elisabeth Bronfen’s analysis for a sketch of the primary metaphors of the loss of paradise,
the loss of the mother and of innocent childhood, and the loss of unambiguous expression
(Bronfen 1993, 167–183).
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 173
Rootless
Broch’s elaborations about exile came late in his writings, but they were long in
preparation, for he was using the topos of exile long before he actually went into
exile himself. Hermann Broch was born in 1886 as the son of Joseph Broch, who
came from a poor Jewish family from Moravia and worked his way up to becoming
the owner of a textile factory.3 Hermann was baptized in 1909 and managed his
father’s factory before emerging with philosophical and art-critical texts at the
end of the twenties and ultimately publishing the three-volume novel Die Schlaf-
wandler (The Sleepwalkers) 1930–1932, which made him a known author. The
novel creates a period portrait in three stages, 1888, 1903 and 1918, and in some
measure, it tells the story of the decline and dissolution of Europe.4 It is also a
highly interesting literary experiment with regard to what it means to impart the
history of nihilism. When Broch unfolds this story as a critique of modernity – by
thoroughly modern means – against the contrasting backdrop of a medieval
culture, he is following a philosophical Catholicism like that of Max Scheler and
Carl Schmitt, to whom one of his concurrent essays on the logic of a collapsed
world is also dedicated.5 Here, Broch appears to be anything other than exilic or
estranged; more like pontifical.
In these speculations the image of the Jew and also the image of exile at first
appear only negatively. In one of the theoretical excursuses in the third part of Die
Schlafwandler, we read a reflection on the historical meaning of the Jew:
The Jew, by virtue of the abstract rigor of his infinitude, is the modern, the ‘most advanced’
human par excellence: it is he who devotes himself with absolute radicality to the once
chosen area of value or profession, it is he who elevates the ‘career’, the gainful occupation
which he has gotten into, to a hitherto unrealized absoluteness, it is he who, without a tie to
any other area of value and devoted to his action with unconditional rigor, glorifies himself
to the highest mental performance, degrades himself to the most animal-like depravity of
the material: in evil as in good, yet always remaining in the extreme, – it is as if the current
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174 Daniel Weidner
of the absolutely abstract, which has flowed for two thousand years like a hardly visible
runnel of the ghetto next to the great river of life, should now become the main river […].
(Broch 1978b, 581)
This characterization of the Jew as the epitome of the modern is not particularly
original – and is not intended to be. It is, rather, a cultural topos that appears
again and again in the stories about the genesis of the modern world, from
Nietzsche to Werner Sombart and Max Weber.6 The Jew is radical, his monothe-
ism is abstract – and precisely because of that he can represent modernity and its
tendency toward abstraction. Because he is an outsider and lacks any fixed
position, anything can become his calling; conversely, his professional work is
inflated with religious import, so that the Jew – and not, like Max Weber claimed,
the Protestant – stands at the origin of the ‘spirit of capitalism’. And this particu-
lar spirituality most effectively realizes itself in the ghetto, in the Jew’s situation
of exile, in his isolation and rootlessness, for – thus reads the sociological
subtext – it is the rootlessness that determines his spirituality.
So again, this is no original sociological or philosophical theory, but rather a
quoting of the discourse of the period – and it shows that in this discourse, not
only the Jew, but also exile were always and are repeatedly quoted, because the
notion of the exile is always resonating along in public discourse. This was
especially the case since the turn of the century. As the Kunstwart-debate about
the Jewish role of the press exemplified, the cultural role of Jews is always being
talked about, but also always in a masked manner, suppressed. Broch’s Schlaf-
wandler is a discourse novel which picks up on this debate, thereby showing that
exile is first of all a quotable cultural topos, a topos that imposes itself on
discussion on the genealogy of modernity and is actually part of the self-concep-
tion of modernity – but on its concealed reverse side.
Moreover, Broch’s novel reflects this topos in a metafictional way. For it
reveals that the historico-philosophical reflections on the crisis of modernity are
in fact written by a desperate intellectual during the closing years of the war, who
happens to live, of all places, in Berlin’s Jewish quarter among Jewish emigrants
who are anything other than abstract, but accept and take care of him. The author
of the quoted reflection ultimately refers to himself as a Jew and he writes a poem
about Ahasver, the eternally wandering Jew. Jewishness thus has more facets
than exilic estrangement, and that estrangement may be, at least in part, a mere
projection of the modern subject.7
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 175
Broch in exile
On March 13th, 1938, one day after the invasion of Austria by the National
Socialists, Broch was arrested in Bad Aussee and imprisoned for three weeks.
