Lost Son - Hermann Broch

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Valentin’s sketches belonged to the type of popular art that Armand liked. Broch also reacted loyally when his son failed his bachot examination for the first time, keeping the bad news a secret from family and friends and devoting all his efforts to arranging a repeat of the exam. Armand was granted an extension of his study at the Collège de Normandie, and when that didn’t work, the father financed a year’s study in Paris for his son. Ultimately Broch was even understanding of Armand’s desire to turn from mathematics to focus on philosophy. Here, too, he provided him every imaginable support. Not only did he recommend books on Kantianism and Neo-Kantianism, and try to make them accessible to him, but he also appealed to prominent scholars at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, to take Armand into their seminars and private tutorials. Thus, in spring 1928 Jean Baruzi, a leading sociologist of religion of his time, became Armand’s mentor. He also was allowed to attend private seminars with Maurice Blondel, a luminary in the field of theist metaphysics, and seminars with André Siegfried, one of the founders of modern political science. Broch was aware that all this effort was not required to pass the bachot. However, since he thought that his son had a genuine interest in philosophical inquiry, he tried to help him with all the means at his disposal.

      Hermann Broch’s interest in psychoanalysis began in 1928. He entered analysis in Vienna with a pupil of Freud’s, Hedwig Schaxel-Hoffer, and these consultations helped him with his decision to become a writer. Since Broch suspected that his son suffered from acute learning disabilities, around the same time he paid for Armand to have an expensive analysis with Rudolph Maurice Löwenstein, the renowned proponent of Ego psychology and the co-founder of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. (Löwenstein gave psychoanalytic training to Jacques Lacan, among others.) But Armand felt the psychologist didn’t understand him and presumably was unable to help solve or reduce his alleged learning disabilities, and so young Broch’s excursions into philosophy, the history of religion, and political science remained dilettantish and half-hearted. They were of no use for passing the bachot examination. Perhaps he had only feigned an interest in philosophy so his father would finance his year in Paris: a series of remarks in his letters of 1928 reveal that Armand cared more for the pleasures of life in the French capital than for the work of his seminars and exam preparations. All his plans were eventually ruined, as Broch correctly notes in the last of the letters in this collection, by the unbridled hedonism of his son.

      And this, in fact, the Brochs could no longer afford. The letters between father and son attest to the dwindling fortunes of the Broch family. Up until 1924/25, the economic boom of the postwar years continued. The weaving mill at Teesdorf had ordered great quantities of cotton from abroad before the First World War, and after the war these were delivered at 1914 prices. So at first, because of the inflationary effects of the war, between 1919 and 1924, the cotton-weaving factory brought in great profits to the Brochs. But this windfall stopped by the mid-1920s. Now the profit margins grew slimmer and slimmer, and the start of the economic crises brought the firm into difficulty. If the economic upheavals of 1924 had been predictable, Armand probably never would have been sent to the expensive Collège de Normandie (tuition 12,000 francs a year). While father and son both chose the Orient Express as a matter of course for their travels between Paris and Vienna in 1924/25, by 1926 they could barely afford to travel second class on passenger trains, and Broch demanded that Armand travel third class. Of course this mode of travel was kept a dark secret from his fellow students and teachers, who would have ridiculed and despised Armand if they had known he used such a “proletarian” mode of travel. Traveling third class becomes a theme for a whole series of these letters. The son protested with every imaginable argument, but the father remained firm. In 1924 Armand had been promised that he would be given a chic Austro-Fiat (the dream car of his childhood) for good scholastic performance, but now even his request for an auxiliary motor for his bicycle was turned down. Hardly a single letter left the desk in Teesdorf for Clères in 1926 that did not discuss the economic downturn, that did not mention cares and catastrophes, hard times, pressing money problems, financing difficulties, the hopelessness of the industrial crisis, labor unrest, tough negotiations in the sale of the factory, and finally the modest remains of the family fortune. The Teesdorf mill was sold in 1927 to Broch’s boyhood friend Felix Wolf, who owned mills and foundries in the Tannwald in Czechoslovakia. This was a depressing fact for Armand, for until then he had seen himself as the sole heir to the factory and had always hoped to take over the firm when he was an adult.

      Father and son were unable to find a basis for a common understanding. The way Broch saw it, his son had failed at the very start of his life, and Broch had failed as a pedagogue. Their relationship was complicated by Armand’s sense that he had been disinherited by the sale of the factory. So it was no wonder that he looked about for a substitute father, whom he found in his uncle Rudolf von Rothermann, his mother’s brother, who was an estate owner and beet sugar producer in the Burgenland of Hungary. Rudolf was childless, and he had taken a fancy to Armand, whose philosophical attitude of dolce far niente he shared. He adopted Armand in the early 1930s, and the uncle’s estate in Csepreg became a kind of second home for the young man. Armand was over twenty-one by then and did not need the permission of his parents for the adoption; and in any event they were not opposed. The reason for the adoption was in part to allow Rudolf von Rothermann to leave his considerable fortune to his nephew. (This never occurred, however, since after the war the Hungarian government seized all private holdings like this one.) After the adoption, Armand called himself H. F. (Hermann Friedrich) Broch de Rothermann. Of course, he could not resign himself to working on the estate, which would presumably have involved managing the estate’s production facilities, and took to making peregrinations throughout Europe: Austria, Italy, Greece, and France.

      By the summer of 1928, when the correspondence between Clères or Paris and Teesdorf or Vienna broke off, father and son were both facing ruin: Armand was nearly eighteen and didn’t know what to do with his life, but the father, too, just forty-two, was also in a precarious situation. He had broken off his old career as an industrialist, but there was no guarantee that the start of his new career as a writer would be successful. In addition, the ten-year relationship with his mistress, Ea von Allesch, was ending. From this point forward, father and son attempted to go their separate ways, the father with more success than the son, who, in the years after leaving his uncle’s estate at Csepreg, started countless jobs with various agencies and firms (primarily in the tourism or automotive sales industries), but whatever he tried—at least up to his fortieth year—never lasted long. He remained as much a financial burden on his father as ever. Occasionally they would work on something together, for instance the stage comedy Es bleibt alles beim Alten (Things Never Really Change) of 1934 (a comedy with a biographical strain, dealing, as it does, with an indulgent father and spoiled son, for which the son suggested the title), and eventually they shared the common fate of exile in America.

      In exile, too, father fared better than son. After his detention in Austria by the Nazis in 1938, Broch eventually was able to flee first to Britain, partly through the intercession of James Joyce, and finally to America, with the help of Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, among others. When Broch died in 1951, Armand was forty, and it was only then, it seemed, that he was able to mold a professional career for himself. He became a successful tour guide with luxury travel firms catering to socially prominent clients and members of the jet set, groups whose peculiarities he had become familiar with in his days at the Collège de Normandie. Having lived for extended periods in France, Italy, Greece, and America, he spoke the languages of these places fluently. In a surprising show of enthusiasm for work, he founded a translation bureau in New York and worked as a simultaneous translator at international conferences. And, importantly, he proved to be a worthy literary executor of his father’s work. In old age he took up literary translation, bringing works of Elias Canetti and Gregor von Rezzori from German to English. The crowning achievement of this activity was his translation, The Spell, published in 1987, of his father’s 1935 novel Die Verzauberung.

      Tennis remained Armand’s favorite hobby, the sport in which he had enjoyed his first successes at the Collège de Normandie and in which he won many trophies. He also remained a lover of fancy cars into old age. Armand was indebted to his father for his school years in Clères and Paris, and without his help he would not have received the documents he needed to emigrate in 1941, when he was interned in a French camp for enemy aliens. Broch

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