The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  “Amen,” said the congregation.

  As they left the barn and were still standing irresolutely in quiet conversation in the courtyard, Huguenau pushed his way through the groups till he reached the Major, but was taken aback by that officer’s discouraging aloofness. Still, he was unwilling to abandon the encounter, all the more as he had a joke ready to fire off: “So the Herr Major has come to assist at our fine new minister’s first celebration?” The curt, aloof nod with which he was answered informed him that their relationship was under a cloud, and this became still more obvious when the Major turned round and said with loud emphasis: “Come along, Esch, you and I will take a walk outside the town.” Huguenau was left standing in a state of mingled incomprehension, wrath and vaguely questioning guiltiness.

  The other two took the path through the garden. The sun was already inclining towards the western heights. That year it seemed as if the summer were never coming to an end: days of shimmering golden stillness followed each other in equal radiance, as if by their sweetness and peace they wanted to make the war, now in its bloodiest period, appear doubly insensate. As the sun dipped behind the chain of mountain peaks, as the sky paled into tenderer blue, as the road stretched away more peacefully and all life folded in upon itself like the breathing of a sleeper, that stillness grew more and more accessible and acceptable to the human soul. Surely that Sabbath peace lay over the whole of the German fatherland, and in a sudden uprush of yearning the Major thought of his wife and children whom he saw walking over the sunset fields. “I wish this were all over and done with,” and Esch could not find any word of comfort for him. Hopeless and dreary this life seemed to both of them, its sole meagre return a walk in the evening landscape which they were both contemplating. It’s like a reprieve, thought Esch. And so they went on in silence.

  CHAPTER LXIV

  It would be false to say that Hanna longed for the end of Heinrich’s furlough. She feared it. Night after night this man was her lover. And her daytime life, that even hitherto had been only a blurring and fending-off of consciousness, a darkening directed towards evening and towards bed, was now much more unambiguously directed to that end, with a lack of ambiguity that was startling and could scarcely be attributed to love, with such hardness, such unsentimentality, was it all dominated by the knowledge that she was a woman and he a man: it was a rapture that did not smile, a literally anatomical rapture that was in part too godlike for a lawyer and his wife and in part too base.

  Her life was certainly a fading into darkness. Yet this obscuration proceeded only by layers, so to speak; it never deepened into complete unconsciousness, but rather resembled a too-vivid dream in which one is painfully aware that one’s will is paralysed; and the more helplessly she was committed to it, the wilder the flora and fauna she accepted, the more did that layer of consciousness awaken which lay immediately above the dream. Only it could not be put into words, not because shame prevented it, but rather because words can never penetrate to the ultimate nakedness that arises from action as the night arises from the day,—her words, too, had fallen into layers, as it were, into at least two layers of language, a night-language closely bound to the event, stammering in its utterance, and a day-language that was detached from the event and went round it in a wide circle, closing in upon it circuitously—the method that the rational always follows until it finally surrenders itself in the screaming and sobbing of despair. And often this day-language was a feeling and seeking for the ultimate cause of the disease that afflicted her. “When the war’s over,” Heinrich would say almost every day, “everything will be different again … the war has made us all more primitive somehow.” “I can’t understand it,” was Hanna’s usual answer to that, or: “One simply can’t think it out, it’s all so inconceivable.” These rejoinders were ultimately a refusal to discuss things with Heinrich as if he were on the same level; he was a guilty party and ought to defend himself instead of surveying things from above. Therefore she said as she stood before the mirror and loosened the light tortoiseshell comb from her fair hair: “That queer man in the Stadthalle talked about our loneliness.” Heinrich dismissed him: “The fellow was drunk.” Hanna combed her hair and could not help thinking that her breasts were drawn up more tightly when her arms were raised. She could feel them under the silk of her chemise, on which they were outlined like two small pointed tents. She could see them in the mirror that was lit on each side by a small electric candle under a softly patterned pink shade. Then she heard Heinrich say: “It’s as if we had been shaken through a sieve … crumbled to dust.” She said: “In a time like this no children should be born.” She thought of the boy who looked so like Heinrich, and it seemed unimaginable to her that her blonde body should be fashioned to receive a man’s seed, to be a woman. She had to shut her eyes. He said: “It’s possible that a new generation of criminals is growing up.… There’s no guarantee that we mightn’t have a flare-up at any moment just like Russia … well, we’ll hope not … but our only comfort lies in the extraordinary vitality of inherited tradition.…” Both of them felt that the conversation was tailing off into irrelevancy. It was almost as if a prisoner in the dock were to say: “Lovely weather to-day. A spacious courtroom,” and Hanna relapsed into silence for a moment, letting herself go on that wave of hatred which made her nights more sordid, more profound and more lustful. Then she said: “We’ll have to wait and see … it has certainly some connection with the war … but not in that way … it’s as if the war were only the second thing.” “How the second thing?” asked Heinrich. Hanna made a furrow between her eyebrows: “We are the second thing and the war is the second thing … the first thing is something invisible, something that we have given off.…” She remembered how she had longed for the end of their honeymoon to come, so that—as she then believed—she might fling herself with enthusiasm into the arrangement of their home. Their present situation was not so unlike that; a honeymoon is a kind of furlough too. What she had felt then must have really been a premonition of approaching isolation and loneliness,—perhaps, it dawned on her now, perhaps loneliness was that first thing, perhaps loneliness was the root of the disease! And seeing that it had begun immediately after her wedding—Hanna sent her thoughts back: yes, it had begun even while they were in Switzerland—and seeing that everything fitted in, she felt her suspicion grow keener that Heinrich in those days must have committed some irreparable mistake in his relation to her, some injustice or other that could never be undone but only made greater, a gigantic injustice that had helped in some way to let the war loose. She had applied her face-cream and carefully rubbed it in with her fingers, and now she examined her face in the mirror with jealous attention. The girlish face of those days had vanished, had turned into a woman’s face through which that of the young girl now only glimmered. She did not know why all these things were connected, but she concluded her silent train of thought, saying: “The war is not the cause, it’s only a secondary thing.” And then she realized: the war is a second face, a night face. It was a disintegration of the world, a night face crumbling into cold and bodiless ash, and it was the disintegration of her own face, that disintegration she felt when Heinrich kissed her in the hollow of her shoulder. He said: “Why, certainly, the war is only the result of our mistaken policy,” and perhaps he might actually have been able to understand that even policy is only a secondary matter in so far as there is a cause which lies deeper. But he was content with his explanation and Hanna, as she sprayed herself sparingly with the French perfume, now irreplaceable, and sniffed its fragrance, was no longer listening: she had bent her head for a kiss on the nape where the faint silvery hairs grew, and she obtained it. “Another,” she said.

