The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  “He’s right there,” said the volunteer.

  “Possibly,” said Flurschütz, “and that’s only occurred to you now, Jaretzki?”

  “Yes, this very moment … but I’ve known it for a long time.”

  “Well, you’ll certainly save the world with that idea.”

  “It would be enough if he saved Germany,” said the volunteer Pelzer.

  “Germany …” said Flurschütz, looking round the empty garden.

  “Germany …” said Pelzer, “when it began I volunteered straight off for the Front … now I’m glad to be sitting here.”

  “Germany …” said Jaretzki, who had begun to weep, “too late …” he wiped his eyes, “Flurschütz, you’re a nice fellow, I love you.”

  “That’s good of you, I love you too … shall we go home now?”

  “We haven’t a home to go to, Flurschütz … I’ll have a shot at getting married.”

  “It’s too late for that too, at this time of day, I fancy,” said the volunteer.

  “Yes, it’s rather late, Jaretzki,” said Flurschütz.

  “It’s never too late for that,” bawled Jaretzki, “but you’ve cut it off, you swine.”

  “Come, Jaretzki, it really is time now that you wakened up.”

  “If you cut mine off, I’ll cut yours off … that’s why the war must go on for ever … have you ever tried to do it with a hand-grenade …?” he nodded gravely, “… now I, I have … fine eggs, the hand-grenades … rotten eggs.”

  Flurschütz took him under the arm:

  “Well, Jaretzki, probably you’re quite right … yes, and probably it’s actually the only way left of coming to a mutual understanding … but now come along, my friend.”

  At the outside door the soldiers were already assembled round Sister Mathilde.

  “Pull yourself together, Jaretzki,” said Flurschütz.

  “Righto!” said Jaretzki, and as he appeared before Sister Mathilde he straightened himself to attention and reported: “A lieutenant, a medical officer and fourteen men present … I beg to report that he has cut it off …” he made a short pause for effect, and then drew the empty sleeve out of his pocket and waved it to and fro under Sister Mathilde’s long nose: “Chaste and empty.”

  Sister Mathilde cried:

  “Those who want to drive back can do so; I am going on foot with the others.”

  Huguenau came rushing out:

  “I hope everything has gone all right, gracious lady, and that we’re all here … may I wish you a safe journey home?”

  He shook hands with Sister Mathilde, with Dr Flurschütz, with Lieutenant Jaretzki, and with each of the fourteen soldiers, being careful to introduce himself in each case as “Huguenau.”

  CHAPTER LXI

  STORY OF THE SALVATION ARMY GIRL IN BERLIN (10)

  What really do I want of Marie? I invite her here, I ask her to sing, I couple her in all chastity with Nuchem, the Talmudist, the renegade Talmudist, I suppose I should say, and I let her go away again, let her disappear within the walls of her grey hostel. What do I want of her? and why does she lend herself to this game? is she resolved to save my soul, is she resolved to take on the endless, the ultimately impossible task of capturing the Talmudist soul of this Jew and leading it to Jesus? What does Nuchem think about it anyway? Here I am with these two human beings apparently in the hollow of my hand, and yet I know nothing about them, not even what they are thinking and what they will eat this evening; man is such an isolated creature that nobody, not even God Who created him, knows anything about him.

  The whole thing disturbed me extraordinarily, especially as I had never been able to look upon Marie except as a creature filled to the brim with hymns and Bible texts, and in my uneasiness I set out for the hostel.

  I had to go there twice before I found her. She was out on a round of sick-visiting, and did not return until the evening. So I sat and waited in the common-room, contemplated the Bible texts on the walls, contemplated the portrait of General Booth, and once more considered all the various possibilities. I recalled to my mind my first meeting with Marie, also her first chance encounter with Nuchem, I made myself visualize everything that had happened since, I impressed all this very thoroughly on my mind, not even excepting my situation at the moment; I examined the common-room with the greatest attention, walking about in the slowly increasing dusk, for the sky had darkened; outside heavy raindrops were falling, hastening the twilight. I asked myself whether the two old men who were also sitting in the room like myself were to be included in my memory, and I included them—best to make certain. They were very feeble, their thoughts were impenetrable, I was empty air to them.

