The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  In this predicament of the European spirit Huguenau was scarcely involved at all, but he was involved in the prevailing uncertainty. For the irrational in man has an affinity with the irrational in the world; and although the uncertainty in the world is, so to speak, a rational uncertainty, often, indeed, merely an economic uncertainty, yet it springs from the irrationality of the super-rational, from an independent reason that strives towards infinity in every province of human activity, and so, reaching the super-rational limits of its infinity, overthrows itself and becomes irrational, passing beyond comprehension. Currency hitherto accepted becomes incalculable, standards fluctuate, and, in spite of all the explanations that can be adduced to account for the irrational, what is finite fails to keep pace with the infinite and no reasonable means avail to reduce the irrational uncertainty of the infinite to sense and reason again. It is as though the infinite awakens to a concrete and independent life of its own, informed and drawn out by the Absolute that glimmers on the farthest horizon in this hour between downfall and uprising, in this magical hour of death and birth. And Huguenau, although he might avert his eyes from that distant dawn and refuse to acknowledge anything of the kind, could not but feel the icy breath sweeping over the world, freezing it to rigidity and withering all meaning out of the things of the world. And when Huguenau followed each morning the chronicle of events in his newspaper he did so with the uneasiness of all newspaper readers who greedily clutch at the facts presented to them, especially those facts that are supplemented by illustrations, in the daily and renewed hope that the mass of facts may fill the emptiness of a world that has fallen silent, the emptiness of a soul that has fallen silent. They read their newspapers and in their hearts is the terror that comes from awakening every morning to loneliness, for the speech of the old community life has failed them and that of the new is too faint for them to hear. They sustain, indeed, a pose of understanding and clear-sightedness by sharply criticizing the political and social situation or the working of the legal system, and they even exchange opinions on these subjects during the course of the day; but in reality they are without a language, standing mutely between what has been and what is not yet; they give no credence to words and require them to be confirmed by pictures, they have even ceased to believe in the adequacy of their own utterances, and thus caught between an end and a beginning they know only that the logic of facts is ruthless and that the Law remains unassailable: there is no soul, however degenerate, however base, however Philistine and devoted to the tritest dogmas, that can avoid this knowledge and this terror,—like a child surprised and overwhelmed by loneliness, a prey to the terror of the creature that has begun to die, man must go seeking the fordable passage that shall at last assure his life and his safety. Nowhere does he find help. And it is in vain that he strives continuously to find a haven in some partial system; in vain he may expect to be sheltered from uncertainty in old romantic structures, or hope that in a partial revolution all that is known and familiar to him will yield only with the utmost slowness, in a kind of painless transition, to what is inexorably alien,—he can get no help, for he finds himself cozened by the false glamour of a sham communal life, and the deeper, more secret relationship he is groping for flutters from the hand that thought to grasp it; and even if in his disappointment he takes refuge in the monetary-commercial system still he cannot escape disappointment: even that most characteristic mode of the bourgeois existence, that partial system which is hardier than all others because it promises an unshakable unity in the world, the unity that man needs to reassure his uncertainty—two marks are always more than one mark and a sum of eight thousand francs is made up of many francs and yet is a whole, a rational organon in terms of which the world can be reckoned up—even that hardy and enduring growth, in which the bourgeois desires so strongly to believe even while all currencies are tottering, is beginning to wither away; the irrational cannot be kept out at any point, and no vision of the world can any longer be reduced to a sum in rational addition. And even Wilhelm Huguenau, now a prosperous business man risen to municipal honours, a man whose first inquiry about everything in life usually concerned its price and the profit it might yield, even Wilhelm Huguenau, although he thought it quite rational in such times of financial insecurity to show a more suspicious face to the world, even he found himself at times ironically shrugging off something, or with a sweeping gesture trying to brush away something that, strangely enough, he could not account for at all; and then in sudden perplexity he would ask “What is money?” and sometimes even refuse credit to a customer, after mustering him with a sharp, suspicious look, simply because he took a dislike to the man or objected to something in his expression, a sarcastic twitch of the lips, perhaps—and whether this capriciousness served him well or ill, whether it drove a potentially good customer into the arms of a rival or got rid of a bad customer at the right moment, quite apart from all practical considerations it was an abrupt method, though, perhaps, a lucid one, that resulted from a kind of short-circuiting; it was in any case unusual in business dealings, undoubtedly irrational, and probably largely responsible for the gulf that imperceptibly began to widen between Huguenau and his fellow-citizens as if he were isolated in a dead zone of silence. Huguenau had but the vaguest inkling of its existence, yet its outlines became less vague and almost palpable as soon as he found himself in any social gathering, in a cinema, or in a beer-hall where young people were dancing, or at banquets celebrating the anniversary of the French triumph: on such occasions Huguenau, himself a probable future Burgomaster, would sit among the other notables at the flower-decked table and watch the dancers with a serious, vacant, boyish gaze behind his thick eyeglasses, and although he was by no means of an age to renounce dancing, yet he could hardly believe it himself when he whispered to his neighbour (as he never omitted to do) that at one time he had been a good enough dancer. For whether he was sitting in such a patriotic assembly or strolling on Sundays with his eldest boy along the Strassburger Allee to watch the bicycle races, he found himself falling irresistibly into a strange state of uneasiness, so that he even began to attend social gatherings merely to put himself to the test; it was an uneasiness in which things imperceptibly moved out of their places and in which every social gathering, although it ought to have presented an integral aspect, began to disintegrate into something that was disconcertingly multifarious, something that somebody or other, by means of decorations, garlands