The death of Virgil
The Death of Virgil is a novel by Hermann Broch that was published simultaneously in English and German by Pantheon in New York in March 1945 . The author had been working on the work since 1936. The novel was also published in Spanish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Japanese, Czech, Romanian and Hungarian by 1976.
The starting point for the novel is the last eighteen hours in the life of the Roman poet Virgil .
Emergence
In a period of nine years from 1936 five versions of the Virgil material were created:
- The Homecoming of Virgil (1936), nine-page manuscript, 1937 version for radio, first published in 1953 in the Neue Rundschau
- [Untitled] (1937), 48-page typescript , first published in 1976
- Erzählung vom Tode (1938), 55-page typescript, edited before and during the three-week imprisonment in Bad Aussee
- Virgil's Journey Home (1938–40), 338-page typewritten text
- The Death of Virgil (mid-1940 to early 1945), final version of the novel
content
Broch's novel is based on the partly legendary traditions of the poet's life and relates to a historical event. On the evening of September 20, 19 BC Virgil landed in the port of Brundisium . Augustus had urged the death-marked poet of the Aeneid in Athens to undertake the arduous journey home from Epirus on a ship of the imperial fleet . As a farmer's son from Andes near Mantua , he would have preferred to live in Greece - far from Rome - in creative leisure and philosophical reflections. Virgil died the next day.
I water - the arrival
The external plot depicts how the sick person is carried in a sedan chair from the landing ship through the Brundisium harbor district, which is overcrowded with onlookers, up the steep Elendsgasse to the imperial palace and there is taken care of by slaves in a guest room. The reason for the crowd is the arrival and the upcoming birthday of the emperor. Powerless from coughing and fever, he clutched the handle of his manuscript case tightly. The march of the porters through the “manifold haze of human animals” is directed by the boy Lysanias, who paves the way for him through the crowd by calling him a magician and great poet. However, this does not impress the mob and is mocked as a living corpse that is not worth dragging back to Italy. Lysanias accompanies the dying man through the whole book as his genius and his childlike stage of life, which is only visible to him.
The focus of the novel is the inner action : In personal form , the happening, v. a. Kp. I, II and IV, narrated consistently from the perspective of the protagonist and mixed with his thoughts in a kind of stream of consciousness. He feels that he is going to die and gets into an existential crisis, which he tries to grasp by spiraling around the difficult to explain and actually inexpressible - like later his visions of the under and overworld - with ever new word creations. His view of the world is shaped by polar forces, which in the first chapter are connected with each other in a water metaphor: waves, flooding home, burned, washed away, etc. In retrospect he remembers different life situations, v. a. of his sheltered childhood with his rural parents, his role as a favorite of the emperor. Then, expanded into the philosophical, he thinks about death and its poetry in the intermediate area of twilight as sliding in the stream of life between light and dark, earth and sky, transience and eternity. Because of his suffering, his image of himself as a poet-prophet, who seeks access to the secrets of eternal life and who discovers unity and truth behind diversity and forms it linguistically, has wavered, as he did in the following long series of sentences with unusual compounds Formations expresses: This “flooding into the never-to-be-attainable dream vaults, but this flooding, originating from the heart, burning at the vault boundaries and flooding home again into the heart, took wave after wave of longing into itself [...] brought the twilight-swinging maternal star cradle of its beginnings Standstill, and the dark flashes of the below, of the bright light of the above, separated into light and darkness, into blackness and glare, two-colored the cloud, twofold the origin, thunderstorm, soundless, spaceless, timeless. Oh broken cave inside and outside, oh, vast earth! - so the night opened up, the sleep of being shattered; Twilight and poetry were silently washed away, their realm washed away, the echoing walls of the dream broken, and mocked by the silent voices of memory, burdened with guilt and broken with hope, flood-flooded, flood-hijacked, life's vast array sank into sheer nothingness. It was too late, there was only escape, the ship was ready, the anchor was hoisted; it was too late".
