The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  Frau Esch came nearer and hesitatingly laid a finger on Huguenau’s hand.

  Huguenau said:

  “Perhaps an omelette would be the thing.”

  “Hadn’t I better make you some herb-tea?”

  Huguenau suspected economy:

  “Oh, an omelette could surely be managed … you must have eggs in the house … say, three eggs.”

  Thereupon with dragging feet he left the kitchen.

  Partly because it was the right thing for an invalid to do, partly because he had to make up for the sleep he had lost in the night, he lay down on the sofa. But there was little chance of sleep, for his excitement over the successful journalistic coup was still vibrating. In a kind of waking doze he looked up at the mirror above the washstand, looked at the window, listened to the noises in the house. There were the usual kitchen noises: he could hear a bit of meat being beaten—so she had swindled him after all, the fat madam, so that that blighter might have all the meat to himself. Of course she would argue she couldn’t make bouillon out of pork, but a nice bit of lightly fried pork never hurt anyone, not even an invalid. Then he heard a short, sharp chopping on a board, and diagnosed it as the cutting of vegetables,—he had always been scared as he watched his mother chopping up parsley or celery with quick-cutting strokes, scared for fear she would chop off her finger-tips. Kitchen knives were sharp. He was glad when the chopping noise ended and mother wiped her unharmed fingers on the kitchen towel. If one could only go to sleep: it might be better to get into bed, and then the Esch woman could sit beside him and knit or give him hot fomentations. He felt his hand; it was really hot. The thing to do was to think of something pleasant. Women, for instance. Naked women. That was the stair creaking, someone coming up. Strange, for father wasn’t usually so early. Oh, it was only the postman. Mother Esch was speaking to him. The baker used always to come up, but he never came now. That was just nonsense: it was impossible to sleep while one was hungry.

  Huguenau blinked again at the window, and noted outside the chain of the Colmar mountains; the castellan of the royal castle was a Major, the Kaiser himself had appointed him. Haïssez les Prussiens et les ennemis de la sainte religion. Somebody laughed in Huguenau’s ear; he heard words in Alsatian dialect. A cooking-pot boiled over; it hissed on the stove. Now someone was whispering, “we’re hungry, we’re hungry, we’re hungry.” That was too stupid. Why couldn’t he have his dinner with the others? he was being treated worse and worse. Perhaps they would give his seat to the Major? The stair was creaking again—Huguenau flinched, it was his father’s step. Oh, stuff, it was only Esch, the would-be Reverend.

  A swine that Esch; served him right if he was annoyed. Tit for tat. You can’t play with knives and not be cut. Esch had managed to turn Protestant; next thing he’d turn Jew and have himself cut, circumcised; must remember to tell the madam that. Finger-tips. Knife-tips. Best of all just to get up and go over to the office and ask him if he was thinking of turning Jew. All nonsense to be afraid of him; I’m only too lazy. But she should bring me my dinner, and be quick about it … before that sanctimonious blighter gets his.

  Huguenau listened intently to hear if they were sitting down to table. No wonder a man grew thinner and thinner with that Esch bagging everything. But that was what he was like. A Reverend had to have a belly. Pure fraud, his parson’s black coat. An executioner had a black coat too. An executioner had to eat a lot to keep up his strength. One never knew whether people were coming to lead one to the block or merely bringing one’s dinner. From now on he would go to the hotel and eat meat at the Major’s table. That very evening. If that omelette was much longer in coming there would be a good row. An omelette only took five minutes to make!

  Frau Esch came quietly into the room and set the plate with the omelette on a chair and pushed the chair up to the sofa.

  “Hadn’t I better make you some tea as well, Herr Huguenau, some herb-tea?”

  Huguenau looked up. His irritation had almost vanished; her sympathy did him good.

  “I’m rather fevered, Frau Esch.”

  She ought at least to pass her hand over his forehead to feel if he had fever; he was vexed because she did not.

  “I think I’ll go to bed, Mother Esch.”

  Frau Esch, however, stood stolidly before him and insisted on giving him tea: it was a very special kind of tea, not only an ancient recipe but also a famous remedy; the herbalist, who had inherited the secret from his father and great-grandfather, had become very rich, he owned a house in Cologne, and people went to consult him from all over the country. She had seldom said so many words in one breath.

