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Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers
By William R. Mueller

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .

"Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand."
(W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming").

"Many must die, many must be sacrificed, so that a path may be prepared for the loving redeemer and judge. And only through his sacrificial death can the world be redeemed to a new innocence. But first the Antichrist must come-the mad and dreamless Antichrist. First the world must become quite empty, must be emptied of everything in it as by a vacuum cleaner-nothingness."
(Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers, p. 301).

IN the year 1888 a perceptive observer of the seventy-year-old Herr von Pasenow could discern his character and personality through his style of walking-undignified, overweening, vulgar, rakish, swaggering. His walk bore the marks of the Devil himself, or-taking into consideration the walking-stick and passing more

William, R. Mueller is Professor of English at Goucher College, Baltimore, and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. This past academic year, he was Visiting Lecturer in Theology and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary. Among his several books are The Prophetic Voice in Modern Fiction, John Donne: Preacher, and Ionesco and Genet: Playwrights of Silence.

This essay on Hermann Brock's novel, The Sleepwalkers, is presented here not only for its intrinsic merit but also because it portrays so vividly several styles of life, each organized around a different ideal or principle, and all lived within the flow of the providence of God. The essay suggests to us that perhaps it is our lot today to live in a time when, in God's providence, the condition of men is destined to deteriorate steadily, and that our task may be to bear a faithful witness throughout an entire lifetime without sight of an end to the darkness.
After each quotation from The Sleepwalkers is the page reference to the Universal Library edition, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, and published by Grosset and Dunlap. The novel was first published in 1931-1932.

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charitable judgment-it resembled a dog hobbling briskly and zigzaggedly about on three legs. His son Joachim (main protagonist of "The Romantic," Part One of Hermann Broch's trilogy The Sleepwalkers) once noted the resemblance between his father's walk and his handwriting, whose sloping, running quality also seemed of a three-legged nature. Joachim liked neither his father's walk, nor his handwriting, nor the man himself.

If Herr von Pasenow's walk is the key to his whole style of living, Joachim's military uniform is the key to his own. About military uniforms Joachim's friend Eduard von Bertrand, a one-time soldier turned business man, has a theory. There had, he believes, been a time when the priest, set off from the rest of mankind by his ecclesiastical garments, prescribed the judgment of good and evil, thus holding off the forces of anarchy. But the church, fallen in luster and authority, has given way to the secular, particularly the army, and the new absolutism is clothed in military, not priestly garb. Such a secular exaltation of itself as the absolute Bertrand defines as "romanticism." The romanticism of his time is "the cult of the uniform" (p. 20), whose function, like that of priestly robes of a time past, is "to manifest and ordain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life" (p. 21). Though Joachim sees in Bertrand's theory, as in various of his other pronouncements, an underlying cynicism, he knows that his beloved uniform does bear witness to his style of life. To him the uniform symbolizes a noble code of living and a secure hierarchy of values. In mufti he feels naked and indecent, for civilian life, unrestrained by priest or soldier, spells for him the anarchy consequent upon an absence of discipline.

Joachim's uniform, outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual sense of honor, signifies his nostalgia for past values, his eagerness to hold on to what of them remains, and his fear of "new values" which seem to him disconcertingly like "no" values. Among the old values is chivalry, particularly as it embraces the relationship between man and woman. He is disquieted by the small liberties his father takes with the charming, if unfastidious, Ruzena. And when Joachim becomes her lover (chivalry allows such liaisons), he is as chivalrous toward her as a man who is simultaneously moving toward marriage with another can be. While his code demands that he protect his mistress from the ravages of sensual men, it also demands that he enshrine his intended, Elisabeth van Baddensen,

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in the cult of the virgin. Upset that his father should caress Ruzena's hand, he is upset too that his father should encourage his marriage to Elisabeth, leading as it certainly would to the violation of a saint. He is keenly mortified when Baron and Baroness von Baddensen, inviting him to a tour of their house, actually suffer him a view of their bedroom, where stand side by side and in embarrassing proximity the two beds sullied by concupiscence and crying loud of the Baroness's degradation. That Elisabeth should be destined for the same fate, "that indeed he himself should be the man chosen to perform that act of desecration, filled him with such compassion that he longed to steal her away, simply that he might watch before her door, so that undisturbed and unviolated she might dream for ever in a dream of white lace" (p. 34). The wedding night, which (with Joachim distinctly loath to divest himself of his uniform) slowly and awkwardly leads to awakening from that virginal dream, is presented with tender ridicule. Had Eduard von Bertrand - who has long since shed his uniform, who looks forward rather than backward, and who loves and is loved by Elisabeth-married the young beauty, the consummation would have been more precipitate, for Bertrand is free of Joachim's cult.