II Fire - The Descent
On his last night, Virgil, lusting for life, "gathers everything that is in him again [...] in order to be able to listen", he feverishly and dreams, talks to people emerging from his past. In his bed he not only thinks about his life, but also about the apprehension of reality through his poetry. It actually seems indescribable to him and only possible in a series of images in approximations: “Because the images are full of reality because reality is always symbolized again only by reality - images and but-pictures, realities and but-realities, not really real, as long as they are it stands alone, yet each individual symbol of an ultimate, real unknowability that is its totality ”. In view of the increasing fragility of his body, he combines this thought with the wish, “May his physical unity, which had become more and more of an apparent unit, be finally dissolved so that the extraordinary can take place, so that dissolution becomes redemption, a new unity , to the final meaning ”and this had accompanied and persecuted him as a childish fear from his earliest youth. His life and poetry was a “single, infinite listening” to the currents of life around him into the abyss of “earth darkness” and up into the eternal “spheres of heavenly light”, “Janus-like always belonging to both”, the regions of “star floating like those of stone gravity ”. Now he listens to the dying and sees that death as the horizon of being was laid out in him from the beginning and that he always saw his task as a poet in it, in the “intermediate realm of parting” the “cognitive image of death” as the return of the fateful cycle to grasp unity. This life's task was not a free decision, it was "a fate commanded [...] having to seek his own form in that of death in order to gain freedom for the soul". Virgil never resisted dying in his life, but he did “against community and love”. This admission leads him in the "stream of memory" back to the childhood places of his golden age, to his beloved Plotia, which in the mind of the poet who is more interested in boys always takes over the function of his muse, to the Posillipean cave and his poems, but all of this is "blown away like brown leaves, no longer remembered, only known". While listening to the currents of dying, he only hears undifferentiated noises, a thicket of voices and no insightful individual tones that lead to a new unity: "The lost is incarcerated in the thicket, no breach, no clearing is to be made". He has to admit that the mortal hope for "knowledge of the world [...] is measured and an abomination to the gods". It would “break on the walls of inaudibility”. He now better understands the futile hopes of the “rabble-rousing”, the “creature masses” for earthly happiness through a Caesarian, god-like leader, whom he has always looked down on in his arrogance.
After this complaint about the failure of all attempts at knowledge, Virgil rises from his bed, looks out the window at the starry sky and develops the idea of the searching person who has to discover himself, his own soul, "the unity of being, [...] the pure now, which is common to all and man ”, and which needs“ the knowledge of futility ”:“ because only in error, only through the error into which he is inescapably held, man becomes a seeker [...] The non-cognition, it becomes for him the basis of knowledge, \ since it is the flowing growth of his soul, \ the imperfectly unfinished of his own self ". Although he has not gained a higher, universal knowledge, it is a consolation to him that he has had experience in the world and he has the confidence that nothing has happened in vain and that there is a meaning in it. His new starting point is the Promethean idea of the earthly roots of all questions. The view from the window down to the earth and to the sky shows him a contrasting scene: On the street he sees a quarreling, coarse burlesque group of three, who in the following reflections again and again the underage, manipulable by the leader and in terms of education and knowledge represents uninterested crowd. But when looking up at the starry sky, he has the vision of an all-encompassing harmony that dissolves the opposites. For him the beauty of the night becomes a symbol for the abolition of inner and outer boundaries, “as the infinity game of earthly human beings in their earthliness [...] the beautiful self-deception repeats anew and anew, \ the flight into beauty, the game of escape ; \ Here the rigidity of the beautified world is revealed to the human being, [...] which only becomes imperishable in the repetition and \ for the sake of such apparent perfection \ must always be sought anew ". At the same time he feels against this frozen beauty "from the space of his deepest previous knowledge" the "lure of an immense primal pleasure [...] to all-disintegration, to the world-disintegration and to the ego-disintegration". This desire to destroy all principles of order comes from pre-creation and is accompanied by a loud laugh that connects people with the gods: "Laughter comes from the knowledge of the ungodliness of the gods [...] it comes from that restless, unsettlingly transparent area the community \, which is demonically stretched between the beyond and the here and now, \ so that in it, in such a twilight zone of twilight, God and man can meet ”. This laughter contains the “bursting germ that is innate in all creation from the beginning, ineradicable” and signals the “superfluity of all knowledge”.