Because of his publications in the thirties, he was viewed as a dangerous liberal.
After his release, he went to Vienna and experienced what he referred to in letters
as a mass psychosis and a “moralische Schweinerei:” the Austrian’s hysterical
enthusiasm for Hitler and their shameless exploitation of their Jewish fellow
citizens.8 In July of 1938, with 20 reichsmark in his pocket, he finally managed to
emigrate to England. In October of the same year he relocated to the United
States, where he lived until his death in 1951.
From the onset, Broch could rely on a strong and continuously growing
network of friends and acquaintances. He came as an established author, and,
most importantly, his first novel, Die Schlafwandler, had been translated into
English and had received very positive reviews. He spoke English relatively
fluently and was therefore often able to serve as a mediator between immigrants
and the American public. He was soon active in a number of initiatives, the most
prominent of which was presumably the City of Man group, an assembly of
American and German-speaking intellectuals who produced various manifests for
democratic politics.
So for Broch, exile did not entail isolation, as it did for many. On the contrary,
he was soon complaining about the burden of correspondence. In this correspon-
dence, not only does the aforementioned network manifest itself, but also the
very condition of exile: It is precisely the excessive exchange of letters that marks
the attempt to overcome distances and to maintain contact with the others in exile
as an existential necessity. One could develop not only a poetics of postal
correspondence, but also a specific poetology of exile from the countless and very
diverse letters, from the engagement with the recipient and from the flood of
everyday details, not the least of which was worry about the mail (did the letter
arrive, was it stamped correctly, etc.?).9
In spite of this high level of integration, Broch’s lifestyle remained precarious.
He had no place of permanent residence, but stayed in various boarding houses,
in artist colonies outside of New York or in the homes of absent acquaintances.
His financial situation was even more precarious. Although his numerous con-
tacts secured an income for him, it was irregular and often hardly covered his
8 Regarding biography and exile cf. next to Lützeler (1985) also Brude-Firnau (1989, 132–160).
9 Cf. Scheichl (1994, 187–204). Even after the massive three volume edition of Broch’s collected
letters, further correspondences have constantly been published.
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176 Daniel Weidner
10 In a letter Broch writes that his book contained “a complete intellectual history– of course,
only in basic outline – from 1860 through 1930.” (Broch 1968, 138–188).
11 The first chapter of this text, written in 1939, entitled “Personal Observations,” sums up
Broch’s experiences as an émigré.
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 177
More and more, I have come to the realization that one should really not start anything,
because one never knows what might yet develop there; a novella suddenly becomes a
novel, unawares a novel becomes a trilogy, that sprawls cancer-like and devours one. (Broch
1981c, 474)
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178 Daniel Weidner
literary writings, particularly in Der Tod des Vergil [The Death of Virgil], the big
novel that Broch wrote between 1938 and 1945. Remarkably enough, this novel
was also translated immediately by Broch’s friend Jean Starr Untermeyer, who
undertook a painstaking effort to reproduce the specific tone and syntax of
Broch’s text in English.15
The novel describes the last day in the life of Virgil when, as legend would
have it, he planned to burn his manuscript of the Aeneid. It therefore reflects two
core experiences of Broch: the peril to life that Broch experienced during his
imprisonment in Austria (a core part of the text was written in his prison cell) as
well as a questioning of the usefulness of art. It is therefore of central relevance
for a poetics of exile and simultaneously reveals how complex such a poetics
must be.
The vision of a world in flames is omnipresent in the text, especially in the
second part entitled Fire – The Descent. There, the poet is depicted as laying half
asleep, haunted by memories and worries:
Oh, who wants to sleep while Troy is burning! Again and again! Now are the waves of the
sea set to foaming, churned by the oar-strokes, cut by the furrowing ships, as their triple-
beaked prows cleave the waters […] –, the images persisted and were not to be banished;
night after night terror had lifted him through the silence of the spectre-filled craters […]!
