The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  7. Reciprocal rights and duties:

  (a) Herr Huguenau shall act as publisher and editor. The commercial and financial conduct of the enterprise rests exclusively in his hands. He has furthermore the right to accept and reject articles for the paper as he thinks fit. In return for these services the firm guarantees him a minimum salary of 175 M. per month, that is to say, 2100 M. yearly.

  (b) During the period covered by his contract Herr Esch shall for his part keep the books of the firm and act as assistant editor.

  Esch had to agree to the limitation of his editorial powers out of consideration for the industrial group; his book-keeping powers represented a sort of compensation.

  8. The rooms in Herr Esch’s house hitherto employed in the production of the paper shall be placed at the disposal of the firm for a period of three years. Furthermore Herr Esch shall put at the disposition of the editor for the same period two comfortably furnished front rooms with breakfast in the aforesaid house. Herr Esch shall receive from the firm’s revenues a reimbursement of 25 marks per month for these services.

  9. Should the company be converted at a later stage into a limited liability or joint stock company, the gist of the aforesaid conditions shall be respected.

  With this projected conversion of the business into a company compelled to audit its accounts, Huguenau’s house of cards of course would fall to pieces. But Huguenau did not worry his head about such trifles; for him the whole thing was a perfectly legitimate piece of business, and the only item that struck him as verging on sharp-practice was the one giving him a present of free quarters with his breakfast thrown in, but he was elated at bringing it off. Esch, on the other hand, was grieved because the contract had not run to ten clauses. They thought for a while and then they found the tenth:

  10. Any difference of interpretation which may arise out of this contract shall be decided by public arbitration.

  So in an astonishingly short time—it was the 14th of May—Huguenau was able to report that the purchase had been smoothly settled. The local subscribers did not hesitate to pay up their full capital investment of 6600 marks; of this 4000 was allotted to Herr Esch in accordance with the terms of the contract; as a prudent and solid business man Herr Huguenau allocated 1600 marks for working expenses, while as for the remaining 1000, he embellished it with the title of floating capital and employed it for his own uses. The interim share certificates were issued to the shareholders, and in a few days it was duly announced that from the first of June the paper would appear under its new editorship and in a new make-up. Huguenau had managed to induce the Major to inaugurate the new era with a leading article, and the festal number was also embellished partly with patriotic, partly with political-economical, but in greater part with patriotic-economical pronouncements from the pens of the local subscribers.

  But to celebrate the new epoch Huguenau installed himself in the two rooms prepared for him in Esch’s house.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  DISINTEGRATION OF VALUES (4)

  The style of an epoch, it is certain, affects not merely the artist; it penetrates all contemporary activities, and crystallizes itself not only in works of art but in all the values which make up the culture of the age, and of which works of art constitute only an insignificant part; yet one is fairly at a loss when confronted by the concrete question: in how far is the style of an age incarnated in the average man, in a business man, for example, of the type of Wilhelm Huguenau? Has the man who deals in pipes of wine or textiles anything in common with the feeling for style that is evident in the shops built by Messel, or Peter Behrens’s turbine power-houses? His private taste will certainly run to pinnacled villas and rooms cluttered with knick-knacks, and even if it should not, he remains a member of the public, which, however it may comport itself, is separated by a great gulf from the artist.

  Yet when one regards more closely a man such as Huguenau, one sees that the gulf between him and the artist does not affect the real point at issue. One may certainly assume that in epochs which had a supreme feeling for style the lack of understanding between the artist and his contemporaries was less strongly marked than it is to-day, that for instance a new picture by Dürer in the Sebaldus Church excited general joy and admiration among even the Huguenaus of the time; for there is plenty of evidence that at that period the artist and his public were bound together in a very different kind of community, and that the painter understood the clothier and the saddler at least as profoundly as they enjoyed looking at his pictures. Of course this cannot be verified, and it may be, too, that many revolutionary spirits received but little recognition from their contemporaries; perhaps that was the case with Grünewald. But such exceptions are not particularly relevant, and in any case whether an understanding between the artist and his contemporaries ruled in the Middle Ages or not becomes a matter of indifference in face of the fact that misunderstanding and understanding alike are just as truly expressions of the legendary “Time Spirit” as a work of art in itself or any other contemporary activity.

  But if this be so, then it is also a matter of indifference what direction is taken by the architectural or other taste of a business agent of Huguenau’s type, and the fact that Huguenau had a certain æsthetic pleasure in machinery is likewise without importance; the sole question of any moment is whether his ordinary actions, his ordinary thoughts, were influenced by the same laws that in another sphere produced a style devoid of ornament, or evolved the theory of relativity, or led up to the philosophical conclusions of neo-Kantianism,—in other words, whether even the thought of an epoch is not a vehicle for its style, governed by that same style which attains visible and palpable expression in works of art; which amounts to the assertion that truth, the ultimate product of thought, is equally a vehicle for the style of the epoch in which it has been discovered and in which it is valid, precisely like all the other values of that epoch.

