Some sixty-five years after his death in American exile in 1951, the Austrian Jewish writer Hermann Broch is today ranked alongside contemporaries such as Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and James Joyce as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Among his works are the multilayered trilogy Die Schlafwandler, a modernist masterpiece that draws the reader, via the increasingly alienated psyches of its three protagonists, into the social and cultural fragmentation of the age; and the hypnotically lyrical Der Tod des Vergil, which articulates the experience of mortality and the conflict of art and political power at the end of an era.

Broch’s encounter with social disintegration and the rise of fascism gave a critical urgency and depth to his fiction. It also impelled him, a profoundly humane individual with a strong sense of social responsibility, to produce wide-ranging and often innovative works of cultural criticism, philosophy, mass psychology, and political theory that not only confronted the ideological crisis of his era but also pointed beyond that crisis to the emergence of a new secular/humanitarian ethos. His attempt to give universal human rights a foundation for the modern age has a powerful resonance for our times.

Broch’s work is widely available in translation, and his novels feature on German Studies programs and university courses on modern European literature throughout the Anglophone world. Nevertheless, his writings deserve to be more widely known than they are, and this Companion represents a contribution to that end. Written by an international team of Broch experts, with English translations of German-language material, it draws on the latest research to present an up-to-date and in-depth study of the writer and his works, covering both his novels and key areas of his philosophical and scientific writings. A concluding selected bibliography provides guidance for further reading in both English and German.

This Companion places its author’s life and work in the context of his turbulent times. We hope it also shows how he can speak to our dislocated present.

The Editors

July 2018