The sleepwalkers broch. The sleepwalkers : Broch, Hermann, 1886 2022-11-17
The sleepwalkers broch Rating:
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The Sleepwalkers is a novel written by Hermann Broch that was first published in 1932. It is a complex and ambitious work that explores the spiritual and intellectual crisis that Europe was undergoing in the early 20th century.
The book is structured as a trilogy and follows the lives of three main characters: Karl RoĂmann, a young man who is forced to leave his home in Austria after being accused of impregnating a servant; Moosbrugger, a serial killer who is on trial for his crimes; and Leopold, a wealthy businessman who is struggling with his own sense of purpose and meaning in life.
One of the main themes of The Sleepwalkers is the concept of "mass psychology." Broch believed that the societal and cultural forces of the time were causing people to become detached from their own individual identities and values, and to instead become mindless "sleepwalkers" who were blindly following the herd. He argued that this mass psychology was a major contributor to the political and social upheaval that was occurring in Europe at the time.
Another important theme in the book is the role of technology in society. Broch was critical of the rapid industrialization and technological advancement that was taking place in Europe, and argued that it was leading to a dehumanization of society. He believed that people were becoming more and more reliant on machines and technology, and that this was causing them to lose touch with their own humanity.
Overall, The Sleepwalkers is a thought-provoking and thought-provoking novel that delves into the deeper issues and concerns of the time. It is a book that is still relevant today, as many of the themes and ideas that it explores are still relevant in our modern world.
The Sleepwalkers (Broch novel)
Broch deftly probes his human interiors, and his observations are resolved and rendered with imagination. And, in this particular book, some of the experimentation truly enhances our understanding of the characters and their situation. She shoots Bertrand, wounding him in the arm, when she thinks he is coming between her and her lover. And it is this banal meaninglessness of it that probably drew me to it. Before that he had published a couple of essays. The trilogy is a profound and disquieting reflection on the dis-integration of values that ushers in the peculiarly logical but ultimately irrational and ferocious twentieth century value-systems. The Sleepwalkers is a silent guardian: most people nowadays remain unfamiliar with Broch or his works.
The Sleepwalkers by Broch, Hermann (9780679764069)
The first part he calls 'the romantic' about a soldier Joachim navigating between his bourgeois world and the lower ends of late nineteenth century society. He found another chance to do so in his book of essays Hofmannsthal and His Time Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit criticising fin-de-siecle culture in Vienna which he felt was represented by kitsch and fussiness. Taking place in the final year of the First World War, it is a combination of five parts. . And so, I choose to walk away from this.
German language novels from the dawn of the mo Hermann Broch is another of those early twentieth century Austro-Hungarian writers whose works I have discovered and devoured over the past decade. Driven by that extraordinary oppression which falls on every human being when, childhood over, he begins to divine that he is fated to go on in isolation and unaided towards his own death; driven by this extraordinary oppression, which may with justice be called a fear of God, man looks round him for a companion hand in hand with There are some books that are not much read but nonetheless they serve as a kind of Bethlehem star for the whole literary movements and The Sleepwalkers is one of those. You absolutely cannot base a character's origin on an unrealistic portrayal of good vs. Hermann Broch und die Moderne: Roman, Menschenrecht, Biographie. His achievement lies not in the theory though but in the description.
Goodreads staff please add 3 instead of 1 to my '2013 books read' because this is a trilogy The first two parts are pretty cool because theyre about these neurotic guys trying to get laid, but I dont even know what the third part is about. . I will certainly come back to his writing over the years. In just one chapter I am already hearing anecdotes and ruminations on dueling scars, monocles, walking-canes, greatcoats, women in laced-corsets and coiffeured hairdos. But onto the good: Reading the Pasenow and Esch sections one could almost conclude that adulthood is a plague in which giant children have had the misfortune of taking themselves seriously. This book cannot be the gold standard of literature with such a flawed introduction. The mentality of spiriferous doom is astounding as a theme in which generations follow each other in being unhappy at what is going on.
The sleepwalkers : a trilogy : Broch, Hermann, 1886
The style is of the nineteenth century 'realist' novel with the foil of a friend who has abandoned traditionalism for business and expresses the 'God is Dead' alienation of the new bourgeois who is moving on from aristocratic expectations and values. This plot is more jumbled and we get essentially just a window into Esch' youth as he starts and stops romances and business schemes. Debates about God and meaning, about Catholic traditionalism, about Protestant duty, about Jewish identity and about sectarianism represented by the Salvation Army are allowed to run without any attempt to skew them in the author's favour. It is so 19th century that it has the feel of the misogyny of Tolstoy's shorter works--how the lusty peasant girl in von Pasenow's case a Czech music hall girl lures the hero away from the decidedly cooler charms of his eligible female peers. The actual 'novel' again shows the same genius for expressing the hard to express in a recognisable social context - a small town suffering the final stage of a world war.
I could not have been more wrong. I could not have finished The Sleepwalkers without the able assistance of Amazon reviewers. Reading The Sleepwalkers with patience is a joy. Since I enjoyed Canetti's Auto da Fe so much and am still working my way through Musil's Man without Qualities, Amazon was insistent that I try this novel. . DeGruyter: Berlin and Boston, 2015. When a system leans too heavily to one or the other it falls apart.
Just a highly-regarded miss that now makes me question everything about myself. The third novel 'The Realist' at least has the virtue of separating the molasses into separate short chapters. I think I 'get it' now. Finally Esch marries Hentjen and moves to Luxemburg, where he gets an even more prestiguous job as a bookkeeper. Even so, what is good here is very very good indeed.
The books are in completely different styles and the final work 'The Realist' is in at least five different styles in its own right including a single burst of highly effective drama, some undistinguished and rather dull poems and didactic phil 'The Sleepwalkers' has proved one of the hardest books I have tried to review on Goodreads. Thanks to the visual media, video games, etc. Arendt suggests that these two narratives, one of which goes off into full-stop technical hegelian logic, and the other of which is converted into poetry, suggest a radicalization of a society fragmented into atoms; In the end the disintegration of values are complete as Huguenau destroys Esch and Joachim, and the story of the jewish army girl ends in a very elegant poetic passivity as the Jewish piety cannot be soothed as it goes to its deathbed. He swindles and murders without remorse and his dealings bring him finally to the zero point of values, a state when old values have disappeared and the new ones have not been created. He is confused with the values of the world but can still differentiate between good and evil. The topics treated so far; and the refined, highly-polished prose.
I feel like I need to read it again to unlock even half of its wisdom. To illustrate the turmoil and confusion in fin-de-siecle-ish Germany, Broch paints Esch with less consistent values than von Pasenow. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. Plus, the topic is Germany--the most savage, the most repulsive, the most fascinating of nations. His magnum opus was the stunning hallucinatory prose poem The Death of Virgil, but The Sleepwalkersâmore in the vein of Musil's A Man Without Qualitiesâis another extraordinary work of art.