Joachim and Bertrand, destined to constant interaction in the year 1888, are polar opposites, a fact attributed in part by Joachim to their disparate breeding grounds: the country, whose pastoral security was thought by him to nourish faith and stability, and the city, whose labyrinthine ways connoted to him a diabolical underworld and helped account for Bertrand's peculiar blindness to the claims of honor. " 'It seems to me,' Bertrand tells Joachim to the latter's disapproval, 'that honour is a very living feeling, but nonetheless all obsolete forms are full of inertia, and one has to be very tired oneself to give oneself over to a dead and romantic convention of feeling. One has to be in despair and see no way out before one can do that . . .'" (p. 53). From this moment on Joachim's feelings toward Bertrand oscillate between repulsion and attraction. At times he views his more sophisticated, less sentimental acquaintance as an emissary of the Devil, as a Mephistopheles sent to tempt him away from his most precious values. But with equal frequency he feels close dependence upon a man clearly more knowledgeable than himself in the practical affairs of the world.

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As a late nineteenth-century romantic, Joachim feels allegiance to the cult of the uniform his surest stay against chaos. Had he lived in an earlier age, he might well have found his security in the priesthood. Indeed, his adult nostalgia for the church of his childhood is strong. Shortly after his brother's death-by "honorable" duel-he enters his parish church and tries "to recapture the feelings which as a child had been his when every Sunday he had stood . . . [there] as before the face of God" (p. 46). As Bertrand seems to him more and more to take on a demonic coloration, he seeks increasingly the consolation of religion; and to contemplate the religious is, to Joachim, to contemplate Elisabeth. Once as he attempts to pray, he recalls from childhood a picture of the Virgin, whose hair seems now to blend with "the maiden tresses of Elisabeth" (p. 116). Later, proposing to Elisabeth, he sees in her "the vision of Mary wandering on earth before her assumption into heaven" (p. 142)-and even entertains the wish that he and Elisabeth, like Mary before them, might already have passed into the heavenly kingdom! His marriage to Elisabeth he views as her sacrifice and his redemption; even on his marriage bed, thoughts of a Christian household as a way of grace take precedence over the more secular aspects of his present situation.

If Bertrand counters Joachim's romanticism with a modest cynicism, he is at the same time the only really hopeful-in an ultimate sense, even optimistic-character in Part One of The Sleepwalkers. The other characters are gripped by fear and loneliness. Herr von Pasenow is "tormented by some secret fear that abated only when he was in his bedroom" (p. 118). Elisabeth's fear of the unfamiliar and unconventional is a strong factor in precluding marriage to Bertrand, and Joachim too dreads change. Doubtless one cause of their fear is a sense of terrible isolation. We learn, for example, that a visit of Joachim to his parents serves only to intensify their loneliness, and that between husband and wife is "an impenetrable wall of deafening silence . . . a wall through which the human voice cannot penetrate" (p. 77). Only Bertrand seems free of such miseries. Aware of the destructiveness brought by fear and loneliness to the relations between man and man, he nonetheless believes in "a kind of human solidarity and an understanding that bridged the years" NB(p. 80). Joachim, with all his romantic notions, seems more despairing than hopeful, perhaps because, his eyes on the past,

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he cannot see ahead to a time when the world, having plunged to its deepest abyss, may once again move to a love long lost. It is, perhaps oddly, the "cynical" Bertrand who foresees a renewal of love, however distant:

"I believe, and this is my deepest belief , that only by a dreadful intensification of itself, only when in a sense it becomes infinite, can the strangeness parting two human beings be transformed into its opposite, into absolute recognition, and let that thing come to life which hovers in front of love as its unattainable goal, and yet is its condition: the mystery of oneness. The gradual accustoming of oneself to another, the gradual deepening of intimacy, evokes no mystery whatever" (P. 100).

I

On March 2, 1903, August Esch lost his job in Cologne for an alleged error in bookkeeping. The charge, fabricated as a protective shield to the misconduct of others, is ironic: Esch is as wedded to and expert in the cult of bookkeeping as Joachim was to the cult of the uniform. His art he views not simply as a. practical mode of keeping commercial ledgers but as a righteous means of rendering the world its moral due: Reference to "the upright bookkeeping of his soul" (p. 236) affords some sense of the avowed scope of his intention. He seeks stability with a passion rivaling Joachim's, though the seeking is implemented not through a romantic sense of honorable behavior, but through a mathematical sense of balancing credits and debits. Kneeling at the altar of what he calls "law and order" (p. 164), Esch hardly conforms to the title-"The Anarchist" ---of Part Two of The Sleepwalkers. If Part Two has an anarchist, it is Martin Geyring, whose "anarchy" is of the gentlest of sorts. Esch himself is opposed to anarchists, largely because, in their world, "no one seemed to know whether he was on the right or on the left, in the van or in the rear" (p. 231), a situation hardly pleasing to a bookkeeper who worships precision.