  CHAPTER LXV

  Esch was a man of impetuous moods. So any trifle was capable of provoking him to self-sacrifice. His desire was for simple directness: he wanted to create a world so strong in its simplicity that his own loneliness could be bound fast to it as to an iron stake.

  H
uguenau was a man who had braved many winds; even when he came into a stuffy room he was braving winds.

  There was a man who fled from his own loneliness as far as India and America. He wanted to solve the problem of loneliness by earthly methods; but he was an æsthete, and so he had to kill himself.

  Marguerite was a child, a child engendered by a sexual act, burdened with original sin and left alone to sin: someone might happen to give her a nod and ask what her name was—but such fleeting sympathy could not avail to save her.

  There is no symbol that does not necessitate a further symbol,—does the immediate experience stand at the beginning or at the end of the series of symbols?

  In a medieval poem the series of symbols begins in God and returns to God again—it is poised in God.

  Hanna Wendling wanted things to be ordered so that in their poised equilibrium symbols would return to themselves again as in a poem.

  One says Farewell, the other deserts—but they all desert from chaos; yet only he who was never bound can escape being shot.

  There is nothing more despairing than a child.

  He who is mentally lonely can always escape into romanticism, and from spiritual loneliness there is always a way of escape into the intimacy of sex—but for ultimate loneliness, for immediate loneliness, there is no longer any escape into symbols.

  Major von Pasenow was a man who yearned passionately for the familiar assurance of home, for an invisible assurance in visible things. And his yearning was so strong that layer by layer the visible sank for him into the invisible, but the invisible, on the other hand, layer by layer became visible.

  “Ah,” says the romantic, drawing on the cloak of an alien value-system, “ah, now I am one of you and am no longer lonely.” “Ah,” says the æsthete, drawing on the same cloak, “I am still lonely, but this is a lovely cloak.” The æsthete is the serpent in the romantic Garden of Eden.

  Children are intimate at once with everything: the thing is both immediate and at the same time a symbol. Hence the radicality of children.

  When Marguerite wept it was only from rage. She did not sympathize even with herself.

  The lonelier a man becomes, the more detached he is from the value-system in which he lives, the more obviously are his actions determined by the irrational. But the romantic, clinging to the framework of an alien and dogmatic system, is—it seems incredible—completely rational and unchildlike.

  The rationality of the irrational: an apparently completely rational man like Huguenau cannot distinguish between good and evil. In an absolutely rational world there would be no absolute value-system, and no sinners, or at most, mere detrimentals.

  The æsthete too does not distinguish good from evil: in that lies his fascination. But he knows very well what is good and what evil, he merely chooses not to distinguish them. And that makes him depraved.

  An age that is so rational that it must continually take to its heels.

  CHAPTER LXVI

  STORY OF THE SALVATION ARMY GIRL IN BERLIN (II)

  I draw back from the Jews as much as possible, but I find myself as before compelled to go on observing them. So I cannot help wondering again at the confidence they repose in Samson Litwak, that half-free thinker. It is obvious that the man is a blockhead who was allowed to study merely because he was incapable of following a proper occupation—one has only to compare his bare unwrinkled face, that has looked out on the world from its fringe of beard for more than fifty years, with the furrowed thought-creased faces of the old Jews—and yet he seems to have a kind of oracular prestige among them which they invoke on all occasions. Perhaps it is a survival of the old belief in the half-wit as the mouthpiece of God, for it cannot be respect for scientific knowledge; they are too conscious of possessing the higher knowledge. It is hardly credible that I am mistaken. Dr Litwak, indeed, tries to put me off the scent, but he does it very badly. This tale of his “enlightenment” is pure fabrication: his reverence for the Jews’ knowledge is too great, and if he gives me a friendly greeting in spite of the way I treat him, that is doubtless because I have refused to dismiss the Talmudic wisdom of the Jewish ancients as “prejudice.” Obviously he has taken this as encouragement to hope that I will keep Nuchem on the right path; and so he submits to my continual snubbing of him and his attempts at familiarity.

