THE YEAR 2001 MARKED the fiftieth anniversary of Hermann Broch's death. The author died of a heart attack on May 30, 1951, in New Haven, Connecticut, where he had spent the last two years of his life. Ten months before his death he had been named an Honorary Lecturer in German at Yale University. His friend, Hermann Weigand, a professor of German at Yale University, had helped him attain this position. Weigand had written the first scholarly study on Broch's novel Der Tod des Vergil, a gesture the author appreciated. Since Broch knew at the time that, due to his precarious health, he probably would die in the near future, he asked his friends at Yale as well as his publisher and his relatives — his son and his wife — to establish the Broch Archives at the Yale University Library after his death. His son, H. F. (Armand) Broch de Rothermann; his wife, Annemarie Meier-Graefe; his friends, Hannah Arendt, Erich von Kahler, Hermann Weigand, Curt von Faber du Faur, and others saw to it that the Broch estate found a proper home in the Beinecke Rare Collection of the Yale University Library.

Hundreds of scholars have visited New Haven during the last half-century to carry out research on Broch at Beinecke. During the last three decades Christa Sammons, Curator of the German Collection at Beinekke, has been a most able administrator of the Broch Archives. Not only has she expanded the collection over the years, it is also thanks to her that international Broch conferences took place in New Haven in 1979, 1986, and in 2001.