  It was quite late when Marie arrived. Meanwhile the two old men had been led out, and I had been almost afraid that I would be treated in the same way. In the barely lit room she did not recognize me at once; she said: “God send you His blessing,” and I responded: “That is only a symbolic figure of speech.” Recognizing me now she replied on her side: “It isn’t a figure of speech, may God send you His blessing.” Now I said for my part: “With us Jews everything is a symbol.” Thereupon she replied: “You aren’t a Jew.” To which I answered: “The bread and the wine are only symbols, none the less; besides, I live among Jews.” She said: “The Lord is our eternal home.” That was completely in character, that was just as I had imagined it to myself, a sacred text for every eventuality; now she was delivered once more into my hand, and raising my voice I said: “I forbid you ever to enter my Jewish home again,” but it had an empty sound in that place. I must have her in my flat again, it seemed, if I was to talk reasonably to her; so I laughed and said: “A joke of mine, nebbich, a joke.” Yet though with that Yiddish word I may have been seeking to take refuge from my own speech in that of an alien, an utterly alien people, and to shelter myself under the ægis of a God alien to me, it was of no avail, I did not recover my assurance. It may be that I was really too broken by my long wait, grown old like the two old men who had finally been led out of the waiting-room; I had been humiliated by my wait, a creature instead of a creator, a disthroned God. Almost humbly I had to bring out: “I wanted to save you from scandal, Dr Litwak has been pointing out the danger to me.” Now that was of course a distortion of the case, for Litwak had feared the danger simply for Nuchem’s sake. And to call in such a ridiculous half-baked Freethinker as a confederate! truly I could not have given a more painful wound to my self-respect. And simple as was the retort which she found in reply, it was a reproof: “When your heart is filled with the joy of the Lord, you’re safe from scandal.” My patience gave under this humiliation, and I did not notice that now I was actually serving the old grandfather’s and Dr Litwak’s purposes: “You mustn’t carry on any more with the young Jew; he has a fat wife and a swarm of children.” Oh, could I have read in her soul, could I have known whether with these words I had hurt and wounded her, torn that heart which gave out that it was filled with the joy of the Lord,—but there was no sign of that, perhaps she had not even understood what I said. She merely said: “I’ll come to see you. We’ll sing together.” I acknowledged myself beaten. “We can go now,” I said with a last remnant of hope that I might still manage to decide her course. She replied: “I would love to, but I must go back to my sick patients.”

  So I was compelled to set off for home again with everything still unsettled. Only a soft rain was falling now. In front of me marched a very young pair of lovers; they were clasping each other and their free arms swung to the rhythm of their march.

  CHAPTER LXII

  DISINTEGRATION OF VALUES (8)

  Religions arise out of sects and in their decadence lapse again into sects, returning to their original status before falling into complete dissolution. At the beginning of the Christian era there were the several Christ- and Mithras-cults, at its close we find the grotesque American sects and the Salvation Army.

  Protestantism was the first great sect-formation in the decay of Christianity. A sect,
not a new religion. For it lacked the most important characteristic of a new religion, that new theology which binds together into a new harmony the new experience of God and a new cosmogony. Protestantism, by its very nature undeductive and untheological, refused to venture beyond the sphere of the autonomous inward religious experience.

  Kant’s attempt to establish a retrospective Protestant theology did indeed wrestle with the task of transferring the substance of religious Platonism to the new positivistic science, but it was far from seeking to set up a universal theological canon of values on the Catholic pattern.