  To-day I met him on the stairs. I was going up and he was coming down. Had it been the other way about I could simply have dashed past him; it’s not so easy to stop a man who is rushing down. But I was climbing up too slowly, what with the heat of the city and my half-starved condition. He barred my way jokingly with his walking-stick. Probably he wanted me to jump over it like a poodle (I catch myself in these last days becoming touchy, far too touchy; that too may be the result of semi-starvation). I raised the stick with two fingers so as to get past it.

  Oh, how I loathed his grinning familiarity! He nodded to me:

  “What do you say to it now? everybody’s quite upset.”

  “Yes, it’s very hot.”

  “If it were only the heat!”

  “Well, the Austrians are held up in Transylvania.”

  “Who’s speaking of Transylvania?… what do you really say to it now? he says one must have joy in the heart.”

  My condition makes me enter into the most idiotic discussions:

  “That sounds quite like a psalm of David … have you any objection?”

  “Objection? I only object … I only say the old grandfather’s right, old people are always right.”

  “Prejudice, Samson, prejudice.”

  “You won’t have me on toast!”

  “Well, what does dear Grandpapa say?”

  “Now listen! He says, a Jew must have joy not in the heart but here.…” He tapped himself on the forehead.

  “In the head, then?”

  “Yes, in the head.”

  “And what do you do with your hearts when you’re joyful in the head?”

  “With the heart we must serve … uwchol levovcho, uwchol nawschecho, uwchol meaudecho, that means, with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul, and with all one’s might.”

  “Does Grandpapa say that too?”

  “Not only the grandfather says it, it is so.”

  I tried to look at him pityingly, but it did not quite come off:

  “And you call yourself enlightened, Herr Dr Samson Litwak?”

  “Of course I’m an enlightened man … just as you are an enlightened man … of course, but is that any reason for upsetting the law?”

  He laughed.

  “God bless you, Dr Litwak,” said I and went on climbing.

  He replied: “A hundredfold,” he was still laughing, “but no man can upset the law, not you, not I, not Nuchem.…”

  I went on ascending the sordid stair. Why did I stay here? In the Army hostel I would be better accommodated. Texts on the walls instead of oleographs, for instance.

  CHAPTER LXVII

  STORY OF THE SALVATION ARMY GIRL IN BERLIN (12)

  He said: my mule, quick-trotting, carries me

  and thee together through our dream of Zion,

  with jingling bells and purple bridle flying.

  He said: I called to thee.

  He said: my heart is open to the miracle

  of the great Temple with its thousand stairs,

  the city where my fathers said their prayers.

  He said: we two shall build a tabernacle.

  He said: till now I have waited for release

  sunk in my book, waiting till I awoke.

  He said: this joy I have longed for, and this peace …

  he did not speak, it was his heart that spoke.

  She too said nothing. Deep in silence lapped

  so they went on, and yet their hearts were rapt.

  So they went on, and yet their hearts were rapt

  in silence, inner yearning, hidden glory,

  so they went on and heeded not the story

  of the mean streets they
passed, the dens of shame.

  She said: in the most secret part of me

  the spark is fanned and rises into flame,

  a blaze of light, a splendour without name.

  He said: I thought of thee.

  She said: my heart is kindled in a glow,

  from me, a sinner, thou dost not turn aside.

  He said: bright gleams the road to Zion that we go.

  She said: for us thou once wert crucified.

  They said no more: light dazzled what was said.

  They did no more: the deed was perfected.

  CHAPTER LXVIII

  “What, are you thinking of going out at this late hour, Lieutenant Jaretzki?”

  Sister Mathilde was sitting near the porch of the hospital, and Lieutenant Jaretzki, standing in the illuminated doorway, lit himself a cigarette.

  “It was too hot to-day to go out …” he clicked his lighter shut, “a good invention, these petrol lighters … you know, don’t you, that I’m going away next week, Sister?”

  “Yes, so I heard. To Kreuznach, to a convalescent home? … You must be glad to get out of here at last.…”

  “Oh, well … I suppose you’re glad to get rid of me.”

  “You haven’t been exactly a good patient.”

  Silence.

  “Come for a little walk, Sister, it’s cool now.”

  Sister Mathilde hesitated:

  “I have to go in again soon … but, if you like, let’s take a short turn.”

  Jaretzki said reassuringly:

  “I’m quite sober, Sister.”

  They went out into the road. The hospital with its two rows of lighted windows lay to their right. The outline of the town beneath them was just discernible, its mass was a little blacker than the blackness of the night. A few lights were burning there, and on the hills, too, a light now and then gleamed from some solitary farmhouse. The town clocks struck nine.