(Broch 1972, 168)
[t]he memorable content of the poem was disappearing; whatever had been celebrated by
the poem – seafaring and sunny strands, war and the sound of armies, the lot of the gods
and the orbits of the starry courses – this and more besides, written down or unwritten, fell
quite away, all of it stripped off, the poem had discarded it like a useless garment and was
returning back into the unveiled nakedness of its hidden being, into the vibrating invisible
from which poetry stems, subsumed again by the pure form, finding itself there like its own
echo, like the soul housed in its crystal shell, singing of itself. (Broch 1972, 197)
As in many other passages, the text presents its own poetology: The act of
recollecting the earlier work of writing decomposes its content and thereby
negates that which the recollecting poet had achieved. The plan to incinerate the
manuscript is only the consequence of this experience of dissolution, which is
itself carried out by the text, as all that is told dissolves into uncertainty. This
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 179
occurs on the one hand by way of the style indirect libre that is used throughout
these passages. The third-person, simple past narrative remains dually focused,
relating the visions of the poet both from within and without. On the other hand
and most particularly, this dissolution occurs by way of the syntactical construc-
tion of the text, namely by the characteristic length and complexity of the
Brochian sentences, which produces a floating discourse full of ambivalences, as
when the text names its objects – sea voyage and sun shore – and simultaneously
evokes their disappearance.
Both of these traits are characteristic of Broch’s writings in exile, and perhaps
also of exile literature in general. They reflect a labor on the language that is
responding to the European avant-garde – for Broch, Joyce is the point of orienta-
tion in this regard –, but also to the specific conditions of the writer in exile, who
is cut off from his native language and thus either has to reach back to historical
objects or to create a language and a style of his or her own. Broch once wrote that
it was important to him to explore what was linguistically possible in German,
particularly for him as a Jew (Broch 1981b, 221).16
But the poetics of disappearance and dissolution also poses a political ques-
tion, namely, the question about the usefulness of art. The third part of the book
depicts Virgil’s encounter with Augustus, who was once his friend and is now
Caesar who has come to visit him on his deathbed to save the Aeneid from its
planned destruction. The chapter consists of a dialogue about the relationship
between art and politics in a crisis-ridden world that is transitioning from an old
order to a new one. For the emperor, art should serve the needs of the audience
and glorify life; Virgil, by contrast, attempts to illustrate that art doesn’t represent
life but rather death, that it is merely parabolic and can no longer portray the old
order and not yet tell anything new.
“No longer and not yet,” Caesar, much dismayed, was weighing these words – “and between
them yawns an empty space. […] The empty spaces between the epochs” – Caesar’s words
continued, as if they were speaking by themselves, as if they were unfolding without his
help, as if the words and not Caesar were soliloquizing: “the empty nothingness that yawns
wide, the nothingness for which everything comes too late and too early, the empty abyss of
nothingness beneath time and the aeons […] must not be allowed to gape open […]” Was it
actually Caesar who said this? Or had the words of his most secret fear been speaking? Time
flowed past mysteriously, the empty, shoreless stream that led to death, always cut into by
the present, the present that constantly and elusively was being washed away: We stand
between two epochs, Augustus; so call it expectancy, not emptiness. (Broch 1971, 335)
16 Regarding language in exile cf. Koepke (1985) and, specific for Broch, cf. Lützeler (1988,
14–31).
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180 Daniel Weidner
[…] first with false modesty you hypocritically slander your own work so as to be able to
disparage mine more easily, and then you want to reduce it to a windy semblance of a sham-
image […]. I know you, Virgil; you seem to be gentle, and you love to be worshipped by the
people for your purity and your virtue, but in reality your allegedly pure soul trembles
constantly with hatred and malice, yes, I repeat it, it trembles with a most abject malice […].
