Broch, Hermann

Broch, Hermann (1886-1951), Austrian novelist, playwright, and philosopher. Broch was born in Vienna on November 1, 1886. He was a director of his family's textile company from 1907 until 1928, but then left the firm to study mathematics and philosophy at Vienna University.

Broch's trilogy of novels, Die Schlafwandler (1931-1932; The Sleepwalkers) influenced by the writings of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka, presents the middle classes of Germany, between 1888 and 1918, as people without purposes or ideals, sleepwalking through social upheavals. After the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938, Broch was briefly detained as a suspected oppositionist. He then fled to the United States, where he lectured at Princeton and Yale universities and undertook research on mass psychology. Among his later novels, Der Tod des Vergil (1945; The Death of Virgil) uses the ancient Roman poet Virgil's doubts about whether to destroy his epic, the Aeneid, to question the value of art; Die Schuldlosen (1950; The Guiltless) depicts the years between 1918 and 1933 and the passivity which allowed the rise of Nazism; and his last, uncompleted novel, Der Versucher (1954; The Tempter), recreates the history of Nazism as represented by a crisis in a mountain village. Broch died in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 30, 1951.