  None the less Huguenau resisted:

  “Some cherry-brandy, Frau Esch, would do me good.”

  She primmed up her face with disgust: spirits? No! Even her husband, whose health was not of the most robust, had been won over to her tea.

  “That so? Does Esch drink the tea?”

  “Yes,” said Frau Esch.

  “All right, then, for the love of God make me some too,” and with a sigh Huguenau sat up and ate his omelette.

  CHAPTER LXXI

  Heinrich’s departure had passed off with remarkable ease. In so far as physical and spiritual effects can be separated, it might have been called a purely physical experience. As Hanna came home from the station she herself felt a little like an empty house where the blinds have been drawn down. But that was all. Besides, she knew for certain that Heinrich would return unharmed from the war. And this conviction of hers, which kept the departing soldier from turning into a martyr, not only obviated the sentimental outburst she had dreaded at the station, but had the more far-reaching effect of neutralizing and displacing her wish that he might never return. When she said to her son: “Daddy will soon come back,” they probably both knew what she meant.

  The physical experience, for as such she was entitled to regard this six-weeks’ furlough, now presented itself to her mind as a contraction of her vital powers, a contraction of her ego; it had been like a damming-in of her ego within the limits of her body, like the foaming narrowing of a river within a ravine. In the past, now that she thought of it, she had always had the feeling that her ego was not bounded by her skin and could radiate through that tenuous covering into her silken underclothing, and it had been almost as if even her gowns were informed by an emanation from her ego (that was probably why she had such infallible taste in matters of fashion), yes, it had been almost as if her ego stretched far beyond her body and enveloped rather than inhabited it, and as if she did not think in her head but somewhere outside it, on a higher watch-tower, so to speak, from which her own bodily existence, however important it might be, could be observed and regarded as a trivial irrelevancy; but during these last six weeks of physical experience, during that headlong rush through the ravine, of all that diffused spaciousness nothing had survived but a shining vapour above the tossing waters, a rainbow glitter that was in a way the last refuge of her soul. Now, however, that the kindly plain once more spread before her and she felt as if released from fetters, her feeling of relief and smoothness turned at the same time into a wish to forget the troubled narrows. This forgetfulness, however, encroached upon her only a little at a time. All her personal memories vanished with relatively great rapidity; Heinrich’s bearing, his voice, his words, his walk, all that very soon disappeared; but the general memories persisted. To use a highly improper analogy: the first to disappear was his face, then his movable extremities, his hands and feet, but the un-moving, rigid body, the torso reaching from the breast-bone to the thigh, that lascivious image of the male, persisted in the depths of her memory like the statue of a god embedded in the soil or washed by the surf of a Tyrrhenian sea. And the farther this encroaching forgetfulness advanced—and that was the frightful part of it—the more that statue of the god was shortened, the more emphatic and isolated became its indecency, an indecency on which forgetfulness encroached more and more slowly, filching smaller and smaller portions—paralyse
d by that indecency. That is only a metaphor, and like all metaphors coarsens the real truth which is always shadowy, a play of undefined ideas, a mingled current of half-remembered memories, half-thought thoughts and half-wished desires, a river without banks, over which rises a silvery vapour, a silvery emanation that spreads to the very clouds and the black sky of stars. So the torso in the mud of the river was no mere torso, it was a hewn boulder, it was an isolated piece of furniture, household rubbish jettisoned in the stream of events, a lump abandoned to the surf: wave succeeded wave, day was woven into night and night into day, and what the days transmitted to each other was inscrutable, sometimes more inscrutable than the dreams that followed each other, and at times it included something that recognizably suggested the secret knowledge of schoolgirls yet at the same time somehow aroused a secret wish to flee from such infantile knowledge, to flee into the world of the individual and to disinter Heinrich’s face once more from forgetfulness. But that was only a wish, and its fulfilment admitted of about as much possibility as the complete restoration of a Greek statue found in the soil: that is to say, it could not be fulfilled.

  At first sight it might seem irrelevant whether the individual or the general prevailed in Hanna’s memories. But in an age when the general is everywhere so obviously dominant, where the social bonds of humanity that are spun only from individual to individual have been loosened in favour of collective concepts of hitherto undreamed-of unities, where a de-individualized state of ruthlessness prevails such as is natural only to childhood and old age, in such a time the memory of an individual cannot escape subjection to the general law, and the isolation of a highly insignificant woman, be she ever so pretty and ever such an excellent bedfellow, cannot be explained simply as the result of an unfortunately complete deprivation of sexual intercourse, but forms a part of the whole and mirrors, like every individual destiny, a metaphysical necessity that is laid upon the world, a physical event, if one likes to call it that, and yet metaphysical in its tragedy: for that tragedy is the isolation of the ego.

  CHAPTER LXXII

  STORY OF THE SALVATION ARMY GIRL IN BERLIN (13)

  Can this age, this disintegrating life, be said still to have reality? My passivity increases from day to day, not because I am exhausted by struggling with a reality that may be stronger than myself, but because on all sides I encounter unreality. I am thoroughly conscious that the meaning and the ethos of my life can be found only in activity, but I begin to suspect that this age no longer has time for the contemplative activity of philosophizing, which is the sole real activity. I try to philosophize—but where is the dignity of knowledge to be found to-day? Is it not long defunct? Has Philosophy itself not disintegrated into mere phrases in face of the disintegration of its object? This world without Being, this world without repose, this world that can find and maintain its equilibrium only in increasing speed of movement, this world’s mad racing has become the pseudo-activity of mankind and will hurl it into nothingness—is there any resignation deeper than that of an age which is denied the capacity to philosophize? Philosophy itself has become an æsthetic pastime, a pastime that no longer really exists but has fallen into the empty detachment of evil and become a recreation for citizens who need to kill time of an evening! nothing is left us but number, nothing is left us but law!

  It often seems to me as if the state I am now in, the state that keeps me here in this Jewish house, is beyond resignation and is rather a kind of wisdom that has learned to come to terms with a completely alien environment. For even Nuchem and Marie are alien to me, even these two on whom I had set my last hope, the hope that they were my creations, the sweet, unrealizable hope that I had taken their fate into my own hands and could determine it. Nuchem and Marie are not my creatures and never were so. Treacherous hope, to take the liberty of shaping the world!

  Does the world have an independent existence? No. Do Nuchem and Marie have an independent existence? Certainly not, for no being exists in itself. But the moments that determine destinies lie far beyond the range of my thinking or my powers. I myself can only fulfil my own law, supervise my own prescribed business; I am in no case to penetrate farther, and even although my love for Nuchem and Marie is not extinguished, even though I do not relax in the struggle for their souls and their fate, yet the moments by which they are determined are beyond my reach, remain hidden from me, as hidden as the white-bearded grandfather whom I meet, to be sure, now and then in the hall, but who takes on his real shape only in the living-room from which I am always excluded, and who treats with me only through his delegate Litwak; they remain as hidden from me as the white-bearded General Booth whose picture hangs in the reception-room of the hostel. And when I consider it objectively, it is not a combat that I am engaged in, neither with the grandfather nor the Salvation Army General, rather do I strive to see justice done to them, and my wooing of Nuchem and Marie applies also to them; yes, sometimes I believe that my aim is exclusively to win through my actions the love of these old men, to win their blessing so that I may not die lonely. For reality is to be found in them that have laid down the law.

  Is this resignation? Is it a revulsion from all æsthetic? Where did I stand of yore? My life is darkening behind me and I do not know if I have lived or if my life was a tale told to me, so far has it sunk in remote seas. Did ships bear me to the shores of the farthest east and farthest west? was I a cotton-picker in American plantations, was I the white hunter in the elephant jungles of India? Everything is possible, nothing, not even a castle in a park, is improbable; heights and depths, all are possible, for nothing permanent has survived in this dynamic activity that exists for its own sake, this activity that is manifest in work, in quietness and serene clarity: nothing has survived—flung to the winds is my ego, flung into nothingness; irrealizable my yearning, unattainable the Promised Land, invisible the ever-brightening but constantly receding radiance, and the community that we grope for is devoid of strength yet full of evil will. Vain hope, and often groundless pride—the world has remained an alien enemy, or even less than an enemy, merely an alien entity whose surface I could explore but into which I could never penetrate, an alien entity into which I shall never penetrate, lost as I am in ever-increasing strangeness, blind in ever-increasing blindness, failing and falling asunder in yearning remembrance of the night of home, to become at last merely a vanishing breath of what has been. I have traversed many ways to find the One in which all the others are conjoined, but they have only diverged more and more from each other, and even God has not been established by me but by my fathers.