and banners, had combined into an artificial unity, against his own better judgment. And if Huguenau had not shied off from such out-of-the-way thoughts he would undoubtedly have discovered that there is not a single idea, not a single name, that has a corresponding concrete unity underlying it; he would certainly have discovered that the unity of any event and the integrity of the world are guaranteed merely by enigmatic, although visible, symbols, which are necessary because without them the visible world would fall asunder into unnameable, bodiless, dry layers of cold and transparent ash—and so Huguenau would have perceived the curse of the casual, of the fortuitous, that spreads itself over things and their relations to each other, making it impossible to think of any arrangement that would not be equally arbitrary and fortuitous: would not the racing bicyclists have to scatter to the four winds if they were no longer combined by a common uniform and a common club badge? Huguenau did not ask such a question, for it exceeded the grasp of what might be called, not without reason, his private theology; yet the unasked question irritated him no less than the elusiveness of the experiences that worried him, and his irritation might, for instance, discharge itself in boxing his child on the ear for no reason at all on the way home. Having relieved his feelings in this manner, however, he found it easy to come back to sober reality, thus confirming Hegel’s maxim: “Real freedom of will is a harmony between the theoretical and the practical spirit.” In the best of tempers he would march back into the town, past the various churches out of which the congregations were just emerging, humming merrily to himself as he went
and beating time with his stick, and whenever he met an acquaintance he would greet him and say “Salut.”

  For everything ultimately depends on one’s relation to freedom, and even the pettiest and narrowest theology that extends merely far enough to make plausible the meanest actions of an empirical ego, in other words even the private theology of a Huguenau, is enlisted in the service of freedom, and regards freedom as the real centre of its deductions, its real mystic centre (and that was true for Huguenau at least from the day on which he deserted his trench in the grey dawn, thus following out an apparently irrational but none the less highly rational course of action in the service of freedom, so that everything he had striven towards since that day and everything he was yet to strive for in his life could be taken as a repetition of his actions in that first high-day and holiday mood): indeed it is almost as if freedom were in a lofty category by itself, soaring high above all that is rational and irrational, like an end and a beginning, resembling the Absolute with which its light is blended and yet which it surpasses, as if it were an ultimate, serene ray shining beyond the fiery caverns of the opening heavens. The irrational could never attach itself to the rational, nor the rational diffuse itself in the harmony of living feeling, were they not both partakers in an overarching and majestic Being which is at once the highest reality and the profoundest unreality: it is only in this conjunction of reality and unreality that the wholeness of the world and its form can be apprehended; it is the idea of freedom that justifies the continued rebirth of humanity, for it can never be realized on earth and the road that leads to it must ever be trodden anew. Oh, agonizing compulsion towards freedom! terrible and ever-renewed revolution of knowledge! which justifies the insurrection of Absolute against Absolute, the insurrection of life against reason—justifying reason when, apparently at variance with itself, it unleashes the absolute of the irrational against the absolute of the rational, justifying it by providing the final assurance that the unleashed irrational forces will once more combine into a value-system. There is no value-system that does not subordinate itself to freedom; even the most reduced system is groping towards freedom, even the outcast victim of all earthly loneliness and detachment, the man who achieves no more than the freedom to commit a murder, the freedom to enter prison, or at most the freedom of a deserter, even he, the man stripped of all values, on whom all earthly compulsions press—there is no man exposed to the breath of the Eternal who does not once see the star of freedom rising in the night of his isolation: each man must fulfil his dream, unhallowed or holy, and he does so to have his share of freedom in the darkness and dullness of his life. And so Huguenau often had the feeling that he was sitting in some pit or dark cavern looking out over a cold zone that lay like a girdle of loneliness around his station, while life streamed in distant pictures over the dusky firmament, and then he had a great yearning to creep out of his pen and share in the freedom and loneliness outside, the existence of which he vaguely guessed at as if it were a vision blown in from somewhere or other upon him alone; it was like a knowledge of the deepest community of the spirit into which that most profound loneliness must inevitably change, but it never got beyond the dull conviction that out there it would be somehow or other possible to compel people to be warm and friendly, to compel them by threats of murder or violence, or at least by a box on the ear, to accept him and to listen to his truth, which he was yet incapable of articulating. For even although he was scarcely distinguishable from others in his actions and his mode of life, even although he ran more and more surely on the lines that had been laid down for him in youth, and that he never thought of leaving again, even although it was an utterly carnal, yes, a solid life that was advancing in him towards death, yet in a certain sense it grew more lofty and airy as he felt himself daily more cut off and isolated while ceasing to suffer from the isolation: cut off from the world and yet in it, he saw men receding from him into regions ever more remote and more longed-for, but he made no attempt to explore that far country; and in thus resigning himself he again showed his complete likeness to all other mortals. For every man knows that human life does not stretch far enough for a journey to the end of the path that mounts like a spiral road to higher and higher reaches, the path on which all that has vanished behind one’s back rises again in front on a loftier level, only to fade into the distant haze with every fresh step one takes: that endless course of the closed circle and of fulfilment, that lucid reality in which things fall asunder and recede to the poles, to the uttermost limits of the world where all that has been sundered is again joined into one, where distance is again annulled and the irrational takes on its visible shape, where fear no more becomes longing and longing no more turns into fear, where the freedom of the self is received again into the Platonic freedom of God; that endless course of the closed circle and of fulfilment that can be trodden only by him who has fulfilled his nature—unattainable for any man.