Esch sees himself as a man with a conscience; as a courageous knight whose strictest duty is to uphold certain absolute principles of law, order, and justice; as a person called to preside over the books of both a commercial firm and the world's morality. He is distressed to note, behind the apparent orderliness of a business enterprise, "all manner of infamies" (p. 217), and to find in the

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world itself a chaos sprung from confusion between "[t]hings as they were and things as they ought to be" (p. 267). His task, he believes, is to set the world right. So Esch sees himself, at least in the late winter and spring of 1903.

But there is in Esch's self-analysis a flaw, one that issues from his very devotedness to bookkeeping. For a bookkeeper as bookkeeper must be more intent upon the balancing of accounts than upon the his eye is on form, not content; he is a computer rather than a judge. And in Esch's hallucinatory meeting with Bertrand, whose judgment we learned to respect earlier in the novel, Bertrand accurately defines the speciousness of Esch's claim to moral uprightness: "Your order, Esch, is only murder and counter-murder-the order of the machine" (p. 301). An efficient machine serves its master well, and Esch's mechanical bookkeeping logic performs for him some remarkable services, particularly through its ability to justify any actions or judgments in which Esch wishes to indulge himself. To cite an example: Esch, betrothed to Mother Hentjen, can sleep with Erna Korn and, for a time at least and through the most complex machinations of illogical logic, persuade himself that he is remaining faithful to his affianced. And to cite a more desperate example: Esch is gratified by the pathetic suicides of Bertrand and young Harry Köhler, for in this, he reflects, "murder and counter-murder, debit and credit cancelled each other, here was for once an account that balanced itself perfectly" (p. 324).

It is evident that the cult of bookkeeping, like the cult of the uniform, may lead into strange ways, but the order of "murder and counter-murder" is a more serious threat to the world's weal than the order of romance and chivalry. The rules of bookkeeping, moreover, cannot only make of infidelity a virtue and see in murder a happy balancing of accounts; they can also, with their attention to form and neglect of substance, lead a man to believe himself free of personal responsibility and to attribute whatever might ordinarily be deemed human guilt to an abstract system, not a living being. Thus the world of behavior can in the end be neither moral nor immoral, but only amoral: men are not individual beings, but ciphers, reduced to their nothingness by a mechanical system. "Somewhere it was not a matter merely involving human beings," Esch once meditates, "for human beings were all the same and

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nothing was changed if one of them melted into another, or one of them sat in another's place-no, the world was not ordered according to good and evil men, but according to good and evil forces of some kind" (p. 239).

Esch has intimations, despite the confidence with which he sometimes speaks, that not all is well. His zealous dedication to the cult of bookkeeping does not bring him the sense of solace and security he so desperately wishes. He is as fearful as Joachim, and even more lonely. And like Joachim he seeks consolation in both religious faith and human love. His religious leanings are frequently seen in his theological imagery. When he first witnesses the knifethrowing act of Herr Teltscher and Ilona, he envisages her as a "crucified girl" (p. 179), hears "the fanfare of the Last judgment" (p. 180), feels a desire to replace her as the crucified one, and essays tireless efforts to rescue her from oppression. He is obsessed with the idea of sacrifice (though he sees this too as in part a balancing of accounts), and he sees himself as the sacrificial victim called to redeem Ilona from her misery. Even his early (unsuccessful) attempt to seduce Erna he approaches with religious overtones, as he is led to her room by "the yearning of the captive soul for redemption from its loneliness, for a salvation which should embrace himself and her, yes, perhaps all mankind, and most certainly Ilona" (p. 197). He sometimes views human love as the supreme earthly religious journey. When he first evokes from the habitually rigid, emotionless Mother Hentjen an ecstatic response, he discerns in the act of physical love (as do the homosexual Harry Köler and the musician Alfons also) the very annihilation of time, and thus a condition of eternity associated with the redemptive state and its attendant goodness and righteousness. And he believes that love is thus a good which reaches beyond its earthly manifestation:

"For the man who wills Goodness and Righteousness wills thereby the Absolute, and it was revealed to Esch for the first time that the goal is not the appeasement of lust but an absolute oneness exalted far above its immediate, sordid and even trivial occasion, a conjoint trance, itself timeless and so annihilating time; and that the rebirth of man is as still and serene as the universal spirit that yet contracts and closes round man when once his ecstatic will has compelled it, until he attains his sole birthright: deliverance and redemption" (p. 255).

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We are reminded of Bertrand's earlier words to Joachim, stressing the wonderful "mystery of oneness" wrought by love's transformation of persons formerly isolated.