Virgil's literary criticism, a focus of Chapter 2, is based on this new insight. As a poet he feels hopelessly "sunk back into the pre-creative, sunk back into the meaningless [... U] surrounded by the shadowy mountains of their pre-deadness, which cannot be surpassed by any earthly death, the world lay before him, beauty permeated and laughing apart, speechless and communityless, Consequence of breaking the oath of which she was guilty; instead of the unknown God, instead of the dutiful oath-bearer, the three came along, the bearers of indulgence ”. True art, on the other hand, contains "oath and knowledge [...] insofar as it is human destiny and coping with being, insofar as it renews itself in the unconquered [...] by calling the soul to continued self-conquest and in this way uncovering its reality layer by layer [...] allows [...] penetrating to the never-reachable, nevertheless always anticipated, always known regions of darkness of the I-becoming and I-extinguishing [...] but at the same time also the entrance and exit of everything that is their truth ”. It cannot be found through any exertion of force, but only through “the grace of self-knowledge. This is why the ending of the Aeneid has been stalling for months. In his “poor verses” he did not find the “supernatural language” required to “uncover the divine” and thus could not solve the “human task of art” to his satisfaction. What is more, the poet doubts his artistry. Isn't he, thrown into the “dungeon of art”, nothing more than a “vain dreamer”, an “ambitious person”? Do not indulge in beauty. It depends on renewal. The knowledge of dying has proven to be inaudible. Virgil laments his “criminal overestimation of poetry” and compares himself with the singer Orpheus, whose beautiful songs were only effective during the time of their performance, but were unable to dispel people's fears for long. He wanted. by attempting to bridge the abyss of linguistic stupidity of the human community with “the magic of a song” of the power of beauty, to be a “savior” and was only a “frenzy”. He could not reach the people with his works, because the "rabble" rather follow the ruler with their earthly instincts, who lures and rules them with circus games, wine and flour. In his review of life, Virgil repeatedly criticizes his own poetry, in variations, which he describes as “rabble-rousing”, “worthless, poor literary life” and as betrayal of the divine and of art ”: intoxicated with frozen beauty templates, artistically playful, vain verbosity. His balance sheet is sobering for both the author and his audience: "The ignorant as a bringer of knowledge for the unwilling to know, the word maker as a wake up speech for the dumb, the oblivious as the duty of the ignorant, the lame as a teacher of the staggering".
All in all, in long rows of sentences filled with imaginative formulations, he laments his double failure: not only as a savior, but also as a person who has not participated in real life and is frozen in loneliness. Now in dying he also loses his memories. He is motionless on all sides: “And he was anechoic, dead echo in the desert mountains of Tartarus, which were shot up to irreversible finality, mute echoes in the motionless drying up inside and outside [...] he was a sightless skull, rolled down into the stone rubble on the shoreline of oblivion, […] rolled to nothing, before the hopelessness of which even oblivion extinguishes, it was nothing but a blind staring eye, it was hullless, voiceless, lungless, breathless, yes, it was thrown to the underworldly airless blindness: shadows had to be solved was his commission, he had created shadows [...] he was commissioned to move the stones of the grave once more, so that the human might rise to rebirth, so that the living creation might become law [...] [...] and he remained in the frozen void of the surface ”. Through his reflections he screwed himself verbatim into a “limitless everyday grief of the still existing being, which lifts any diversity and any doubling into the excess of its own limitlessness and thus abolishes, with the ego lifted up, absorbed and crushed by the limitlessness and its grieving Void, the horrific foreboding of the doubled horror, the doubled horror brings and at the same time dissolves in itself, with the ego dissolved, dissolved and staring into the gaze of the threatening all around, the gaze-threatened I [...] it was pressed onto the last remnant of its being, was destroyed to the non-space of its inhumanity, its unthinking [...] the ego had lost itself, was robbed of its humanity, of which nothing remained, nothing but the nakedest guilt of nakedness of the soul ”. He describes this feeling of total abandonment in an underworld realm of the dead in ever new associations with paradoxes, words denoting destruction and negations such as un-light, lightless, perpetual murder, disaster, chased to a standstill, ashless, shattered, bursting, deprived of language, immortalized, un-heaven , Dome of the non-space, inexhaustibility, “What a reversal of inside and outside! What a dreadful inversion! All around burned the crypt streets and the crypt cities of the earth inhabited by the dead, all around stared the stony futility of human turf [...] all around stood stiff the cold earthly flames, and it was the de-creation of man, the dethronement of God from creation, covered in stone by the dying - bared creation Dissension of fear confuses the gods' decision, according to whose will it should have happened. Because creation demands an everlasting resurrection ”.