  Unattainable for any man! And even if Huguenau had landed in a revolutionary instead of in a commercial system he would still have been barred from entering on the path of fulfilment. For murder remains murder, evil remains evil, and the Philistinism of a value-system whose field is restricted to the individual and his irrational impulses, that last product of every disintegration of values, remains the point of absolute degeneracy; the point, so to speak, of an invariant absolute zero that is common to all scales of value and all value-systems without reference to their mutual relativity, and that must be common to all of them since no value-system can be conceived unless in its idea and logical nature it observes the “condition of possible experience,” the empirical draft of a logical structure common to all systems and of an a priori immutability that is bound up with the Logos. And it almost seems like an outcrop of the same logical necessity that the transition from any value-system to a new one must pass through that zero-point of atomic dissolution, must take its way through a generation destitute of any connection with either the old or the new system, a generation whose very detachment, whose almost insane indifference to the suffering of others, whose stark denudation of values provides an ethical and so an historical justification for the ruthless rejection in times of revolution of all that is humane. And perhaps it must be so, since only such a silent and self-contained generation is able to endure the sight of the Absolute and the rising glare of freedom, the light that flares out over the deepest darkness, and only over the deepest darkness: the earthly reflection of the Absolute is like an image in a dark pool, and the earthly echo of its silence is the iron clangour of murder, which yet sends mute vibrations rolling like an impenetrable wall of deafening silence between man and man, so that no voice can rise beyond it or through it, and man must tremble. Dread reflection, dread echo of the Ratio bursting its way through to the Absolute! its ruthlessness finds an earthly counterpart in violence and mute force, and the rational immediacy of its divine end becomes on earth the immediacy of the irrational that forces men to reluctant yet dumb obedience; its endless chain of inquiry is reduced on earth to the single link of the irrational that asks no more questions but merely acts, setting out to destroy a community of life that has ceased to justify its existence, a so-called community devoid of force but filled with evil will, a community that drowns itself in blood and chokes in its own poison-gases. What a lonely death is the earthly counterpart of divine isolation! Man, exposed to the horror of unrestrained reason, bidden to serve it without comprehending it, caught in the toils of a process that develops far over his head, caught in the toils of his own irrationality, man is like the savage who is bewitched by black magic and cannot see the connection between means and effect, he is like the madman who cannot find his way out of the tangle of his Irrational and Super-rational, he is like the criminal who cannot find his way into the value-realities of the community he desires to enter. Irrevocably the past escapes him, irrevocably the future flees from him, and the droning of machines gives him no indication of the path to his goal that rises unattainable
and formless in the haze of the infinite, bearing aloft the black torch of the Absolute. Dread hour of death and of birth, dread hour of the Absolute sustained by a generation that has extinguished itself, a generation that knows nothing about the infinite into which it is driven by its own logic—inexperienced, helpless, and insensate, the men of this generation are delivered to the icy hurricane, they must forget in order to live and they do not know why they die. Their path is the path of Ahasuerus, their duty is his duty, their freedom is the freedom of the hunted creature and their aim is forgetfulness. Lost generation! as non-existent as Evil itself, featureless and traditionless in the morass of the indiscriminate, doomed to lose itself temporally, to have no tradition in an age that is making absolute history! Whatever the individual man’s attitude to the course of the revolution, whether he turns reactionary and clings to outworn forms, mistaking the æsthetic for the ethical as all conservatives do, or whether he holds aloof in the passivity of egoistic knowledge, or whether he gives himself up to his irrational impulses and applies himself to the destructive work of the revolution: