Pre-Hitler Germany

THE SLEEPWALKERS (648 pp.)--Hermann Broch--Pantheon ($5).

If any readers have any nostalgic hankerings for the literary days of the early '30s, The Sleepwalkers should make them think again. Its reissue summons up memories of the debates on proletarian literature, the analyses of the bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, the expositions of dialectical materialism, the burning of the books, the reports of the street fights in Berlin. In that period before and just after Hitler took power, the books coming out of Germany had a confused, bitter, gnarled violence foreshadowing the impending catastrophe. It was probably one of the ugliest periods in literary history. Hermann Broch, born in Vienna and now living in exile in the U.S. (he was jailed when the Nazis invaded Austria), was an eminent Austrian novelist; The Sleepwalkers, a massive and gloomy trilogy, which he calls a philosophical essay, is his big book.

It is written with a calm, thoughtful air, describing in great detail the mental processes and the doings of some of the unloveliest people ever seen outside the caricatures of George Grosz. The first of the three books is The Romantic, laid in 1888, and picturing the world of potbellied landowners and their sensitive sons, a world of meaningless propriety, duels, love affairs with actresses; a world so hedged about with tradition that it is a scandal when a young officer leaves the army to manage the family estate. It is the other side of German romanticism--Unter den Linden with the leaves off the trees; champagne parties with the girls sick in the lavatories and the young men ashamed of their fathers' wild oats; elder sons killed in duels they do not want to fight and younger sons sent off to cadet schools they do not want to attend. The story, insofar as there is one, deals with the love affair of Joachim von Pasenow and Ruzena, his Czech mistress.

Discussions. The second book, The Anarchist, is better. Laid in 1903, it is the story of Esch, a short, red-faced, powerful bookkeeper who in a phlegmatic, almost indifferent way: 1) gets mixed up with the Social Democrats when his friend is jailed in a shipping strike; 2) becomes a partner in a theatrical venture featuring lady wrestlers, his task being to recruit the wrestlers; 3) seduces, or almost takes by assault, a middle-aged widow who owns a restaurant, and subsequently marries her. The book is a succession of drab quarrels over boardinghouse tables, dull arguments over money, cynical discussions of socialism, loveless matings on rooming-house beds, artful schemes to marry pregnant girls to somebody else.

With the third book, The Realist, laid in 1918, the moral breakdown is complete. Huguenau, the central character, is a deserter. Clever, self-confident, cocky, a smooth salesman, he finds himself in a town where the aging Major von Pasenow (the hero of The Romantic) is the town commandant and where Esch, spiritualized and suffering, and with vague Messianic visions, is the editor of a failing radical paper. Huguenau becomes friendly with Esch in order to denounce him to the commandant, organizes a company to buy the paper, and is unmasked as a deserter just as the revolution begins.

When the Town Hall is burning, the jail opened, and the looters swarming in the streets, Huguenau, the deserter, perceives Esch, the visionary, walking ahead of him. "Should he knock him over the head with the rifle butt? No, that would only be silly, what was needed was something that would end the business for good. And then it overwhelmed him like an illumination--he lowered his rifle, reached Esch with a few feline tango-like leaps, and ran the bayonet into his angular back. To the murderer's great astonishment, Esch went on calmly for a few steps more, then he fell forward on his face without a sound."

Discursions. Intermixed with these scenes are long essays on revolution and German philosophy, brief glimpses of minor characters in a technique similar to that of John Dos Passes in U.S.A., long autobiographical discursions grouped under the heading: The Disintegration of Values. Some of them are hauntingly phrased: "The man who from afar off yearns for his wife or merely for the home of his childhood has begun his sleepwalking. . . . He still hears the voice of the demagogue, but it comes as a mere unmeaning murmur. He stretches his arms sideways and forwards like a poor tightrope dancer who, high above solid earth, knows of a better support. . . ."

Most readers will wish Hermann Broch had put his essays in one volume, his novels in another. But to anyone who has to deal with post-Hitler Germany, The Sleepwalkers may seem almost compulsory reading, much as Main Street and Babbitt would be required reading for anyone studying the crash of 1929.

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