When Virgil manages to direct his gaze out of the window back to the lamp in his room and Lysanias offers him wine, a feeling of calm returns and he can free himself from the apocalyptic images of fear. "The limbo of apparent death had left him". Now he has a need to detach himself from his writings and to burn the Aeneid as an offering for his transgressions as a poet. He gives Lysanias the order: "Destroy language, destroy names, so that grace may be again." But the boy wants to prevent this and gives him his poetry to read, but he rejects the manuscripts. "The language was unlearnable, unreadable, inaudible." Then Lysanias recites a few verses from Canto 8 (v. 310–369) in which Prince Euander tells of the divine nature of his land. What could be remembered in terms of content had dissolved for him, the poem “returned to the shrouded nakedness of its prebornness, to the resounding invisibility from which all poetry stems, taken up again by the pure form, finding itself in it like an echo of itself, the soul which sounds like itself in its crystal case ”. The sound leads him into dreamlike visions. He feels a "readiness to wake up", a resurrection, a return to his belief in the interpretation and implementation of spherical, transcendent voices that correspond with his heart in constant upward and downward movements and call for creation. At dawn, dream and reality mix for him. In a paradise landscape, a boyish angel reminiscent of Lysanias speaks to him: "Enter creation that once was and is again: but be called Virgil, your time is here!" Then he falls into a dreamless sleep into the "sweetness of Forget everything ”. In other scenes, too, the boy appears and disappears alternately with the slave before Virgil's eyes, and it is questionable whether he is an independent figure or just a projection of unconscious thoughts or his own childhood: “Exit and entrance are one, childhood of the beginning and the end ”. In addition , the verses quoted by Lysanias from the Aeneid fit Virgil’s situation in an interpretive way; B. after Aeneas return from the realm of the dead (6th song): "The outcome of dreams is twofold: Was it a true dream [...] was it a trickery [...] Isn't it your way too, Virgil, that Aeneas went?"
III Earth - The Expectation
The next morning, Virgil is first visited by two friends, the poets Plotius Tucca and Lucius Varius . He discusses the tasks of art with them. In contrast to his self-critical insights from last night, they represent the traditional ancient aesthetic of the true and the beautiful as characteristics of the imperishable harmonic world hidden behind everyday reality, which the artist must represent, and cite Horace and Lucrez as examples. Virgil's Aneis belonged to the category of great immortal works, like Homer's epics, and should not be burned. For Virgil, on the other hand, the highest law of reality is "Eros in the course of being [...] the law of the heart": "Reality is love". The new art must leave the old tracks and return to the original, immediate. The friends do not dispute the importance of love for everyday life, but a poet should only use sublime love, e.g. B. between Aeneas and Dido, and not simple love stories, as the younger writers practiced. They ensure that Charondas from Kos, Augustus' personal physician, examines and treats the patient. After encouraging encouragement and washing his body with warm vinegar, Virgil feels more comfortable and falls into a waking dream-like state. A transparent, exotic jungle landscape forms in his room, in which he and Plotia connect as plant creatures under lush willow bushes. The hallucination is overlaid by the love story Aeneas and Didos (4th song). In this fairy tale dream, the times flow harmoniously into one another, while his slave, as a projection of his own alternative thoughts, points from the background of the room to the separation of the lovers through the divine life task of Aeneas and Virgil: "The woman's fate is past, but yours, Virgil, is the future ”.
The garden backdrop fades when the Emperor Octavian Augustus visits the sick man and has him recite some of the glorifying verses from the 8th Canto of the Aeneid . In the following, the two discuss the role of literature in society for a long time. This controversy forms the focus of Chapter 3, because the author also addresses the contemporary discussion in the 1920s and 1930s about the danger of art being instrumentalized by the state. Augustus calls for poetry to be included in his statecraft. He sees in his peace order a structure of harmony and he expects the same from architecture and literature. That is why he claims the Aeneid as a national epic and “symbol of the Roman spirit” for his people. Such a perfect work does not belong to the poet alone. For Virgil, on the other hand, his poetry grew out of his personal experience and was therefore his property until it was published. He considers the Aeneid to be incomplete because it lacks his knowledge of death and it only contains a surface knowledge of life. That is why he does not want to hand over the manuscript: "[I] I survey my life and I see the undone in it". He blames time for his loss of knowledge, the distance of people from the gods and, through the imprisonment of their souls, their inability to hear their voices. Fateful change the time "the great web of knowledge, in whose flowing meshes man is caught and on which he still has to work incessantly so that it becomes an all-weave and does not tear: mysteriously united with being". Augustus sees it differently. The existential situation has not changed over the years, people have always had to take responsibility for shaping their lives in the state, and Virgil succeeded in this as a poet. He regards its self-criticism and its fateful interpretation as exaggerated. Virgil's complicated, sometimes labyrinthine thoughts, e.g. The pragmatist cannot understand, for example, the parable of poetry or the state. Most of the time the two talk past each other. Augustus gives a long speech on his theory of the state. For him, the Roman state he created embodies the divine order that he restored after the civil wars of the republic, the individual and his piety are subordinate to the whole that protects him: "The love of the gods is not for the individual, They are indifferent to him and they do not know his death ”. The people are not interested in Virgil's knowledge of the truth, but in nutrition, entertainment and the simple pleasures of life. That is why it must be controlled and directed by a strong state. For Virgil, the state is not the focus of his thinking. The time is determined by fate, "uninfluenced and uninfluenced by earthly power and earthly institutions". In his opinion, Augustus Reich is only on the path of development with growing human piety. The starting point of his thinking is the “piety of the individual soul, beyond the state”, which seeks “dialogue with the divine”. Then "the state of citizens [...] will become the state of people", the "new kingdom [...] that is gifted to guarantee creation". For Augustus these are dangerous thoughts that undermine order; he accuses Virgil of wanting to relativize his theory of the state with a transcendental vision out of envy. The poet is shocked by these accusations and tries to appease the emperor by being prepared to dedicate his Aeneid to him and to hand over the manuscripts to him in trust. With this Augustus has achieved his goal, because neither of them believe in the realization of their agreement that the Epic of Virgil should be completed after his recovery in Rome. In return, Virgil receives an assurance that his slaves will be free after his death.
After Augustus said goodbye, Virgil arranged his estate, possessions, property and poetry with Lucius and Plotius. He has come to terms with the fact that human works are imperfect and entrusts the friends with the task of editing the Aeneid . Lucius should only correct formal errors, but not make any changes or additions to the content. In between, the dying poet repeatedly falls into feverish dreams, in which he is carried the way from the previous day back through the city to the sea. In his imagination, different layers slide into one another: “Reality piled up behind reality: here the reality of friends and their language, behind that of an indelibly lovely memory in which a boy played, and behind that of the caves of misery in which Augustus had to live , behind it that of the threatening brittle tangle of lines, spread out over beings, over worlds and but-worlds, behind it the reality of the flower groves, oh, and behind it, unknowable, unknowable the real reality [...] the reality of the re-emerging creation, overpowered by the star of the inexplicable, the reality of home ”.
IV Ether - The homecoming
In his traumatic state, Virgil's journey to death continues on a boat across the sea, which is increasingly lost in the haze of infinity. The boy Lysania is standing at the bow, Plotius is rowing and the helmsman in the stern gives the direction. Their figures become more and more transparent and gradually dissolve. In the hyperbolic formulations known from the first two chapters, the impressions of the dying are circumscribed, but this time there are paradisiacal associations of eternity such as the “doubling of being”, a “silence on a higher level” and the “second infinity”, the “infinity of true light "With" higher [m] knowledge at a higher level ". The boat leaves its intermediate realm with him: “The banks remained behind, and that was an easy farewell to human existence and living”, “Farewell to the transformed unchangeable,” Dissolution and “unification of outer face and inner face”, the “transformation of the end to Beginning, transformation of the symbol back into the archetype ”. Plotia Hieria merges with the boy Lysanias into a figure, who hurries ahead of Virgil through the gleam of the sky of "the most transparent finality". It leads him to a coast and as souls they wander through an idyllic paradise garden in which all earthly spatial and spiritual ideas disappear in an all-harmony. Then he experiences the regression of life in several metamorphoses: In mutual reflection, Plotia and he merge into one person, his consciousness expands in a kind of natural mysticism to include animal and vegetative elements. The brightly radiated garden changes in the night to a water-flooded thicket with an "incessantly renewing sprout and gears", to a primordial darkness with a star dome and sun "flowing at the same time" in infinite space. The firmament and vegetation sprawling upwards wrestle with each other. He looks “up into the face of heaven” and sees the star of the east, “whose infinite shine was his companion”, but star after star plunges into the vegetation. The vegetation withers to a bare stone landscape under a "breathtaking, breathless world night". He himself becomes a mud-stone rock, on which the star of the morning is sunk into the forehead as a third seeing eye over the two blind ones. The solidified liquefies again and he sinks into the "forgetting infinity". The melted is brought back into the sky dome as liquid light, and he floats as an eye in the room and corresponds to the big eye in the opening dome. In the stage of the “nothing giving birth” he receives the “order to turn around” and a new creation begins with paradise, this time combined with mother-son symbolism with associations with the image of Christ and a hope of redemption. "[T] he ring of time had closed". As a final realization he hears nothingness and the “pure word” erupting from all: “He couldn't hold onto it [...] it was inconceivably inexpressible for him, because it was beyond language”.