Parts One and Two of The Sleepwalkers introduce us to the young adulthood of Joachim van Pasenow in 1888 and of August Esch fifteen years later, both men rather inflexibly bound to their respective cults. In Eduard von Bertrand and Martin Geyring the protagonists find persons of more mature and composed demeanor. When we encounter Pasenow and Esch again in 1918, time setting for Part Three of the trilogy, we discover that they in large degree throw off the rigid patterns of their younger years. That Bertrand, to the young Pasenow half-angel and half-devil, was a wise mentor to the young soldier has already become evident. And though Esch only imagines a meeting with Bertrand, of whom he has heard much, the Bertrand who addresses him in a dream sequence speaks, as is his custom, wise words, quoted verbatim by Esch fifteen years later: "No one stands so high that he dare judge his fellows, and no one is so depraved that his eternal soul can lose its claim to reverence" (p. 300). Esch himself has presumptuously arrogated the role of judge, yet his depravity is by no means complete. As we will discover, it is Broch's view that the world's spiritual health is with the passage of years spiraling downward toward an abyss whose coming will bring with it a purgation clearing the way for a rising motion and regaining of health. Again Bertrand is the prophetic spokesman:

"Many must die, many must be sacrificed, so that a path may be prepared for the loving redeemer and judge. And only through his sacrificial death can the world be redeemed to a new innocence. But first the Antichrist must come-the mad and dreamless Antichrist. First the world must become quite empty, must be emptied of everything in it as by a vacuum cleaner-nothingness" (p. 301).

II

In the year 1918 the soldier Wilhelm Huguenau, who already before his military service enjoyed the reputation of "an energetic, prudent and reliable man of business" (p. 343), deserts the German Army, sheds his uniform, and takes up quarters in the town of KurTrier. For him Part Three of The Sleepwalkers-"The Realist"is named. As Joachim worshiped his uniform and Esch his book-

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keeping, Huguenau worships himself. And by a coincidence which is the novelist's prerogative, the trilogy's three protagonists are met together in Kur-Trier and largely guide the town's activities: Joachim as Herr Major von Pasenow, Town Commandant; Esch as owner and editor of the town newspaper, the Kur-Trier Herald; Huguenau as the town realist, which is to say its sower of discord and suspicion, its traitor, rapist, and murderer. Yet it must be admitted that Huguenau's boundless ingenuity as a "realist" does evoke a certain grudging and horrified admiration. In the brief span of six months, which he views as a holiday from his more normal round of activities, he works quickly and confidently. He deserts, takes up residence in Kur-Trier, ingratiates himself into Major von Pasenow's trusting confidence, engineers the "sale" of the town newspaper to no one's advantage but his own, moves into Esch's house, vilifies Esch and challenges the Major's judgment and competence, rapes Frau Esch (formerly Mother Hentjen), murders Esch with a bayonet in the back, gains a military escort from the town in charge of the wounded Pasenow, and by the middle of the 1920's is a flourishing merchant and father of a family.

Tempting as it is to pass moral judgment on Huguenau, we should remember that this realist is simply the epitome and microcosm of the style and spirit of his time and that, in the earlier judgment of Esch himself, the world is "not ordered according to good and evil men, but according to good and evil forces of some kind." Realism is that style of life which leads a man to base his every choice and decision on self-interest, without regard to the consequences upon other persons. Huguenau's style could be described through the following syllogism: MAJOR PREMISE, All that is to my self-interest is good; MINOR PREMISE, Murder is to my self-interest; CONCLUSION, Murder is good. The world which the time's style has produced is described in various ways by different characters: ". . . the whole world goes on crutches . . . a hobbling monstrosity" (p. 499); ". . . the whole world is a prison" (p. 570); it is "full of devils" (p. 573); "[c]haos was invading the world on every side . . . darkness was spreading" (p. 582); the world is "in the midst of fear and tribulation" (p. 597). And as we recall Bertrand's designation of Esch's bookkeeping kind of order as "murder and counter-murder -the order of the machine," a triumph of technical form over substantive moral content, we are not surprised at Huguenau's fond-

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ness for machines. His interest in gaining control of Esch's newspaper is further kindled by sight of the printing press. He is a man whose "sympathies were with the machine" (p. 379), who bears an "affectionate attitude to machines" (p. 441), and who, during the town's looting, is clutched by fear that the looters "would smash his machine to pieces" (p. 601). His constant suit for the young Marguerite's affection is doubtless partly due to his feeling that "there was some vague kinship between the child and the machine" (p. 380). There is, moreover, implication that both Marguerite and the machine were born of the Devil. As she dances and chants in apparently sympathetic rhythm to the town's frenzied looting, we are told that Pasenow "gazed at the dancing child whose laughter seemed to him strangely mechanical, strangely evil, and horror overwhelmed him" (pp. 548-549). And Esch, his ears assailed by the pounding of the printing press, once remarks:

"Sometimes it seems as if the world were only one huge dreadful machine that never stops . . . the war and everything . . . it runs by laws that we don't understand . . . impudent self-assured laws, engineers' laws . . . every man must do what is prescribed for him, without turning his head to right or left . . . every man is a machine that one can only see from outside, a hostile machine . . . oh, the machine is the root of evil and the Evil One is the machine. Their order is the void that must come . . . before Time can begin again . . ."(pp. 501-502).

