Geist and Zeitgeist

by Hermann Broch, John Hargraves

Hermann Broch achieved international recognition for his brilliant use of innovative literary techniques to present the entire range of human experience, from the biological to the metaphysical. Concerned with the problem of ethical responsibility in a world with no unified system of values, he turned to literature as the appropriate form for considering those human problems not subject to rational treatment.

Late in life, Broch began questioning his artistic pursuits and turned from literature to devote himself to political theory. While he is well known and highly regarded throughout the world as a novelist, he was equally accomplished as an essayist. These six essays give us a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most original thinkers.

Genres: Essays, Philosophy, Literature

228 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

Broch was born in Vienna to a prosperous Jewish family and worked for some time in his family's factory in Teesdorf, though he maintained his literary interests privately. He attended a technical college for textile manufacture and a spinning and weaving college. Later, in 1927, he sold the textile factory and decided to study mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna.

In 1909 he converted to Roman Catholicism and married Franziska von Rothermann, the daughter of a knighted manufacturer. This marriage dured until 1923.

He started as a full-time writer when he was 40. When "The Sleepwalkers," his first novel, was published, he was 45. The year was 1931.

In 1938, when the Nazis annexed Austria, he emigrated to Britain after he was briefly arrested. After this, he moved to the United States. In his exile, he helped other persecuted Jews.

In 1945 was published his masterpiece, "The Dead of Virgil." After this, he started an essay on mass behaviour, which remained unfinished.

Broch died in 1951 in New Haven, Connecticut. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize and considered one of the major Modernists.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Humanity today has been overtaken by a peculiar contempt for words, a contempt that is almost revulsion. The easy confidence that people could persuade one another by means of words and language has been radically lost; parlare has taken on a negative sense, and parliaments are being undone by their own aversion to the activity of parleying. Anywhere a conference is called, it meets subject to the scorn and skepticism of pundits who all too generally agree on the impossibility of agreement. Each one knows that the other speaks a different language, inhabits a different value-system, that every country is imprisoned inside its own value-system. Not just every country, but every vocation: The merchant cannot persuade the soldier, nor the soldier the merchant, and they understand each other only to the extent that each concedes the other's right to use whatever means he has at his disposal, to employ his own values ruthlessly, to break any treaty should he choose to invade and conquer his enemy. Whether one calls it cynicism or not, never before, at least not in Western European history, has the world so candidly and openly admitted that words mean nothing and, moreover, that any attempt at mutual understanding and agreement is not even worth the effort. Never before has it been resigned so openly to thinking that the only means it could, or should, use, is power, the power of strong over weak.

This is not to bewail the fact that the world is the way it is, nor to blame mankind for this state of affairs. For mankind, the situation is desperate, for having lost faith in words, it despairs of the spirit, too, the spirit of its own humanity, that spirit which works through language. The word is nothing without the spirit, which can live nowhere else but in the word; whoever kills the spirit, kills the word, and whoever desecrates the word, desecrates the spirit; the two are bound inseparably. Over and over again, humanity loses its language, and over and over again the spirit, the absolute, slips from its grasp, time and again humanity is thrown back to the muteness of its dim origins, still apparent today in the apathy of primitive peoples; it is thrown back to their violence, their obscure suffering. And it is truly suffering, for mankind will never lose its aspirations to godliness, and no matter how depraved, no matter how far fallen from the spirit, it will keep on striving toward the spirit. This mute silence weighs heavily on a world that has lost language and spirit, for it has had to put its faith in power, and in murder, without which there is no power. Muteness now rules both individuals and groups, and it is the muteness of murder.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hermann Broch focuses on the central values of European society during approximately the 100-year period beginning with the second half of the 1800's. His main thesis throughout the six essays, the last being an excerpt of a book-length essay, focus on the harmful impact to society that Broch sees in society moving from a singularly-focused value center for society to one with a pluralistically-focused value system where values are pitted against each other. Broch finds this wholly unacceptable ethically, politically, and aesthetically. The tone of the essays, drawn from throughout his career, speak to this.

Broch is Austrian by birth and found himself exiled to the United States after World War II. He lived to 1951, dying in and around New York City. Broch focuses on the anti-political in Vienna, Austria, and applies his repudiation of pluralism onto the most culturally-significant city of his native country. This collection is ultimately saved from becoming one of the things Broch argues against, kitsch, for me in that he is at minimum introducing me to a new system of thought. That I disagree with his overall, modern sentiment that pluralism is fatal culturally, politically or aesthetically is another point altogether.

[Ermina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ima smislenih pasaža, ali je prijevod tako suhoparan da sam morala nekoliko puta ponavljati pročitano.
I nezaobilazni jebeni Hitler o kojem više svi sve znamo (čak smo znali 1947.), jeez!

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that bleeds excellence and profundity but which one will likely have to return to 9-10 times during one's lifetime to fully appreciate all the nuances of.

[Michael Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

impressive syntheses of european history, and literary history

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pish posh