File under forgotten texts.
Hermann Broch was a Austrian author from the first half of the twentieth century. He came to writing somewhat later in life, part of the same milieu of nervous Teutonic soul-searching that that brought us Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. He traveled in the international orbit of Modernists like James Joyce, who later helped Broch emigrate as the Nazis seized power.
Broch’s first and heftiest work, The Sleepwalkers, was published in 1932. It’s six-hundred or so dense pages, split into three sections — The Romantic, The Anarchist, The Realist — each section named after the prevailing disposition of the main character, one of the interconnected lives he traces through the decades leading up to World War One.
The title, The Sleepwalkers, is a pithy take on the heavy-lidded state of the average European during the run-up to that same war, the Great War, that accidental and senseless conflagration between the supposedly most civilized peoples on the planet.
A small spark set it off. Petty rivalries fueled the fight. Competing factions glommed on, forgetting as Broch sees it — in the age or Nietzsche, after centuries of fragmenting Protestantism — the Catholic brotherhood that had once bound them together, that could temper their bellicose descent.
There are lessons here, if you have the patience to wade through such a lengthy, lonely text.
Early on you’ll find this conversation:
“Well, the most persistent things in us are, let us say, our so-called feelings. We carry an indestructible fund of conservatism about with us. I mean our feelings, or rather conventions of feeling, for actually they aren’t living feelings, but atavisms.”
“So you consider that conservative principles are atavistic?”
“Oh sometimes, but not always. However, I wasn’t really thinking of them. What I meant was that our feelings always lag half-a-century or a full century behind our actual lives. One’s feeling are always less human than the society one lives in. Just consider that a Lessing or a Voltaire accepted without question the fact that in their time men still were still broken on the wheel — a thing that to us with our feelings is unimaginable. And do you imagine that we are in a different case? … How completely imprisoned we all are in conventional feeling. The world is ruled by the inertia of feeling.”
I believe that Broch is right in this. You see it in the news everyday: Israel and Palestine, Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan. Everything, everywhere driven by grandfathered slights, the sins of the past, the ghosts of faded empire, and the spectral groans of blood and soil.
He sees the antidote — the escape from these generational chains, the grudges and expectations of our fathers — in America. He views America through immigrant hopes and dreams: a land of fresh starts, of opportunity. As the Anarchist opines:
“In the land of justice, in America, it would be different; there the past would fall away like tinder.”
Unfortunately, Broch could re-write The Sleepwalkers to fit our last few decades. He could easily find modern American analogues for his disaffected Romantic, his scheming Anarchist, and his conniving Realist. The inertia of feeling is alive and well these days. Don’t be fooled: It’s in you. It’s in me.
America has seen its fair share over the last few years, as windows broke from Minneapolis to Portland to the Capitol. A vomiting of Atavistic Feeling poured forth, some still livid with untold years of oppression, others feeling bewildered, left-behind, fearful of losing the “way things oughta be.”
No doubt that their grievances were real, but the shouts and taunts came not from a cool-headed calculation of the best way forward, nor a careful survey of present opportunities and future possibilities. Raised fists and sloganeering rise not from sober reckoning. These were Broch’s inborn, inherited passions on display.
Let’s take a step back and confront our animating instincts, our well-springs of assumption, lest we continue to sleepwalk down the same somnolent path, the easy slide to self-righteous conflict and continued aggression. It’s the default choice. Perhaps it’s the definition of original sin. But I must believe that we can do better.
