Hermann Broch und die Menschenrechte. Anti-Versklavung als Ethos der Welt by Paul Michael Lützeler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hermann Broch und die Menschenrechte. Anti-Versklavung als Ethos der Welt by Paul Michael Lützeler Graham Bartram Hermann Broch und die Menschenrechte. Anti-Versklavung als Ethos der Welt. By Paul Michael Lützeler. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. Pp. xii + 288. Cloth £36.50. ISBN 978-3110738995. Hermann Broch's remarkable contribution to European modernism is primarily defined by his novels—above all the débutant Schlafwandler trilogy (1930–1932) and, fifteen years later, Der Tod des Vergil (1945). But the sprawling corpus of his non-fictional writings, accounting for a sizeable portion of the Kommentierte Werkausgabe, is more than just an interpretative context for the fiction. With a center of gravity that moves from Broch's early cultural-historical grappling with modernity's "disintegration of values" and loss of a theologically grounded "Absolute," through aesthetic theorizing driven by work on the début novel, to mass-psychological studies of the threats to the self and to democracy in a totalitarian age, Broch's non-fictional writings constitute a substantial but hitherto inadequately recognized intervention in the cultural and political discourse of their time. In the present book, Paul Michael Lützeler, editor of the Suhrkamp Werkausgabe and author of the standard biography as well as of countless other works on Broch, focuses on the crisis-driven psychological, ethical, and political writings produced in the fifteen years leading up to the Austrian-Jewish writer's death from a heart attack in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1951. Grounding [End Page 161] his defense of human rights in the notion of a universal "Weltethos," Broch, while still in Austria, took the failing League of Nations to task with his "Völkerbund-Resolution" of 1936–1937. During the following years of exile in the United States, he worked on a multidisciplinary theory of mass hysteria, elaborated an oxymoronic sounding but eminently defensible concept of "total democracy," and campaigned for the development of a postwar global order, including institutions of international justice and an international university. These core texts, along with political-economic articles from the crisis years of 1919 (Austria) and 1940 (USA), are closely analyzed in the second of the book's four main sections, "Essayistisches Werk." In the likewise genre-based sections 3 and 4, "Dichterisches Werk" and "Briefwechsel im Exil (1938–1951)," Lützeler pursues a key theme of his study, the genre-porosity of Broch's humanitarian concerns. Despite his disillusionment with literature from the mid-1930s onwards, Broch continued to dichten, as well as to engage in a prolific correspondence with fellow intellectuals, and the resulting texts add dimensions of imagined reality and epistolary dialog to his theoretical discourse: the slave voice, and Virgil's freeing of his slaves, in Der Tod des Vergil; the references to the psyche's Dämmerzustand in Die Schlafwandler and Die Verzauberung, interestingly antedating Broch's discussion of this phenomenon in the Massenpsychologie; the debate with Hannah Arendt on a post-religious foundation of universal human rights. An additional intertextual dimension to Lützeler's study is brought into play in its substantial two-part Einleitung. Here and in later sections Lützeler's account deploys a range of historical and cultural narratives, some belonging to Broch's mental world, others external to it or indeed postdating it, that together form a richly multifaceted context for his evolving thought—among them the centuries-old Judaeo-Christian tradition, whose fundamental tenet of Ebenbildhaftigkeit (human beings as fashioned in the image of God) undergirds the emerging principles of human dignity (Menschenwürde) and human rights; the nineteenth-century antislavery movement in the United Kingdom and the United States, sustained in part by the same religious belief; the various secular continuations of this ethos living on in our post-religious age, in the institutions of international justice, global and European, set up in the decades following the founding of the United Nations, and in the discourse of what became known in the twenty-first century as "human rights culture." Projecting Broch's thinking forward in time, Lützeler imagines his posthumous contribution to later debates and initiatives, pitting Broch's universalist concept of a "Weltethos" against twenty-first-century accusations of "Eurocentrism" (Makau...