  And indeed it cannot be otherwise. For it is not merely that, seen from a certain standpoint, truth is just a value among other values; truth also governs all the actions of mankind, which are, one may say, steeped in truth: whatever a man does is plausible to him at every moment, he justifies it to himself with reasons which in his eyes represent the truth, he proves it to himself logically, and—at least in the very moment of action—his actions are always justifiable. If his actions, then, are dominated by the style of his age, so must his thoughts be; we need not decide (from the practical or epistemological standpoint) whether the act has preceded the thought or the thought the act, the motion of life the motion of reason, the sum the cogito, or the cogito the sum—all we can take into account is the rational logic of thought, for the irrational logic of action, in which style is embodied, can be perceived only in the finished product, in the result.

  But with this extremely intimate connection between the substance of logical thought and the positive and negative values which action embodies, the scheme of thought which governs a man like Huguenau and compels him to act in one particular way, which determines his business methods for him and makes him draft contracts from a certain standpoint—that is to say, all the inner logic of a man like Huguenau—is given its own place in the whole logical framework of the epoch, and brought into essential relation with whatever logic permeates the productive spirit of the epoch and its visible style. And even although that rational thought, that rational logic, may be nothing but a thin and as it were one-dimensional thread which has to be wound round and round the multiplicity of dimensions presented by life, nevertheless that thought, projected in the abstraction of logical space, is an abbreviated expression of life’s multiplicity and prevailing style, much in the same way as ornament is an abbreviated spatial expression of the visible style-product,—a projected abbreviation of all the works that embody style.

  Huguenau is a man who acts with singleness of purpose. He organizes his day with singleness of purpose, he carries on his business affairs with his eye singly on his purpose, he evolves and conclud
es his contracts with his eye singly on his purpose. Behind all his purposefulness there lies a logic that is completely stripped of ornament, and the fact that this logic should demand the elimination of all ornament does not seem a too daring conclusion to draw; indeed it actually appears as good and just as every other necessary conclusion. And yet this elimination of all ornament involves nothingness, involves death, and a monstrous dissolution is concealed behind it in which our age is crumbling away.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  The rebel must not be confused with the criminal, though society may often stigmatize the rebel as a criminal, and though the criminal may sometimes pose as a rebel to dignify his actions. The rebel stands alone: the most faithful son of that society which is the target of his hostility and rejection, he sees in the world he combats a totality of living relationships whose threads have merely been tangled in confusion by some diabolical wickedness, and it is his chosen task to disentangle them and order them according to his own better ideas. Thus did Luther make his protest against the Pope, and so Esch might with justice be called a rebel.

  This is by no means, however, a sufficient cause to asperse Huguenau, on the other hand, as a criminal. That would be not only to slander him, but also to do him grievous injustice. From the military standpoint a deserter is of course a criminal, and undoubtedly there are convinced militarists who loathe the deserter with the same intensity as, let us say, a farmer loathes a chicken thief, and like the farmer they will recognize nothing less than the death penalty as a just punishment for such a transgressor. Nevertheless there is here a principal and objective distinction: the essence of a crime lies in the fact that it can be repeated; and the fact that it can be repeated characterizes it as nothing else than a social profession. Criminalism is directed only in a very loose sense against the existing social order, even when its battle against law and order assumes American forms; to the thief and the coiner the slogans of communism cannot mean very much, and the burglar who goes about his work of nights on noiseless rubber soles is a handworker like any other handworker, he is conservative like all handworkers, and even the profession of the murderer, who with his knife between his teeth climbs up the unaccommodating wall, is not directed against the whole community, but is simply a private affair which he has to settle with his victim. There is no attempt to upset the existing regime. Proposals for the improvement or amelioration of the penal laws have never emanated from the criminal classes, closely as these things may concern them above all others. If it had been left to the criminals, we should still be hanging thieves and coiners on the gallows, and we should not even have got to the point of distinguishing murder from manslaughter, in spite of the fact that criminals usually show a fine feeling for the nuances of their professional exploits, and are delighted when the penal code adapts itself to their fine-drawn distinctions and exactions; but the very fact that they demand a corresponding distinction of penalties, the gallows for one crime, the wheel and the red-hot brand for another, the cat-o’-nine tails or the stocks for a third,—this simple and clumsy desire for recognition, in reality nothing but the groping aspiration of uneducated men who cannot express themselves properly, and who awkwardly, in symbol as it were, demand something that represents only a small fraction of what their hearts are set on, though they scarcely know what it is; this very fact betrays the goal of their aspiration: which is that the border-land they live in, that border-land on the frontier of a world full of good ordinances, should be admitted into that greater, that good, that almost beloved order which they do not want to alter; and if criminals can conceive of such an admittance and acknowledgment only within a framework of regulated and severe penalties, yet that proves them to be aspiring and social by nature, men who are moved simply by the desire to avoid frontier friction, to go about their vocation in peace and quiet, and to accommodate themselves more and more uncomplainingly, inconspicuously and sensitively to their calling, whose point of reference is the whole structure of society and the existing order.