If man is a machine who can be seen only from outside, it is no wonder that he feels isolated. And the loneliness which oppressed the worlds of 1888 and 1903 is no stranger to the inhabitants of Kur-Trier. To Lieutenant Jaretski, whose gas-poisoned arm has been amputated, "everyone is pledged to his own loneliness" (p. 518). Hanna Wendling suffers intensively the anguish of isolation. And both Pasenow and Esch carry into the year 1918 the loneliness which has long been theirs. But that terrible year is not without signs of joyous metamorphosis in the lives of them both as they free themselves from the cults which once dominated their actions and frustrated their lives.

Esch's remarkable transformation from concern for the mechanical form of bookkeeping to concern for the content of the accounts grows out of a newspaper editorship leading him to a panoramic view of man's suffering. He learns, finally, that the balance between murder and counter-murder brings only a mathematical, not

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an ethical, gratification and that the commercial rules of bookkeeping are simply not applicable to a scaling of good and evil. He now turns not only in theory but in practice to a righting of the world's wrongs, struggling, as editor of the Kur-Trier Herald, "for precise evidence of the world's doings, and against the false or falsified bookkeeping entries which people tried to fob off on him . . ." (pp. 370-371). He exposes the abuses of his time and fights its evil with a fervor quite outdistancing the rebellious anarchy of his earlier friend, Martin Geyring. "Small wonder," we are told, ". . . that Herr Esch, himself at odds with the world, should begin to feel a brotherly sympathy for his oppressed and downtrodden fellow-creatures, and should become an obstructionist and a rebel" (p. 371).

It took Esch fifteen years to free himself from the mechanical cult of bookkeeping, and Pasenow thirty years to free himself from the romantic cult of the uniform. In the June 1, 1918, issue of the Kur-Trier Herald appears an essay by Pasenow entitled "The Turning-point in the Destiny of the German People," its religious basis foreshadowed by its epigraph: "Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him." The verse is Matthew 4: 11 and concludes the passage narrating Jesus's successful resistance in the wilderness to the temptations of Satan. Pasenow urges that his Fatherland also cast off its unclean spirit and turn to a renewal of Christian faith through which alone his nation may find its salvation. The article is an accurate measure of the Major's change from the young man whose uniform seemed the symbol of good. It is the war, the abysmal evil of the new age, which at the same time sparks the redemptive awakening not only of Esch, but of Pasenow as well, for whom the devastating conflict "had suddenly become no longer a matter of uniform, no longer a matter of red regimentals or blue regimentals, no longer an affair between gallant enemies who chivalrously crossed swords; no, war had proved neither the crown nor the fulfilment of a life in uniform, but had invisibly and yet more and more palpably shaken the foundations of that life, had worn threadbare the ties of mortality holding it together, and through the meshes of the fabric grinned the Evil One" (p. 422).

Pasenow's article in Esch's paper leads to a remarkably tender relationship between the two, Esch finding in the essay "a restatement of his own task and his own aims" (p. 427). Their long-time

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mutual loneliness dissipates in the bond of their friendship. And as the Major's words lead Esch to renewed hope for the world's redemption, Esch in turn comes to impress the Major as one who could "set everything right." Through Esch's laughter Pasenow beholds "the glimmer of a soul leaning out of a neighbouring window with a smile, the soul of a brother, yet not an individual soul, nor yet in actual proximity, but a soul that was like an infinitely remote homeland" (p. 533). In mutuality of trust and love the two men gain together what neither could gain alone, as each moves from anguished isolation within a society' knowing only loneliness to membership, partly through their Bible classes, in a Christian Body whose Head brings joy even in the travail of suffering. Fifteen years earlier Esch's dream of becoming a sacrificial intercessor for Ilona bore little fruit, primarily because his rigidly formal mode of keeping accounts blinded him to the larger moral issues involved. But now he has been made ready for his long envisioned sacrifice. Once a sleepwalker whose dreams were misleading and whose actions were of little avail, he can now be accurately described as one who stretches "his arms out like a man waking from sleep or nailed to a cross" (p. 533). It is Esch who rescues his beloved Major from imminent death, shelters him in the tomb-like cellar of his home, leaves the small light of a paraffin lamp by the unconscious man's side, and returns to the town in the hope of restoring order. As he makes his way into the street, his thoughts, we learn, are "with the man who lay in the cellar, the paraffin lamp at his head. When the light expires the Redeemer is near. The light must expire so that the debt of time might be paid" (p. 612). As Esch goes to his death, victim of Huguenau's back-piercing bayonet, certainly we are to assume that he has met his crucifixion, sacrificing his life that one payment may be made on the very extensive "debt of time." The novel's action ends with Esch's sacrificial death; with the wounded Pasenow carried to safety, not to be heard from again; and with Huguenau, still very much the realist, moving in his kind of triumph to a successful business career and a family life, yet never to dispel a loneliness which he feels most acutely when in the presence of others.