(Broch 1972, 388)
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 181
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Cabin, today we have Gone With the Wind. The emancipation of the slaves began
with sentimental trash – does this new sentimentality not announce the reintro-
duction of slavery?” (Broch 1981a, 237) This somewhat shocking opening intro-
duces Broch’s argument which points first to the glorification of the ‘lost cause’
for which the film is notorious, then to the popular function of cinema as the
factory of dreams for the masses, and finally and most importantly, to the
coincidence of Gone With the Wind with the publication of Hermann Rauschning’s
Conversations with Hitler, which revealed the global political aims of National
Socialism – namely the domination of the entire world whilst degrading all other
nations to servants. Slavery, as Broch’s argument continues, is the sign of the
time, both for economic reasons, since high capitalism can no longer rest on paid
labor, and psychologically, because slavery implies a vision of an ordered world
as represented in Gone With the Wind, a vision which totalitarian propaganda
efficiently confronts with the chaos and discontent of modern civilization. Only if
democracy develops its own vision and symbolism, namely a “democratic propa-
ganda,” as Broch does not hesitate to call it, can it hope to counter the totalitarian
threat, a propaganda that might evoke the glorious figure of Abraham Lincoln to
counter the demonic attraction of Hitler.18
Broch’s small text is a piece of political analysis and theory in the form of
critical commentary on film and literature. He imagined that it could be widely
distributed, and he was open to making all sorts of concessions in order to enable
that – but the text was actually never translated, let alone published. Soon after-
ward, Broch was overcome by doubts as to whether his expositions might have
been too sketchy, and he decided to continue working on what he referred to at
the time as the “slavery book,” which had become his primary enterprise. It was a
political theory that was to replace his writing novels, a project that was to
encompass both a theory and scientific explanation of ‘mass delusion’ [Massen-
wahn] and a program for combating it with new politics.
This project also expands ultimately to a planned three volumes, which are
also never published and never completed. It is only from his posthumous papers,
that the torso of a project appeared in print, whose form and content remain
difficult to appraise. The published text is not only wide-ranging in its subject-
matter, but also highly idiosyncratic. It has a scientific and philosophical objec-
tive, but it contains hardly a footnote and barely mentions other research. It is
interesting since it represents one of the first attempts to develop a comprehensive
theory of “Totalitarianism,” although Broch himself never uses this term (Müller-
18 Already in 1938, Broch raised the charge against democratic states “that they didn’t consider it
necessary to have set up propaganda ministeries” (Broch 1981b, 51). Cf. Also Broch (1978a, 64).
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 183
Funk 2003). It is also a theory of exile, since the true impulse to this project is
Broch’s attempt to comprehend his own situation and to interpret it politically.
This attempt – and this makes Broch’s texts particularly rich – is inseparably
linked to his very situation; it becomes unstable, and precisely this lability, one
might assume, belongs to the situation of exile.
Broch interprets National Socialism primarily as a practice of exclusion and
enslavement: “For whether Nazi, whether Soviet, whether fascist, the terror of the
totalitarian state is based on the magic of enslavement. An ultimate objectifica-
tion of man occurs; with every fiber of his being and thinking he is made
‘property’ of the state, actually becoming the ‘corpse left alive’, which the slave
was in the very beginning.” (Broch 1979, 484) This theory is based on Freud’s and
Le Bon’s theories of mass psychology and on Durkheim’s early sociology. It goes
back to the theory of sacrifice according to which society constitutes itself by way
of the exclusion or destruction of one of its elements. Like Freud, Broch finds that
society is founded on an act of violence, but for him, this is not an event of the
mythical past, but rather the very concrete outburst of violence in the present:
“The devilish amusement of lynching is an act of sacrifice legitimized by the
respective value-theology, the sacrificial act of a madman who wants to free
himself of fear so that he can become ‘normal’ again (and in point of fact, the
people become strangely ‘normal’ again after a lynching, without any remorse
about what happened).” (Broch 1979, 392)
Broch also explored this event in fiction: In the novel Die Verzauberung [The
Enchantment] – in other versions also entitled Der Bergroman [The Alpine Novel]
or Demeter –, a text, the first version of which Broch wrote in 1935 and which he
again reworked shortly before his death. It is a parable of mass psychology in
which the malicious agitation of a mountain village populace ultimately culmi-
nates in a human sacrifice and the banning of a merchant, who obviously stands
for a Jew. The text is, however, much more than a parable: The mythical atmo-
sphere of the village is central – drawing forth the accusation that Broch was
being ideologically regressive – and the narrative perspective even more so. The
story is told through the eyes of the village doctor, who is increasingly infected by
the occurrences., as Broch comments: “All of these occurrences are participated
in and told by the doctor, and without his noticing it himself, he who had initially
stood across from the fool more coolly and critically than any other, is seized by
the delirium. And without his actually noticing what has happened, the diary also
ultimately makes a turn back into everyday life.” (Broch 1976, 384) No less
important that the fundamental irrationality of mass hysteria is its ephemeral
nature, for the people become completely normal again after the lynching and
seem to have forgotten everything – a thought that will play an important role in
understanding the aftermath of the catastrophe.
