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6 - Broch’s Die Verzauberung: Ludwig Klages and the Bourgeois Mitläufer
- Edited by Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, Galin Tihanov
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- Book:
- A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 20 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 April 2019, pp 123-142
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Summary
As a perceptive observer of the political scene in Germany, Broch watched as in the years 1933–36 even the educated middle class succumbed to the primitive slogans of National Socialism. This was the social stratum for and about which he wrote the so-called first version—the only completed one—of his novel Die Verzauberung,the bulk of which was composed during the second half of 1935.The character and psychological makeup of the narrator provide a paradigmatic example of the middle class’s turn toward the stance of the Mitläufer or “bystander”—a more or less passive acceptance of National Socialism.
The figure of the Mitläufer gives the novel a relevance beyond the immediate historical context, for the tendency to tacitly go along with majority opinion is not tied to a particular era; it simply presents itself in different historical forms.In Broch’s text the process of human degradation takes place under the influence of Ludwig Klages,who felt so close to National Socialism that he declared among friends that he had provided its “metaphysical foundations.”It is generally agreed that Klages helped pave the way for Hitler among the educated middle class: in the years before the First World War he was already a darling of upper-middle-class society; it is hard to exaggerate the influence of his vitalist philosophy and characterology (subsequently taught in university courses) on the broad reading public. In the mid-1930s his influence reached its peak:the combination of biologistic thought, explicit anti-Semitism, critique of Christianity and capitalism, and the notion of salvation through violence and sacrifice found its political analogue in the doctrines of National Socialism. Some of his prominent supporters therefore demanded that “Klages’s teachings be made the core of the National Socialist worldview”; others longed for the “introduction of a pagan religiosity in Germany” based on his ideas. In April 1936, however, Nazi cultural spokesmen began to attack Klages for his critique of the principle of the Will and of scientific thought, alleging that his writings were irreconcilable with the basic tenets of National Socialism.
In Broch’s Verzauberung Klages’s cultural critique serves as a banalized intellectual substratum in order to show a mountain village being brought under the ideological sway of the demagogic itinerant prophet Marius Ratti. The central character used to demonstrate this process is the narrator, the village doctor.
8 - From Faust to Harry Potter: discourses of the centaurs
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- By Gisela Brude-Firnau, University of Waterloo, Canada
- Edited by Hans Schulte, John Noyes, University of Toronto, Pia Kleber, University of Toronto
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- Book:
- Goethe's <I>Faust</I>
- Published online:
- 01 June 2011
- Print publication:
- 05 May 2011, pp 113-128
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Summary
It may be called daring, or merely naïve, to relate Faust, the crown jewel of German-language literature, to Harry Potter, a series of seven children's books. The pressure to justify oneself that sets in when one takes Rowling's novels seriously as literature can also be seen in the qualifying titles of some of the publications that have so far appeared: Why Nabokov Would Have Liked H. P., or The Charm of H. P.; another subtitle is On the Trail of a Charming Bestseller. All these titles try to vindicate Rowling's novels as a relevant subject for academic analysis. Although a publicity machine of global dimensions may raise suspicions, popularity is not in itself a disqualification; it cannot change the text. Anyone able to ignore the media vortex and concentrate on the text will find sufficient quality to induce him to read further; and very quickly, Germanists will stumble across parallel motifs that practically invite the comparison with Faust.
For the young magician Harry Potter, who learns and practises sorcery at Hogwarts Boarding School, has more in common with the magician Faust than merely his first name, since German Heinrich is English Harry; more, too, than the academic milieu and the encounter with evil; and although Harry never concludes a pact with the devil, there exists a mysterious and life-threatening relationship between him and the Evil Lord.
Neither Sane nor Insane: Ernst Kretschmer's Influence on Broch's Early Novels
- from II. Hermann Broch: The Novelist and Dramatist
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- By Gisela Brude-Firnau, University of Waterloo (Canada)
- Edited by Paul Michael Lützeler, Washington University St. Louis, Matthias Konzett, Yale, Willy Riemer, Yale
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- Book:
- Hermann Broch, Visionary in Exile
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 03 March 2003, pp 137-146
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THE VIEW OF HUMANITY IN Hermann Broch's Schlafwandler trilogy is, in part, the fictional equivalent of the insight that there is no definite borderline between the sane and the insane. The insane character is no more than the distorted picture of the sane character; the one is contained in the other: a porous, even fluid concept of man. Its mental stigmata are revealed to the reader almost as norms of the disfigured and damaged life.
This psychopathological twilight zone appears most clearly in two characters who may be called historical epitomes, since they not only are typical of their own epoch, but also refer to the highest decision maker of their respective periods: Joachim von Pasenow, the Prussian officer of the Wilhelmine Era, and Marius Ratti, the newcomer and village demagogue of the Hitler period. Both characters raise the question of autonomy and responsibility: when can they no longer be held accountable for their ideas, decisions, and actions? When does a character slide into the realm where the observer must take responsibility as much as, or even more than, the actor?
Broch's view that normalcy cannot be taken as a constant in the life of most individuals is based on publications by the psychiatrists Emil Kraepelin and Ernst Kretschmer. Both stress that there is no clearly ascertainable point at which the border is crossed in the development of mental disease. Kretschmer wonders what constitutes the difference between individual eccentricity (Verschrobenheit) and lunacy (Wahnsystem).