III

Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers is a complex and manifold accomplishment, mostly prose fiction, but with its third part con-

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taining a symposium in dramatic form, a sixteen-part "Story of the Salvation Army Girl in Berlin" (partly in verse), and ten essays entitled "Disintegration of Values." Each of the trilogy's three parts --The Romantic (1888)," "The Anarchist (1903)," " The Realist (1918)"-portrays the style or spirit of its particular time in Germany. The young, uniformed, country-bred Joachim von Pasenow possesses the romantic temperament which seizes upon honor as the primary value and looks back to an age presided over by knights and priests. The young August Esch puts his faith in the mathematical precision of bookkeeping, more interested in an account's formal balancing than in the nature of its credits and debits. Wilhelm Huguenau is the prototypical realist, a person whose devotion to self-interest is pursued with the singleness of purpose of a machine.

The Sleepwalkers is a tripartite microcosm of the German people from 1888 to 1918, a portrait of the dissolution of values and disintegration into chaos attending the absolute pursuit of any cult, most particularly that of the realist. But if the novel is a microcosmic portrait of three decades of German history, it is also the microcosmic portrait of a western civilization which had its roots in Athens and Jerusalem, has become a "lost generation" (pp. 145, 302, 646), and may look forward to a glorious rebirth only when the Logos (Greek and Christian) once again becomes the informing Value of all values. So we learn through one "Bertrand Müller, doctor of philosophy" (p. 403), first-person narrator of the "Story of the Salvation Army Girl in Berlin," and, more importantly, author of the philosophico-theological essays entitled "Disintegration of Values" (p. 439). Through him, Broch's spokesman, the trilogy is taken well beyond its narrative time span and presents a theocentric philosophy of history whose thesis is that the spirit of every age is determined by that period's degree of fidelity or infidelity to the Logos or Christ as interpreted by Plato and the Catholic Church. Broch-Müller sees as civilization's basic conflict a continuing struggle between Christian and Antichristian forces and argues that the western world, since the great Thomistic synthesis of the late Middle Ages, has been moving antithetically toward the Antichrist. The movement, not yet complete, must run its full downward cycle before the reign of Christ may return. As we were earlier apprised by Eduard von Bertrand, the redemption to a new birth must await and be preceded by the coming of the Antichrist, when the

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world's downward spiral will reach the absolute nothingness toward which it has been moving since the Protestant Reformation initiated the gradual, catastrophic fall from a theocentric world. Broch's lost generation is nearing, but has not yet reached, the nadir. The fortunes and misfortunes, the actions and passions of Pasenow, Bertrand, Esch, and Huguenau provide the narrative counterpart, foreshortened to three decades, of the trilogy's philosophy of history.

Turning specifically to the ten Broch-Müller essays, we may begin with their recognition (like that of Camus a little later) of "our mass movement towards death" (p. 373), and of the slaughter, insanity, and hatred shaping the style of our age. Nowhere do we find more precise witness to our time's spirit than in the "machineand-cannon-and-concrete style" (p. 390) of its architecture, whose most marked characteristic is an absence of ornament which, far from being the mere excrescence of architectural form, is in fact the outward manifestation of its whole "inner logic of structure" (p. 390). Our architectural mode is "a writing on the wall proclaiming a state of the soul which must be the non-soul of our non-age" (p. 391). Thus, as we could infer from Herr von Pasenow's manner of walking his whole style of life, we can infer from a period's architecture the spirit of its age: ". . . style is something which uniformly permeates all the living expressions of an epoch" (p. 397). To know a man's or an epoch's style, moreover, is to know what is held by him or it to be the "truth," which in turn is the determining and presumably logical motivation of all the actions of the man or the epoch. Huguenau, for example, sees as the true and the good any action which works to his advantage. Once this major premise is accepted, the logic of his thought has a precise rationality. But the actual propositions providing the substance of his syllogisms are profoundly irrational, with the result that the rational logic of thought is used to justify the irrational logic of his actions. As Broch-Müller points out, Huguenau is a fitting complement to the non-ornamental architecture of his age:

"Huguenau is a man who acts with singleness of purpose. He organizes his day with singleness of purpose, he carries on his business affairs with his eye singly on his purpose, he evolves and concludes his contracts with his eye singly on his purpose. Behind all his purposefulness there lies a logic that is completely stripped of ornament, and the fact that this logic should demand the elimination of all ornament does not seem a too daring conclusion to draw; indeed

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it actually appears as good and just as every other necessary conclusion. And yet this elimination of all ornament involves nothingness, involves death, and a monstrous dissolution is concealed behind it in which our age is crumbling away" (p. 416).