  I said to Nuchem:

  “You are a suspicious people, an angry people; you are jealous even of God and are constantly pulling Him up even in His own Book.”

  He answered:

  “The law is imperishable. God is not until every jot and tittle of the Law has been deciphered.”

  I said to Marie:

  “You are a brave but a thoughtless people! You believe that you need only be good and strike up music in order to draw God near.”

  She answered:

  “Joy in God is God, His grace is inexhaustible.”

  I said to myself:

  “You are a fool, you are a Platonist, you believe that in comprehending the world you can shape it and raise yourself in freedom to Godhood. Can you not see that you are bleeding yourself to death?”

  I answered myself:

  “Yes, I am bleeding to death.”

  CHAPTER LXXIII

  DISINTEGRATION OF VALUES (9)

  Epistemological Excursus.

  Can this age be said still to have reality? Does it possess any real value in which the meaning of its existence is preserved? Is there a reality for the non-meaning of a non-existence? In what haven has reality found its refuge? in science, in law, in duty or in the uncertainty of an ever-questioning logic whose point of plausibility has vanished into the infinite? Hegel called history “the path to the liberation of spiritual substance,” the path leading
to the self-liberation of the spirit, and it has become the path leading to the self-destruction of all values.

  Of course the question is not whether Hegel’s interpretation of history has been overthrown by the World War; that had been done already by the stars in their courses; for a reality that had grown autonomous through a development extending over four hundred years would have ceased in any circumstances to be capable of submitting any longer to a deductive system. A more important question would be to inquire into the logical possibilities of this emergent anti-deductive reality, into the logical grounds for such anti-deductiveness; in short, to examine “the conditions of possible experience” in which this development of the spirit has become inevitable—but a contempt for all philosophy, a weariness of words, are themselves inherent in this reality and in this development, and it is only with a complete mistrust of the coercive suasion of words that we can pose the urgent methodological questions: what is an historical event? what is historical unity? or, to go still further: what is an event at all? what principle of selection must be followed to weld single occurrences into the unity of an event?

  Autonomous life is as indissolubly and organically knit to the category of value as autonomous consciousness is knit to the category of truth,—one could find other names for the phenomena of truth and value, but as phenomena they would remain as irrefutable as Sum and Cogito, both of them drawn out of the isolated autonomy of the Self, both of them activities as well as surrounding products of that Self; thus value can be split up into the value-making activity, which in the widest sense creates worlds, and into the formed, spatially discernible and generally visible value-product, and the concept of value splits into the corresponding categories: into the ethical value of the activity and the æsthetic value of the product, the obverse and reverse sides of the same medal, and it is in combination and only in combination that these give the most general concept of value and the logical co-ordinates of all life. And, indeed, this is borne out by history: for the writing of history in antiquity was already governed by its concepts of value, the moralizing historians of the eighteenth century applied theirs with full deliberation, and in Hegel’s scheme the concept of an absolute value is most clearly revealed in the ideas of a “World-spirit” and a “High Court of History.” It is not surprising that the post-Hegelian philosophy of history occupied itself chiefly in considering the methodological function of the concept of value, bringing about incidentally the fateful splitting-up of the whole realm of knowledge into a philosophy of nature unaffected by values and a philosophy of spirit conditioned by values—which, if one likes, may be considered the first declared bankruptcy of philosophy, since it confined the identity of Thought and Being to the realm of logic and mathematics, allowing all the rest of knowledge to dispense with what is the main idealistic task of philosophy or to relegate it to the vagueness of intuition.