Apocalypse and utopia in the Austrian novel of the 1930s

Abstract

In 1930, six years after the publication of The Magic Mountain , there appeared the first parts of two novels by Austrian writers that were destined to take their place alongside Mann's work as summative achievements of European modernist fiction. Hermann Broch's 1888. Pasenow oder die Romantik ( Pasenow the Romantic (1888) ) was the first volume of the trilogy Die Schlafwandler ( The Sleepwalkers , 1932), whose second and third parts were published in 1931 and 1932; Book 1 of Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften ( The Man Without Qualities , 1953-60) was followed by a portion of Book 2 in 1933, but the work remained incomplete, a massive fragment, on its author's death in 1942. Like The Magic Mountain , both The Man Without Qualities and The Sleepwalkers take the First World War as the chronological end-point of their fictional worlds. In Musil’s novel, set in Vienna on the eve of its outbreak, the war hovers as a huge irony, a knowledge, shared by author and readers, of the destruction that is about to engulf the traditional social world that its unwitting characters inhabit. Broch’s trilogy, whose first two parts 1888. Pasenow oder die Romantik and 1903. Esch oder die Anarchie (Esch the Anarchist (1903) ) are set in 1888 Berlin and 1903 Cologne/Mannheim respectively, locates its third novel 1918. Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit (Huguenau the Realist (1918) ) amidst the debâcle of Germany’s defeat.