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184 Daniel Weidner
The uncanny infection of mass hysteria doesn’t leave Broch’s theoretical text
untouched either. The theory of sacrifice to which Broch refers is problematic in
itself, because it also assigns a mythical status to the violence of the present.
What that can entail is demonstrated in one of the most remarkable aspects of
Broch’s mass hysteria texts: in his reaction to the annihilation of the Jews. When
speculating that the specific ‘modernity’ of the Jews might be the origin of the
“dumbest of all the dumb anti-Semitic accusations,” namely, the idea that the
Jews governed the world, Broch continues as following:
Yet as dumb and easy to refute this idea might be, it remains irrefutable that anti-Semitism
derived from it the alleged need for a general eradication of Jews, after which the conditions
of the world would reliably improve. Here, the limit of refutability is already exceeded, all the
more when the intention to eradicate has already been put into action. (Broch 1979, 399)19
For us, this passage, which was written by 1941 at the latest, sounds harrowingly
prophetic – and it is prophetically voiced as a warning to the world, to western
democracies: “they could not imagine – although the fate of the Jews should have
given them a clear signal – that with today’s technical means one was readily able
to simply eradicate entire peoples by way of torture in concentration camps,
scientific withdrawal of vitamins and through cold.” (Broch 1979, 332)
These formulations are indeed most remarkable, because they are written
while the annihilation of the Jews about which they speak is actually happening,
at a time when first attempts to describe National Socialism by no means placed
its anti-Semitism in the foreground – on the contrary, anti-Semitism was often
viewed merely as an epiphenomenon, and the genocide, if it was mentioned at
all, was often referred to more as a derailing.20 For Broch, by contrast, the “Jewish
question” plays a central role, and it is not only anti-Semitism that must be
understood to understand Nazism, but rather the occurrence of the annihilation of
the Jews itself. As in the case of lynching, it is the event of the murder that brings
about the cohesion of the masses, whereas all explanations (even irrational ones
as with anti-Semitism) represent rationalizations after the fact. It is precisely the
event that creates the strength of Nazi-propaganda and its irrefutability by ra-
tional argument, it is the event which calls for a new understanding of politics, a
theory of mass delusion and, most of all, for an active ‘reverse conversion’. For
him – and also for us – the Shoah is an occurrence after which nothing is as it was
before.
19 On the role of Judaism in Broch’s writings during exile cf. also Steinecke (2005).
20 Cf. for example Ziege (2009).
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 185
The radical nature of this event does also affect Broch’s own text. The passage
on the putting into action of the extermination of Jews is continued by a further
reflection:
Viewed from a magical realm, the thought might arise that the human sacrifice to which an
entire people was to fall prey could become a symbolic reference elevated into the mass
character of modern life, a repetition, elevated into mass character, of the divine self-
sacrifice with which Christ, even as a member of the same people, initiated our calendar. Yet
this is almost a Nazi thought, just as blasphemous from a Christian as from a Jewish
standpoint. (Broch 1979, 400)
This is because, Broch continues, the Jews didn’t die as martyrs, but rather as
merchants, civil servents, lawyers – simply as average people: “The jewish fate is
gruesome, but unceremonious.” (Broch 1979, 400)
One positively senses how the text begins to fishtail here, how Broch inter-
rupts himself in order to avoid thinking the “Nazi thought” that imposes itself on
him to its end. He must repel the association of sacrality and of expiation that
goes along with the model of sacrifice and realign his perspective, which threa-
tens, for a moment, to shift into the perspective of the persecutors or, at the least,
of the spectator. This fishtailing is not singular, but rather recurring throughout
the entire text. It reflects the fundamental ambivalence of the notion of sacrifice,
which always alternates between destructive and expiatory force. It also shows
how dangerously Broch’s thinking moves between politics, anthropology, and
theology. If according to him a conventional understanding of politics – of
interest-driven action, rational decision-making, etc. – does not suffice in order to
comprehend National Socialism because one has to take into account its irra-
tional forces; and if these forces must furthermore be understood not by means of
simple psychology, but rather with the aid of religious models, then the entire
approach comes into dangerous proximity to what it is attempting to critically
describe. For National Socialism itself speaks of sacrifice, self-sacrifice, a new
calendar and of magic.