The ten essays trace the historical process which has brought us to our present "monstrous dissolution," just this side 'of the abyss which awaits us and which, in turn, will give way to a newness of life once again informed by the Logos. The essays distinguish, as do the trilogy's narrative sections, between the unchanging, purely formal quality of logic and its substantive propositions' constantly varying throughout history. An epoch's propositions, those intuitions or facts which it deems true, spring from that epoch's interpretation of the world. Biblical writers, for example, eschewing a pagan pluralism, interpreted the world as a monotheistic structure with the whole creation emanating from and reaching toward a First Cause, God himself, the beginning and end of all that is. Medieval thought viewed God anthropomorphically, as one whose infinity is nevertheless "finite" in the sense that he is conceived as the very real source and goal of all that is. But more recent centuries have come to interpret God as "an infinity of abstraction," with the result that the modern inquiry for ultimate truth does not culminate in a single agreed upon and universally recognized "finite" First Cause. The inquiry has become a series of infinitely extended, never-ending, disparate inquiries, with the consequence "that every solution is merely a temporary solution, and that nothing remains but the act of questioning in itself: cosmogony has become radically scientific, and its language and its syntax have discarded their 'style' and turned into mathematical expressions" (p. 426).

There remains, therefore, no single common goal or ultimate truth which may serve as a canon for mankind's striving or for its system of values. Thus there are many value systems and many partial truths, each with its own proponents, who respect only their own particular goals and are indifferent or hostile to the goals of others. Moreover, each group has its own logic, its own syllogism which would seem to justify its goal, however irrational that goal may be or however wide it is of what the biblical God would decree. "The logic of the soldier," for example, "demands that he shall throw a hand-grenade between the legs of his enemy" (p. 445). And there is the logic of the army, of the business man, of the artist-the list

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could go on and on. It follows that a romantic like Joachim, yearning for a "bounded world, a closed system of values," must finally look backward to the Middle Ages, which "possessed the ideal centre of values . . . a supreme value to which all other values were subordinate: the belief in the Christian God" (p. 446). There remains no predominant style of life, catholic in inclusiveness; there remain only innumerable and mutually incompatible styles, never touching, each moving autonomously and in parallel order, and never reaching an infinitely regressing, quite abstract First Cause. Every man is consequently isolated in his own system or style, unable to communicate with other men:

". . . [man] is helplessly caught in the mechanism of the autonomous value-systems, and can do nothing but submit himself to the particular value that has become his profession, he can do nothing but become a function of that value-a specialist, eaten up by the radical logic of the value into whose jaws he has fallen" (p. 448).

Broch-Müller assigns the primary cause of the world's disintegration to "[t]hat criminal and rebellious age known as the Renaissance, that age in which the Christian scheme of values was broken in two halves, one Catholic and the other Protestant . . ." (p. 480). The Protestant Reformation, a movement from deduction to induction and from Platonism to Positivism, rejected the medieval value system with the result that, in our time, "values are no longer determined by a central authority, but take their colouring from the object: what matters is no longer the conservation of Biblical cosmogony, but the 'scientific' observation of natural objects and the experiments that can be carried out on them . . ." (p. 483). To the Protestant mind God loses his transcendence, becoming "the divine spark in the soul . . . the object of immediate mystical apprehension," for "Protestantism is a phenomenon of immediacy" (p. 484). When all values were informed by a central authority, then every activity-that of the soldier, the business man, the artist -was judged not as an end in itself but in terms of its redounding to the glory of God. But, according to Broch-Müller, it is Protestantism's emphasis on the immediacy of individual objects which has led to individual value systems, each "raised to an absolute of its own," with a series of "absolute values side by side in isolation without reference to each other" (p. 485). For these reasons Protestantism is seen as a lapsing from the medieval synthesis and as "the first

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great sect-formation in the decay of Christianity" (p. 523). The essayist's description of the twentieth-century Protestant is the diagnosis of all that he finds lamentable in the style or spirit of our age -its multiple autonomousness, abstraction, unornamented barrenness:

"[The Protestant,] in excluding all other values, in casting himself in the last resort on an autonomous religious experience . . . has assumed a final abstraction of a logical rigour that urges him unambiguously to strip all sensory trappings from his faith, to empty it of all content but the naked Absolute, retaining nothing but the pure form, the pure, empty and neutral form of a 'religion in itself.' a 'mysticism in itself' " (p. 525