Quotes
- The light is bigger than the earth.
- Only what is at rest is capable of pointing the way.
- Only in error does man become a seeker.
- The more rejected he [man] becomes, the more mortal he becomes.
- Beauty cannot live without applause; Truth avoids applause.
- Poetry comes from the twilight.
- The slave worships his master's gods.
- But what is truly done once belongs to everyone.
- It is the infinite that sustains all connections in beings.
- Much of it only takes on its real, initially only anticipated meaning over time.
- Those who love are beyond their limits.
Testimonials
Mostly before the novel was published, most likely as a result of the dialogue with the publisher's editor, Broch commented on the text on various publishing occasions. But some of these well-intentioned justifications were only published in the appendix of subsequent editions. In those papers from the years 1939 to 1946 the same phrases are sometimes used.
- Broch judges his Virgil as "a difficult book", the reading of which "confuses his unfortunate readers from the start".
- In the 2nd Kp. Virgil overhears his childhood landscape and himself in it - as an eight-year-old in Cremona in the winter time and confesses that he has overheard death all his life. This admission of his object of observation fits in with Broch's declarations in his self-testimonies that Virgil is the extremely difficult poetic "approach to death".
- While Virgil descends deep into the inner world to his “vegetative roots” in the second book (The Descent), in the third book (The Expectation) he once again deals with the environment.
- Broch hopes that the searching, ethical person Virgil might be of support to the reader in a "time of deep fragmentation of values".
- Regarding the style in Virgil : “In any language, clarity is only the fruit of a development. Therefore, I am happy to admit that I have not completely ... finished with this task. "
- Broch names 21 Virgil quotes that he inserted into the text.
- Broch's comments are definitely worth reading. After reading it, they partially illuminate the “environment”. Here is an example. In Virgil's conversation with Augustus about philosophy and poetry, the novel only suggests why he went to Athens. The reader can find the reason in the comments. Virgil, versatile, was not only a writer, but also a. a. also philosopher. In Athens, the city of Plato , the poet had sought the place and tranquility to philosophize.
shape
The length of the sentences and the profuse use of pleonasms are noticeable, e.g. B. "fleeting volatility", "grieving sadness", "indulgent enjoyment", "most profound background", "more terrible horror", "unforgettable unforgettable", "stone petrification", "the content without content", "the really real", " blind blindness ”.
reception
- Hannah Arendt , who was also a friend of Hermann Broch, informed him in a letter from 1946: “You see, this is the greatest poetic achievement of the time since Kafka's death, because it persistently clings to the little fundamentally simple. "
- Thomas Mann said, according to Dieter Lohr , that the Virgil was "one of the most unusual and thorough experiments".
- According to Imre Trencsényi-Waldapfel, “it was not the artist's dissatisfaction, but the disappointment of the people” that gave Virgil the idea of destroying his poem.
- Dietrich Simon understands the novel "as a self-questioning of an individual". a. about "thinking about the function of art".
- Walter Jens writes: “Behind Virgil stands Hermann Broch” and analyzes the “musical language”. Jens sums up the content of the novel in the shortest possible way: "For Broch love is identical with reality, is the only reality apart from death."
- Hans-Dieter Gelfert quotes the first sentence of the novel and says that the contemporary criticism, who compared him with Ulysses by James Joyce, could have recognized that he had to be overtaken by "the fate of a pure seminar subject" because of the "ambitious [ n], a style consciously striving for the highest level, which German critics and educated citizens “saw as a“ quality feature ”. But this style only loses if it "is spiced with irony as with Thomas Mann,] [...] the character of stylistic show gymnastics".
- In 2005, Dieter E. Zimmer continued the line of the more casual, feuilletonistic swipes and cited the mean sentence length of 91 words, "which would overwhelm even the most willing reader".
