The Sleepwalkers

In three novels —— entitled The Romantic (1888), The Anarchist (1903), The Realist (1918) —— Hermann Broch gives the foreground and background of the dissolving structure of modern European society, leading to a complete disintegration of values. With a mathematician's logic, a philosopher's depth of perception, and an artist's power of vivid rendering, Broch dissects the material and the moral life of the individuals which form the masses. He shows the crisis of modern man in its origin and growth, over three periods, each of which reveals a further downward step from security to insecurity, from form to chaos. In its first appearance, in 1932, the trilogy was hailed as one of the most memorable achievements of modern literature, and the author was compared to Joyce and Proust. But only today, with the added perspective of years, can Broch's work be understood in its full significance. In the meantime, the petty bourgeois, stripped of a universal system of ethics and morals, has shown to the world the full measure of his inhumanity. In Broch's novels we see the antecendents of all later horrors; we are provided with the intimate background and breeding place of the mass phenomena later years have witnessed: the psychology and philosophy of a new race of men becomes manifest. And yet this vast content remains confined in the novel form; it "comes across" in expert narrative, in a most skillful polyphonic construction, in which each novel by its very style reveals also the style of its period.

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