The last two "Disintegration of Values" essays look forward, not backward, prophesying at a time indeterminable the coming in fullness of the Antichrist and the consequent beginning of a reverse movement marked by rebirth of the human spirit. Out of the nothingness of utter dissolution, the unchanging though now neglected Logos will once more be seen as the First Cause, from which and toward which all moves. The world's sleepwalking, which dreads the present night but dimly intuits the distant coming day, will then be at an end; lonely, speechless fright will give way to the spirit of the Logos, the Christ and the Word, to the "condition of possible experience" (pp. 564, 645) which makes for communication and thus unity among men. The new age will be free of both an irrationality of action embracing even murder, and a super-rationality venerating formal precision without regard to the propositions treated formally. Actions will be tempered by a reason not lost in worship of its intrinsic self but giving direction to the world's behavior. There will, finally, be a return to the one Truth which informs every truth, though-not before the spirit of Protestantism, "the most outstanding expression of the disintegration of values" (p. 635), makes the slow way to its reduction to absurdity: the coming of the Antichrist, end product of immediacy, positivism, and abstraction, and the "zero-point of atomic dissolution" (p. 645).

Broch, like Camus after him, sees the twentieth century as an absurd and a suicide-pondering era. Contemporary man yearns, in Broch's view, "for a Leader to take him tenderly and lightly by the hand, to set things in order and show him the way" (p. 647). The Broch of the early 1930's, unlike Camus a decade later, believes

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that the Leader is and that his spirit will reach again into the world. The Leader is he "who will build the house anew that the dead may come to life again, and who himself has risen again from the multitude of the dead; the Healer who by his own actions will give a meaning to the incomprehensible events of the age, so that Time can begin anew" (p. 647). The world's travail will not cease; sacrifice and expiation will be called for; yet the world will once again be illumined by the presence of grace in the hearts of men and the promise of an imperishable heritage. To the contemporary man whose fragmented world, terrible loneliness, and seeming lostness have brought him to the thought of suicide, Broch's closing lines bring the promise of a human solidarity born of hearts touched by grace:

". . . in the icy hurricane, in the tempest of collapse all the doors spring open, the foundations of our prison are troubled, and from the profoundest darkness of the world, from our bitterest and profoundest darkness the cry of succour comes to the helpless, there sounds the voice that binds all that has been to all that is to come, that binds our loneliness to all other lonelinesses, and it is not the voice of dread and doom; it falters in the silence of the Logos and yet is borne on by it, raised high over the clamour of the non-existent; it is the voice of man and of the tribes of men, the voice of comfort and hope and immediate love: 'Do thyself no harm! for we are all here!'" (p. 648).

IV

Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers is a remarkable achievement and is among the most neglected, certainly in the United States, of our century's great novels. With all its philosophical depth, it is yet a novel whose prominent thesis never dominates or renders puppet-like its characters. Pasenow, Esch, and Huguenau, representative as they are of "styles" of life, are, first of all, like the characters of Proust, Joyce, and Mann, protagonists whose actions are never imposed upon them but spring from their fully drawn inner beings. The trilogy is of both epic scope and notable unity. The person and influence of Eduard von Bertrand are among the unifying factors of the entire work, as is the coming together of the three major protagonists in the novel's third part. Providing an overarching unity is the counterpoint between the narrative of relatively brief duration and the philosophy of history encompassing a span from

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Greek and biblical times to a future viewed apocalyptically. As the narrative has its integrity, so does the philosophy or theology have its own. It is difficult in the twentieth century to express messianic hopes without cloying sentimentality or without a leap of faith, as Camus defines it, seemingly made in partial blindness to the world's ways or as a last resort of despair. Though we may feel inclined to dispute Broch's reading of history, particularly his diagnosis of Protestantism and his prophecy of a new age, we-at least I -find his position consistent and not beyond credibility. The Sleepwalkers argues most convincingly of the twentieth-century novels known to me that the biblical God, withdrawn as he may now be, is the force and being in the light of whom history has made most sense. A belief in the triune God, Broch's "Leader," has been history's primal motivating force. No serious philosophical novelist can ignore the idea of God, much as he may rigorously dispute his being. Broch, accepting God's being, has in my judgment "placed" him in the world's history with rare and exciting brilliance.

One of Broch's stunning metaphors may serve fittingly to conclude this essay. He writes of a dancer's relationship to music, described by Plato, we may recall, as the harmony of the celestial spheres. Broch's sense of the relationship between dancer and music is the metaphor of God's relationship to man:

"The dancer is removed beyond the reach of this world. Wrapped in the music, he has removed his freedom of action, and yet acts in accordance with a higher and more lucid freedom. In the rigorous security of the rhythm that guides him he is safely sheltered, and a great relief comes to him from that security. Thus music brings unity and order into the confusion and chaos of life. Cancelling Time it cancels death, and yet resurrects it anew in every beat of the rhythm . . ." (p. 513).