Hermann Broch has long been considered one of the most significant and formidable Austrian novelists, a profoundly engaged thinker with an essayistic bent, a writer to whom fiction had value only insofar as it could ameliorate humanity's existential or sociopolitical condition. His novels are, in varying degrees, expositions of his eclectic psychological, philosophical, aesthetic, and political view of the world. Novels such as the trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1931-1932; translated as The Sleepwalkers, 1932) and Der Tod des Vergil (1945; translated as The Death of Virgil, 1945) are at the same time masterful poetic evocations of epochs that were historic turning points and detailed, subtle interpretations of these periods viewed from the vantage point of Broch's complex Weltanschauung. Broch's dramas have received much less critical attention than his novels, but they deserve analysis because they provide--in the most succinct form of which Broch was capable--interesting dramatic treatments of the basic tenets of...