EVEN BEFORE ITS PUBLICATION in 1950, Broch's Die Schuldlosen posed a conundrum for its readers, as we know from the explanatory letters that the author wrote to his friends and from the frustration of his publishers as they sought to accommodate the ever new stories, poems, parables, and essays that the author added to the original collection of four previously published stories. The bewilderment has often persisted. Hermann J. Weigand, Broch's friend and an early admirer of the work, wrote of the confusing complexity of this constantly shifting puzzle (“Vexierbild”). A mid-century English survey of the modern German novel called it “an interesting, if uneven experiment” that only imperfectly realized its aim of shaping the whole into a coherent narrative. A standard history of modern German literature stated that the stories are connected only by a Hasidic parable and that, all in all, the tales “fail to coalesce into an epic whole.” And the 1976 Oxford Companion to German Literature characterized it tersely as a “tangled story.” At the same time, other critics have seen in the novel a “testamentary work” that represents Broch's final reckoning with his epoch and his own existence as a thinker and writer. Two of the most dedicated Broch scholars — Paul Michael Lützeler and Manfred Durzak — have gone so far as to label the work Broch's grand summa.

The early scholarly perplexity stemmed in no small measure from the fact that scholars, alerted by Broch's own “Entstehungsbericht,” were concerned with, and often distracted by, the complicated genesis of the work — a genesis that, thanks to the efforts of Durzak, Lützeler, and others — we now understand in considerable detail.