  Rebel and criminal, they both bring their own order, their own conceptions of value into the existing regime. But while the rebel wants to subjugate the existing regime, the criminal seeks to fit himself into it. The deserter belongs neither to the one category nor the other, or perhaps he belongs to both. Huguenau may have felt this, now that he was faced with the task of setting up his own little world of reality on the outposts of that greater order and of adapting the one to the other, and even if he agreed that deserters should be sentenced to death by rifle fire, that was irrelevant for the time being, and the fact that the Kur-Trier Herald represented in his eyes a part of a great machine, say, a brass-plated joint where the bars met and were clamped together, a point at which the country where his own law ruled met that other one whose laws he reverenced and loved, into which he was resolved to make his way and in which he wished to dwell; this fact was not merely nonsensical; it was no more nonsensical than the language of his dreams. And all these motives were jointly responsible for the need that Huguenau felt to get hold of the Kur-Trier Herald; they also provide an explanation for the complete success of his transaction.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  (Leading Article in the Kur-Trier Herald of 1st June 1918.)

  THE TURNING-POINT IN THE DESTINY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE.

  Reflections by

  Town Commandant Major Joachim von Pasenow.

  Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him.—MATTHEW iv. II.

  Although the change in the editorial policy of this paper is but a trifling occurrence compared with the mighty event whose anniversary we may soon be seeing for the fourth time, yet it seems to me that, as so often is the case, we must here too regard the smaller event as a mirror of the greater.

  For we too and this paper of ours stand at a parting of the ways, we too have the desire to take a new and better path which will lead us nearer to the truth, and we nurse the faith that as far as it is permitted to human powers we shall

  where is the devil whom we must drive out from amidst us, where the angel whom we can call to our aid?

  It beseems an old soldier to speak his mind bluntly, even at the risk that what he says may seem untimely to many people

  to free ourselves from the iron embrace of the enemy nations, but also to release the Fatherland and with it the whole world from the unclean spirit which

  not to be wondered at that the nations should be visited with hundredfold dissension and thousandfold disunion. For in the member with which you have sinned shall you be punished.

  I hear someone objecting that in that case we should simply submit to the punishment, endure the scourge, and turn the other cheek to the persecut-

  just as Luther’s struggle against a Popedom which had grown corrupt was a justified struggle. And does not our master Clausewitz teach us that the spirit of righteousness is one of the weapons of war, which

  it shall be said of our struggle: “His foes fled in terror before him, the evil-doer was abashed, and salvation was in his hands” (Maccabees iii. 6), yet we must not fix our thoughts on the pursuit of the flying foe, but on salvation, the salvation of our own as of other nations. We have been shortsighted, and in very truth all our sacrifices will have been in vain, if they are regarded frivolously, and God’s

  possesses that outward freedom which we have to fight for, only when at the same time that inward and truly divine freedom is vouchsafed to it. And we shall achieve that freedom not on our battlefields, victorious as we may be there, but we shall find it only in our hearts. For that inward freedom is commensurate with the faith which the world stands now in danger of losing. So the war is not only

  according to the Scriptures? “Good and pious works will never make a man good and pious, but a good and pious man will do good and pious works,” asserted Luther, writing of Christian freedom, and he goes on: “But if works can make no man pious, and a man must be pious before he can do good works, then it is evident that only the fait
h granted us by infinite grace through Christ

  and John says (iii. 30) “He must increase, but I must decrease,” and so it was with the war, which had to increase that our faith might decrease, and until our faith is re-born to blossom anew, until that happens this war may not be able to come to an end. Evil for the mere sake of evil

  and it almost seems to us that first the black hordes will have to be let loose on the whole world, so that out of the fires of the Apocalypse the new brotherhood and fellowship may arise, so that once more the kingdom of Christ may be established, and new and glorious.

  the black troops, armed with unchivalrous weapons, sent out against us, yet these are only the vanguard. They shall be followed by the black hosts, by the terrors of the Johannine Apocalypse. For as long as the white races are incapable of overcoming this inertia of feeling, and casting from them