- For Karl Ove Knausgård , The Death of Virgil is “one of the most important novels of modern times of the 20th century”.
literature
Quoted edition
- Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil. In: Paul Michael Lützeler (Ed.), Hermann Broch. Annotated work edition , Vol. 4, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 4th edition 1986, pp. 7–454. ISBN 3-518-06796-6 .
German-language first edition
- Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil. Pantheon Books, New York 1945.
expenditure
- Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil. Rhein-Verlag, Zurich 1947
- Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil. Modern Book Club, Darmstadt 1961
- Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil. People and World, Berlin 1978
- Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1980
- Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil. Novel. in Paul Michael Lützeler (Ed.): Annotated work edition. Novels and short stories , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (5th edition) 2007. ISBN 978-3-518-38866-2
Secondary literature
- Paul Michael Lützeler : 1937: Hermann Broch writes a narrative entitled "The Return of Virgil", thus beginning an eight-year project that culminates in the novel "The Death of Virgil". In: Sander L. Gilman , Jack Zipes (ed.): Yale companion to Jewish writing and thought in German culture 1096-1996. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997, pp. 537-543
- Walter Jens : Instead of a literary history. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf and Zurich 1998. ISBN 3-538-07064-4
- Durs Grünbein : Don't trust the cheerfulness, the truth is serious, in: FAZ of April 4, 2009, p. Z3
Web links
- Book review by Jürgen Heizmann: Ancient and Modern in Hermann Broch's "Death of Virgil"
- Brief discussion in English: The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch
Individual evidence
- ^ Paul Michael Lützeler (ed.): Hermann Broch. Annotated work edition , Volume 4, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 4th edition 1986, pp. 516-518.
- ^ Lützeler: Werkausgabe , Vol. 4, p. 519 f.
- ^ Lützeler: Werkausgabe , Vol. 4, p. 3.
- ^ The first three versions in: Paul Michael Lützeler, Brochs "Tod des Virgil" , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 1988. ISBN 3-518-38595-X .
- ↑ Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors, Vol. 4, 1996, pp. 73–85, p. 74.
- ↑ The references are included in the source text as "invisible comments".
- ↑ Source, p. 17, 8. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 20, 10. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 97, 15. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 137, 2nd Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 232, 7. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 243, 9. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 248, 8. Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 295, 12. Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 305, 15. Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 321, 5th Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 327, 12. Zvo
- ↑ Source, pp. 455-505.
- ↑ Hermann Broch: The death of Virgil. In: Paul Michael Lützeler (Ed.), Hermann Broch. Annotated work edition , vol. 4, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 4th edition 1986, p. (Hereinafter referred to as “source”), p. 464.
- ↑ Source, p. 485.
- ↑ Source, p. 459, p. 464, p. 472, p. 473.
- ↑ Source, pp. 457/8
- ↑ Source, p. 463 below
- ↑ Source, p. 484, 16. Zvu
- ↑ Source, pp. 499/500
- ↑ Source, p. 460 below
- ↑ Source, p. 80, 1st Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 114, 9. Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 117, 11. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 123, 1. Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 138, 6th Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 144, 12. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 150, 16. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 190, 3. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 231, 5. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 235, 21. Zvo
- ↑ Hannah Arendt: Truth only exists in two. Letters to friends . Ed .: Ingeborg Nordmann. Piper, Munich 2013, p. 54 .
- ^ Quotation from the short discussion of Dieter Lohr in Hermann Broch: The death of Virgil
- ↑ Quoted by Dietrich Simon in his afterword to the Berlin 1978 edition, p. 557, 20. Zvo
- ↑ Dietrich Simon in his epilogue to the Berlin 1978 edition, p. 602, 4th Zvu and p. 603, 6th Zvo
- ↑ Jens, p. 212, 5th Zvu
- ↑ Jens, p. 217 middle
- ↑ Jens, p. 226, 3rd Zvu
- ↑ Hans-Dieter Gelfert: What is good literature? How to tell good books from bad ones. 2nd revised edition. CH Beck, Munich 2006 [1. Ed. 2004], pp. 80f.
- ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer, Language in times of incorrigibility, Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, 2005 , p. 77.
- ↑ Fight. Munich 2017. p. 697.
- ↑ The cover illustration of the first edition comes from the book illustrator Edward McKnight Kauffer .