The sudden death of Hermann Broch in New Haven on Memorial Day cut short the life of a writer who, despite his years, still had an infinite amount left to say. Broch was a unique phenomenon in more than one respect. It was not only that he became a great novelist, after waiting until his early forties to devote himself fully to his writing, with a successful career as an industrialist behind him; what was perhaps most special about his mind was its acute sense of the position in history of the age in which he lived—his heightened awareness, that is, of contemporaneity. This sense he put to aesthetic as well as intellectual uses, as can be seen in his two major novels, a trilogy called The Sleepwalkers (published in English translation in 1934) and The Death of Virgil (1945). He had recently finished a philosophical study of mass psychology, to be published in three volumes, that promises to be an even greater mine of insights into the social nature of our times.
Broch could say, with the Latin poet, that nothing human was foreign to him. His interests were universal but not dilettantish; he possessed an enormous erudition. He was, among other things, a Jew interested in his Jewishness, intimate with it and perhaps in many ways better able to explain it than those who bore their Jewishness more conventionally. The present “Parable” is but a small part of the evidence for that. It constitutes the introduction to his last published work of fiction, Die Schuldlosen (“The Innocents”), “a novel in eleven tales,” which was issued late last year in German by the Rhein-Verlag in Zurich and is as yet not published in English. (The “Parable” was translated from the German by Jean Starr Untermeyer.)
Hermann Broch was born in Vienna in 1886, and grew up there, entering the family business after finishing his education as an engineer. In 1927, he returned to his university studies, concentrating on his true interests: mathematics, philosophy, and literature. At the same time he began to write his first novel, The Sleepwalkers, whose publication immediately established him as a major novelist of our time, one deserving to be mentioned in the same breath as Joyce, Mann, Proust. Henceforth he wrote steadily—criticism, plays, and philosophy, as well as fiction.
In 1938, when Hitler occupied Austria, Broch was imprisoned; In his cell he began to write The Death of Virgil, his second major effort, in an attempt to understand and render understandable what was happening to Europe and himself. At the time Broch was sure that he would never get out of the Nazis’ hands alive, and his writing was also a way of preparing himself for death. But he was released shortly, and came to this country in the fall of that same year, 1938, taking up his residence first in New York and then in Princeton, where he received a Rockefeller grant to enable him to pursue his study of mass psychology. Two years ago he was called to Yale University, where he was working when overtaken by death.
Those who knew him cannot but feel that his departure was premature; he was still too young, too curious, too energetic and productive to die, still too closely bound to the living. The loss is one to American culture as well as to world literature. As his fame grows—as it most certainly will—and his works receive increasing attention in this country—as they most certainly will—the beneficial effects of his presence among us will make themselves more obvious than they are now.
This is the second time that the work of Hermann Broch has been represented in COMMENTARY; readers are directed to his reviewarticle dealing with the late Elizabeth Langgässer’s novel, Das Unauslöschliche Siegel (“The Indelible Seal”), which appeared in the August 1950 issue.—ED.
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One day, to the Rabbi Levi bar Chemjo, who lived most highly famed in Poland more than two hundred years ago, there came his students and asked:
Why was it, Rabbi, that the Lord, whose name is blessed, lifted up His voice as He began the Creation? Had He wished to address with His voice the light, the waters, the stars, and the earth, as well as the creatures who found themselves thereon, calling them into life, in order that they should hear Him and follow His commands, must they not already have been in existence for this purpose? But none of all this had previously existed, and none of these could hear Him, since He created them after He had lifted up His voice. And that is our question.
Thereupon the Rabbi Levi bar Chemjo raised his eyebrows very high, and most unwillingly he replied:
The speech of the Lord—blessed like His name—is His silence, and His silence is His speech. His seeing is blindness, and His blindness is sight. His doing consists in not doing, and His not doing is His deed. Go home and ponder this.
Troubled, because it was evident that they had annoyed him, they went away, and in fearful hesitation they returned on the following day.
“Forgive us, Rabbi,” shyly began the one selected to be spokesman. “You told us yesterday that for the Lord, whose name is blessed, doing and not doing are the same. How then did it happen that He Himself distinguished His doing from His not doing, since He rested on the seventh day? And how could He, who was able to set everything in motion with a single breath, be in need of rest, or become weary? Was the work of Creation such a strain for Him that He had to rouse up Himself by His very own voice, in order to be able to do it?”
