Hermann Broch

Sold at the age of forty to pursue a full-time literary career, Hermann Broch transitioned from managing a family textile factory to crafting dense, experimental narratives. His intellectual output in German and English spanned prose, essays, and philosophy, reflecting a deep preoccupation with the disintegration of values in a modern, post-religious age.

Early Life and Industry

Born in Vienna in 1886 to a prosperous family, Broch spent his early career as an industrialist. He attended technical colleges for textile manufacture, eventually taking charge of his father's factory in Teesdorf. This period of his life was marked by a conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1909 and his marriage to Franziska von Rothermann. By 1927, he divested from the textile business and redirected his focus toward mathematics, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Vienna.

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The Sleepwalkers and Literary Emergence

Broch achieved significant recognition with his first major literary project, the trilogy titled The Sleepwalkers. Published in Munich by Daniel Brody between 1930 and 1932, the work consists of three volumes: The Romantic, The Anarchist, and The Realist. In the final book, Broch included an essay on the disintegration of values, which served as a theoretical framework for his approach to contemporary culture.

Political Imprisonment and Exile

Following the 1938 annexation of Austria by the Nazis, authorities arrested Broch in Bad Aussee for possessing a socialist magazine. He spent eighteen days in a district jail before friends, including James Joyce and Thornton Wilder, facilitated his departure. He traveled to Britain before settling in the United States.

The Death of Virgil and Later Works

Broch's most notable work, The Death of Virgil, evolved from a 1937 radio lecture into an extensive novel published in 1945. The narrative examines the final eighteen hours of the Roman poet's life, blending poetry and prose to explore themes of hallucination and moral crisis. His later output included the 1950 collection The Guiltless, and he remained active in political writing and mass psychology until his death in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1951.