Biography Essay

About a year before his death on 30 May 1951 Hermann Broch received a letter from his son, Hermann Friedrich Broch de Rothermann, in which Broch's reception in postwar Austria and Germany was characterized as that of an "unknown quantity"—a reference to Broch's second novel. Though Broch's name was "in the air" his works remained unknown save to a small and select readership; his reputation in literary circles both inside and outside of German-speaking countries, on the other hand, had been firmly established. Commercial popularity and financial success eluded Broch throughout his career, but this failure did not lessen his importance as a philosopher, experimental novelist, and critic of the intellectual and cultural trends of his day. While it was perhaps his philosophical concerns and his penchant for nontraditional narrative techniques in his novels that kept him from gaining a larger readership during his lifetime, these...