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The others nodded assent to this discourse. And as the Rabbi noticed that they eyed him anxiously the while, to see whether he would again become impatient with them, he laid his hand upon his mouth so that the smile behind his beard would not become apparent to them. And he said:
Let me reply to you with a counter-question. Why did He, who had announced Himself in His sacred name, deign to gather the angels around Him? Was it to support Him in any way, He who was really in no need of support? Why did He surround Himself with them who was sufficient unto Himself? Now go home and ponder this.
They returned home, astonished at the counter-question he had posed, and after half a night of debating the question they returned on the morning to their teacher and announced joyfully:
We believe that we have understood your question and can answer it.
“So let me hear then,” said Rabbi Levi bar Chemjo.
Then they seated themselves before him and their spokesman gave voice to that which they had found in their thoughts.
“Because, O Rabbi, according to your interpretation, to the Lord, whose name is blessed, silence and speech—as do generally all opposites—always signify the same thing: therefore is His speech contained in each of His silences. Yet He concluded that a conversation which no one hears is meaningless, as meaningless as a deed which takes place in an uncreated void; so He deigned, for the sake of fulfilling His holy nature, to compel the angels to listen all around Him. Therefore He directed His voice to them as He commanded the Creation, and they, following this mighty work, became so exhausted that they needed to rest; then He rested with them.”
Great was their fright when at this the Rabbi bar Chemjo now laughed aloud; he laughed and the eyes above his beard were almost lost in laughter.
“So, you hold the Lord, whose name is blessed, for a mountebank at a fair who—like a buffoon, before His angels—raps with his baton and announces his tricks? It almost seems to me that He made fools like you so that He could laugh at them, as I do now, for verily His earnestness is His laughter and His laughter is earnest”
They were ashamed, but nevertheless happy to see the Rabbi so jolly, and they implored:
Help us just a little bit further, Rabbi.
I will do it,” responded their teacher, “and again a counter-question shall serve my purpose. Why did God, the Holy One, use seven days for His Creation, when He could have finished it in the flick of an eye?
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They went home to deliberate and as they stepped before the Rabbi on the following day they knew they were nearing the solution: however, their spokesman said:
You pointed out the way to us, Rabbi, for we have perceived that the world, which the Lord—let His name be blessed—has created, exists in time, and that the Creation, because it indeed already belongs to what has been created, must needs have a beginning and an end. Yet for the sake of a beginning, time must already have been in existence, and the angels were called to their places for that small stretch of time before the beginning of the Creation, rushing through time with their wings, and thus bearing it onward. Without the angels it would be impossible for God’s timelessness to exist, His timelessness in which, by reason of His holy decree, time is embedded.
Rabbi Levi bar Chemjo seemed, satisfied and said:
Now you are on the right track. However, your first question was concerned with the voice that the Lord in His holiness lifted up for the Creation—how goes it with this?
Then the students spoke:
We have striven sorely to come to the point which we have conveyed to you. But we have not attained to the last question which was our first one. Since you are kindly disposed to us once more, we hope you will give us the answer.
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That will I do,” answered the Rabbi, “and it will be short.”
And so he began:
In everything that He, whose name is blessed, has made or is still to make—and how should it not be so—there is part of His holy nature. What, then, is speech and silence together? Verily, of all things that I know, it is time which possesses such double characteristics. Yes, it is time, and although it encloses us and streams through us, it is both muteness and keeping silent, but when we become old and learn to listen backwards, we hear a gentle murmuring and that is the time which we have left behind us. And the further toward the past we listen, the more distinctly shall we be able to hear the voice of time and the silence of time, which He in His majesty has created for His own sake, but also for the sake of time, so that through us it shall complete the Creation. And the more time that has flowed away, the mightier for us becomes the voice of time. We shall grow with it, and at the end of time we shall grasp its beginning, and hear the calling up of the Creation, for then we shall understand the silence of the Lord in the holiness of His name.
The students were struck dumb. But as the Rabbi vouchsafed nothing further but sat there motionless with closed eyes, they tiptoed away.
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