Hermann Broch (1886–1951) was an Austrian writer and essayist, a major figure of German-language literary modernism. Forced into exile by Nazism, he wrote novels that examine the disintegration of European civilization's values.
Hermann Broch(1886 — 1951)
Hermann Broch
États-Unis, Autriche
6 min read
Frequently asked questions
Key Facts
- Born in 1886 in Vienna into a Jewish industrialist family
- Published the novel trilogy *The Sleepwalkers* between 1931 and 1932
- Briefly arrested in 1938 after the Anschluss, then emigrated to the United States
- Published his masterpiece *The Death of Virgil* in 1945
- Died in 1951 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Works & Achievements
Novel trilogy tracing the "decomposition of values" in German society from 1888 to 1918. A foundational work that established Broch as a major modernist.
Novel featuring a young mathematician, reflecting Broch's interest in scientific rigor and the quest for knowledge.
Masterpiece composed during exile: the long interior monologue of the dying poet Virgil. A pinnacle of 20th-century lyrical and philosophical fiction.
Novel in stories questioning the passive guilt of those who, through indifference, made the Nazi catastrophe possible.
Major essay on fin-de-siècle Vienna, analyzing the aestheticism and moral emptiness of an era on the brink of collapse.
Unfinished novel about the arrival of a demagogue in a mountain village, a parable on the seduction of crowds by totalitarianism.
Vast theoretical project, left unfinished, on mass psychology and the conditions that lead to totalitarian regimes.
Anecdotes
Before becoming a writer, Hermann Broch managed his father's textile mill near Vienna for nearly twenty years. Only after the age of forty did he sell the factory to devote himself entirely to literature and resume studies in mathematics and philosophy.
After Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938 (the Anschluss), Broch, of Jewish origin, was arrested and briefly imprisoned in the Alt-Aussee region. Writer friends, including James Joyce, helped him obtain support and a visa to flee Europe.
His masterpiece, "The Death of Virgil," recounts only the last hours of the Roman poet Virgil, agonizing and torn by the desire to burn his great poem, the *Aeneid*. The entire novel consists of this long interior monologue spanning nearly five hundred pages.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt was a close friend of Broch. After his death, she helped publicize his work and edit his texts, seeing him as one of the great witnesses to Europe's intellectual collapse.
Broch's mother, who remained in Europe, died in 1942 in the Theresienstadt camp. This tragedy haunts his later work, which focuses on mass psychology and the mechanisms that make totalitarianism possible.
Primary Sources
Steel-blue and light, driven by a barely perceptible contrary breeze, the waves of the Adriatic rippled to meet the imperial fleet.
The world is given over to the disintegration of values, each domain of life following its own logic without any longer relating to a common meaning.
Vienna at the end of the century was the center of a joyful void, a gay apocalypse where aesthetics took the place of ethics.
Understanding how a human mass can tip into collective madness has become the most urgent task of our time.
Key Places
Broch's birthplace and the capital of a vibrant intellectual Mitteleuropa. He grew up there, ran the family factory, and studied at the university.
Site of the textile mill managed by Broch during the 1910s–1920s. This industrial world fueled his reflections on bourgeois society.
Region where Broch was arrested and briefly imprisoned after the Anschluss in 1938. There he began to conceive “The Death of Virgil.”
A stop in Broch's exile after his flight from Austria in 1938, before his departure for America.
Broch's place of residence in the United States, where he frequented the circle of émigré intellectuals and continued his work.
City where Broch spent his final years, near Yale University, and where he died in 1951.
