Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers

Last night I finished reading Hermann Broch’s epic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers. Broch was an Austrian Christian novelist and is considered (along with Joyce, Mann, Musil, Proust, and Kazantzakis) to be one of the premier modernist writers. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1886, Broch converted to Christianity in 1909 and began writing in 1926. The Sleepwalkers was his first novel.

The Sleepwalkers is a work about the disintegration of values, specifically the decline in thinking and behavior that occurred between fin de siècle Europe and the end of World War I. During those 30 years, we are introduced to dozens of characters in various places, though three main characters (Joachim von Pasenow, August Esch, and Huguenau) are the philosophical and narrative focus.

Book One, The Romantic, is more of a straightforward novel and deals with both von Pasenow’s disgust and participation in the decline of values.

Book Two, The Anarchist, with its expressionistic prose, follows the life of socialist Esch as he struggles with the substance-less of his social progressivism.

Book Three, The Realist, is written in the style of pure modernism, like that of Joyce’s Ulysses. Characters from the previous books come together and interact within Broch’s philosophical plotting. It contains parallel stories of a young woman alienated from her family; of shell-shocked and mutilated soldiers and field hospital nurses; and that of a Salvation Army girl in Berlin. The plot of each chapter determines the genre used (occasional verse for the story of a Salvation Army girl, journalistic style of the hospital chapters, etc.). While the previous books subtly touched upon religious themes, here, in book three, his conception of the theology and philosophy of Christianity are on full display. Huguenau is the focus of this book. He is a war deserter who pretends to be a businessman and publisher in order to cheat Esch out of his newspaper and ingratiate himself to Pasenow.

The most unusual element of the third novel is the multi-part essay titled The Disintegration of Values. It both comments upon the plots and characters while examining the Western world’s descent from communal values following the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation.

This was a really amazing book. Probably the best Christian work I’ve ever read. It was also a very difficult read (only Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Doctor Faustus, and In Search of Lost Time have been more difficult).