  The defence of Catholicism against a progressive disintegration into sects was organized by the Jesuits of the Counter-reformation in a draconic, even a military, centralization of values. That was the time when even the survivals of heathenish folk-customs were pressed into the service of the Church, when folk-art received its Catholic colouring, when the Church of the Jesuits blossomed into an unheard-of splendour, aspiring towards and achieving an ecstatic unity which was no longer, indeed, the mystic symbolical unity of the Gothic, but none the less was its heroic-romantic counterpart.

  Protestantism has had to dispense with that kind of defence against sectarianism. It does not absorb the non-religious values, it only tolerates them. It despises extraneous “aids,” for its asceticism insists on the radical inwardness of religious experience. And although it acknowledges ecstasy to be the source and the crown of religion, yet it exacts that the ecstatic value shall be independently wrested from the sphere of pure religion, remaining absolutely uncontaminated, uncompromised, and autonomous.

  This attitude of severity is what governs the relationship of Protestantism to the non-religious social values, and what it depends on also to ensure its own stability as a Church on earth. In its exclusive and single-minded devotion to God it must of necessity fall back on the sole extant emanation of God’s spirit on earth, the Holy Scriptures,—and so fidelity to the Scripture becomes the highest earthly duty of the Protestant, and all the radicality, all the severity of the Protestant method is applied to maintaining it.

  The most characteristically Protestant idea is the categorical imperative of duty. It is in complete opposition to Catholicism: the extraneous values of life are neither subsumed in a creed nor included in a theological canon, but are merely strictly and somewhat bleakly supervised on the authority of Scripture.

  If Protestantism had chosen to follow the other line of development, the Catholic, in order to achieve in its turn an organic system of Protestant values, such as Leibniz envisaged, for example, it would perhaps have preserved itself not less successfully than Catholicism against a further splitting-up into sects; but it would have been compelled to lose its essential character. It found itself—and still finds itself—in the situation of a revolutionary party that runs the danger, once it has risen to power, of being forced to identify itself with the old order it has been opposing. The reproach of disguised Catholicism levelled against Leibniz was not quite without foundation.

  There is no severity that may not be a mask for fear. But the fear of lapsing into sectarianism would be much too insignificant a motive to account for the severity of Protestantism. And the flight to punctilious fidelity, to the written word, is pregnant with the fear of God, that fear which comes to light in Luther’s pœnitentia, that “absolute” fear of the “ruthlessness” of the Absolute which Kierkegaard experienced and in which God “is enthroned in sorrow.”

  It is as if Protestantism by clinging to the Scripture wished to preserve the last faint echoes of God’s Word in a world that has fallen silent, a world where only things speak dumbly, a world delivered over to the silence and ruthlessness of the Absolute,—and in his fear of God the Protestant has realized that it is his own goal before which he cowers. For in excluding all other values, in casting himself in the last resort on an autonomous religious experience, he has assumed a final abstraction of a logical rigour that urges him unambiguously to strip all sensory trappings from his faith, to empty it of all content but the naked Absolute, retaining nothing but the pure form, the pure, empty and neutral form of a “religion in itself,” a “mysticism in itself.”

  There is a striking correspondence between this process and the structure of the Jewish religion: perhaps the Jews have carried to a still more advanced stage the neutralization of religious experience, the stripping of all emotional and sensory elements from mysticism, the elimination of the “external” aids to ecstasy; perhaps they have already got as near to the coldness of the Absolute as the ordinary man can bear—but they too have preserved the utmost rigour and severity of the Law as the last vestige of a bond with religious life on the earthly plane.

  This correspondence in the process of intensification, this correspondence in the form of religious structure, which is asserted to extend even to the point of causing a corresponding similarity of character between orthodox Jews and Swiss Calvinists or British Puritans, this correspondence could, of course, be attributed also to a certain similarity in the external circumstances of these religions: Protestantism being a revolutionary movement, and the Jews an oppressed minority; they are both in opposition; and it could even be alleged that Catholicism itself when driven into a minority, as for instance in Ireland, exhibits the same characteristics. Yet a Catholicism of that stamp has as little in common with the Catholicism of Rome as the original Protestant faith has with the Romanizing tendencies of the High Church. They have simply inverted their distinguishing signs. And however these empiric facts are expounded, their explanatory value is but little, since the facts would not be available at all were it not for the determining religious experience behind them.