Essentially, if one comprehends totalitarianism, and especially the Shoah, as
the decisive occurrence as described above, then it also has epistemic impact. It is
then no wonder that one cannot simply talk about totalitarianism without being
exposed to the danger of surrendering one’s own discourse to it, just like this
happens to the doctor in the alpine novel. The way Broch’s texts on mass
psychology must at times surrender to their object makes for an especially inter-
esting but also irritating reading, since they are both testimony to and theory
about the annihilation of the Jews. It is also clear that this surrendering is
intensified in exile, in as much as the discourse in exile is generally dis-located; it
is lacking a context, a discipline, an assignment and recipients, it loses the
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186 Daniel Weidner
firmness that especially politic theory often has, be that because it is being
produced professionally or because it is addressed directly to the bearers of
political sovereignty in the form of constitutional argument. By contrast, Broch is
writing as an autodidact, almost solely for and by himself – and that’s precisely
why his writing begins to skid and swerve. This can be recognized even in the
style of the quoted passages, where the argumentation repeatedly shifts into a
sort of theoretical monologue that is hardly structured by clear concepts, let alone
by way of an argumentative interaction with other positions. Instead, it is char-
acterized by the constant shifting of ideas and figures of thought. Much like the
‘Fire’ chapter of The Death of Virgil, these texts read as if he were writing in a half
sleep, very much in correspondence to the comatose state of the masses he is
describing. Like his poetic texts about that state, Broch’s theoretical expositions
about it tend to undermine clear differentiations, and it is this quality that makes
his texts especially interesting.
21 On Agamben and Arendt with particular references to the question of human rights see Menke
(2008).
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 187
22 Cf. Broch (1979, 456–510). On Broch’s correspondence and relation with Arendt cf. the editor’s
afterword in Arendt and Broch (1996); and Sauerland (2008).
23 Cf. also: “If man only renames the divine law as law of reasons or calls it as ‚natural right’,
without searching for new earthly contents, he did not fulfil the task but only executes a super-
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188 Daniel Weidner
the text that argues consistently with religious analogies also emphasizes that it
is impossible to secularize the sacred.
The ‘negativity’ of man is not just theoretically present in his indeterminacy;
it has a concrete and therefore political existence. Man is negative in as much as
he might be negated, as he might be deprived of his humanity, as this occurs in
the totalitarian state. This figure of exclusion is central to Broch’s attempt to
formulate a positive theory of human rights and politics. It is posited as a negative
axiom, which Broch formulates as follows: “The total enslavement epitomized so
horribly paradigmatically in the concentration camps must not occur.” (Broch
1979, 468) Broch’s theory of democracy is based on the fact that everything is
possible for and with man. He can be made sub-human or super-human – and so
it was possible to carry out the annihilation of the Jews as a ‘rational’ process, and
to even undergird that process by way of affirmative legislation. This radical
openness asks for a limitation, which is the negative foundation of politics: Man
may not be entirely subordinated, may not be made into an object of politics.
Consequently, Broch argues vehemently for the abolishment of capital punish-
ment, noting that western democracies could show how seriously they take hu-
man rights by way of such a measure.
The postulate of non-enslavement is ‘earthly absolute’ for Broch. From an
anthropological standpoint, this is paradox, because the absoluteness is not
founded in man’s higher faculties, in rationality and the calling of mankind, but
rather in his fragility, i.e. in the fact that his ‘nature’ can be taken from him. This
‘earthly absolute’ is consequently not actually derived from the being-in-likeness
of man, but is, as the end of the essay shows, a plea for future development:
To be sure, an image of man will ultimately develop from the sentences of these human
rights, and to be sure, it will […] ultimately converge more and more with a being-in-
likeness, while the human liberty connected to it will then stand at the end of the sequence
of definitions instead of dogmatically at its beginning, a target definition of human approx-
imation, without ever being able to be reached: successively developing from legal rules,
each of which says about the empirical occasion what may not be done to man, if he is to
remain man […]. (Broch 1979, 468)
The length and syntactical complexity of this sentence, which is typical for
Broch’s prose, describes an unfolding process in which the boundary between
ideal and reality is constantly shifting and the relationship between cause and
effect permanently inverting. In this manner, the sentence conveys what it de-
fluous atheistic demonstration”(Broch 1979, 472). On the critique of a political theology implied in
this argument see Koebner (1988).