  Is it this radical religiosity, dumb and stripped of ornament, this conception of an infinity conditioned by severity and by severity alone, that determines the style of our new epoch? Is this ruthlessness of the divine principle a symptom of the infinite recession of the focus of plausibility? Is this immolation of all sensory content to be regarded as the root-cause of the prevailing disintegration of values? Yes.

  The Jew, by virtue of the abstract rigour of his conception of infinity, is the really modern, the most “advanced” man kat’ exochen: he it is who surrenders himself with absolute radicality to whatever system of values, whatever career he has chosen; he it is who raises his profession, even though it be a means of livelihood taken up by chance, to a hitherto unknown absolute pitch; he it is who, unconditionally and ruthlessly following up his actions without reference to any other system of values, attains the highest summit of spiritual enlightenment or sinks to the most brutal absorption in material things: in good as in evil a creature of extremes—it looks as though the current of the absolute Abstract which for two thousand years has flowed through the ghettoes like an almost imperceptible trickle beside the great river of life should now become the main stream; it is as if the radicality of Protestant thought had inflamed to virulence all the dread ruthlessness of abstraction which for two thousand years had been sheltered by insignificance and reduced to its minimum, as if it had released that absolute power of indefinite extension which inheres potentially in the pure Abstract alone, released it explosively to shatter our age and transform the hitherto unregarded warden of abstract thought into the paradigmatic incarnation of our disintegrating epoch.

  Apparently a Christian can only decide between two alternatives: either to seek the still available protection of the Catholic harmony of values, in the literally motherly bosom of the Church, or courageously to accept the absolute Protestantism which involves abasement before an abstract God,—and wherever this decision has not been taken, fear of the future lies like an oppression. And in fact it is the case that in all countries where men are still undecided this fear is latent and constantly active, though it may find expression merely in a fear of the Jews, whose spirit and mode of living are felt, if not recognized, to be a hateful image of the future.

  In the idea of a Protestant organon of values there certainly
exists a desire for the reunion of all Christian churches, the kind of reunion envisaged by Leibniz, and that Leibniz, who comprehended completely the values of his age, was bound to think of it can now be seen as almost inevitable; but it was equally inevitable that a man like him, a man centuries ahead of his time, who foresaw the lingua universalis of logic, must have also envisaged in that final reunion the abstraction of a religio universalis, an abstraction of a coldness that perhaps he alone was capable of enduring, being as he was the most profound mystic of Protestantism. But the Protestant line of development postulated first the immolation of life; so it was Kant’s philosophy, not Leibniz’s, that engendered Protestant theology; and the rediscovery of Leibniz was reserved, significantly enough, for Catholic theologians.

  The numerous sects that have split off one after another from Protestantism, and have been treated by it with that ostensible tolerance which is peculiar to every revolutionary movement, have all developed in the same direction; they are all a rehash, a whittling away and levelling down of that old idea of a Protestant organon of values; they are all on the side of the “Counter-reformation”: for instance, to leave out of account the grotesque American sects, the Salvation Army not only resembles the Jesuit movement of the Counter-reformation in its military organization, but also exhibits very clearly the same tendency to centralize all values, to draw everything into its net, to show how popular art of every kind, down to the street song, may be reclaimed for religion and reinstated as “ecstatic aids.” Pathetic and inadequate expense of spirit.

  Pathetic and inadequate expense of spirit, deceptive hope, to think of saving the Protestant idea from the horror of the Absolute. It is a touching cry for help, a cry summoning all the resources of a religious community, even though that may be seen only as the pale reflection of what was once a great fellowship. For at the door in rigid severity stand silence, ruthlessness and neutralization, and the cry for help mounts more and more urgently from the lips of all those who are not capable of accepting what is bound to come.