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 189
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190 Daniel Weidner
Perhaps more importantly, the people don’t remain in the desert. At the end of
Deuteronomy, they stand at the border of the promised land.
Broch’s last novel, The Guiltless [Die Schuldlosen], published in 1949, con-
tains a poem about precisely this site: about Mount Pisgah, from which Moses
saw the land of Israel that he was not permitted to enter:
For the exiled, exile is also a figure of biographical reflection, a figure which
allows him to construct and narrate his own life story. This occurs precisely from
the edges of the situation – for Broch, from the standpoint of his situation after the
war, where neither his apocalyptical fears nor his hopes for a peaceful world have
been fulfilled, where steps must once again be taken, albeit in a weakened state,
where confidence must once again be mobilized to at least find a resting place.25
The end of exile is not only envisioned in a poem, but also again in a letter. In
July of 1945, Broch corresponds with Volkmahr von Zühlsdorff, another exile and
associate of the American Guild for German Freedom who is preparing to return to
Germany. Broch writes that he himself has too much to attend to in America:
“Moreover, in my opinion, Jews can and may not return at present; no guilty
conscience can grow in the sight of victims, and Germany needs contrition,
because consciousness can only develop from there: particularly the non-Nazi
needs contrition, he needs it for the Nazi brother, who himself will never be
capable of this.” (Broch 1986, 21) Zühlsdorff responds with fierce incomprehen-
sion: In the meantime, Germany had itself become victim of war and displace-
ment, yes, the Germans had suffered “like presumably no people yet prior in
history,” one should assist in its reconstruction, and Broch in his emigration was
comparatively well off (Broch 1986, 23). Whereupon Broch clarifies that he doesn’t
see himself personally as a victim. He is rather quite happy about the new life that
his displacement had enabled.
24 Cf. Ziolkowski (2003). Cf. the critical discussion by Steinecke (2002, 171–183).
25 Earlier research viewed Die Schuldlosen and especially the poems uncritically as ‚testimonial
poetry.’
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Neither here nor there – Hermann Broch’s Writing in Exile 191
But impersonally I am a victim. Namely, as a Jew. It will perhaps surprise you that I
emphasize the Jewish problem so […] but I don’t do this out of resentment but after very
thorough reflection. The ‘guilt’ of the German people shows itself in the Jewish problem:
throughout an entire 20 years the German viewed the most crazed-idiotic persecution of
Jews with complete indifference, and by this indifference he became the accessory of a
bestial-systematic mass murder. (Broch 1986, 25)
Yet Zühlsdorff can understand this even less. For him, most Germans had not
actually known what was happening and had not been Nazis – that claim, he
alleges, stemmed from allied atrocity propaganda. Moreover, if one differentiated
between Jews and Germans in such a manner, one was drawing on the same racist
categories as the National Socialists, and so on.
It is frightening to observe how here, among exiled, immediately after the
war, patterns of discourse emerge that came to overshadow the history of
postwar West Germany. Yet on the other hand, the correspondence reveals
Broch’s precise position. From that position, he speaks about ‘personal’ and
‘impersonal’ victims, about ‘guilt’ in quotation marks and contrition without
them, attempting to work in a differentiated manner with categories that shift
between moral, legal, political and religious discourses. For Broch doesn’t want
to comprehend the guilt of the Germans purely in terms of criminal law, nor
morally nor even metaphysically; he is more closely concerned with the political
question of how to reconstitute democracy – an aim that can only be achieved by
way of knowing the past. Here, again, Broch’s position is a difficult one, between
the various discourses; one that doesn’t exhaust itself in radical pessimism nor in
speechless horror in view of the catastrophe, but one that instead still seeks
perspective and opportunity for action.
In this respect, for Broch, throughout his life, exile remains anything but a
‘pure’ condition. It is a multi-dimensional experience of real and metaphorical
exile, of exile both in poetry and in politics, of political exclusion and the
opposing assertion of human rights, and it is the interplay of these dimensions
that makes it fruitful and complex. The ‘neither – nor’ in the story of the two
friends’ passing encounter on the Atlantic, which thwarted any clear reading of
exile, therefore reflects how thought about exile remains as fruitful as it remains
unsettled.
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192 Daniel Weidner
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