Dogsticks logo  
    Home        Book Reviews        Music        Photos        Kayaking Videos        Videos with Music        oBlog        Links        Contact    


Book Reviews - Review 215

Choose a category for a list of reviews. Notes | Books I Couldn't Finish | Random Review

Latest | Fiction | Science | Biography / Memoir | History | Music | Miscellaneous | All

Search Reviews: Whole Words Author/Title Only Include Unfinished Books

Hermann Broch


Die Schlafwandler, Part 1: Pasenow oder die Romantik

Category: Fiction | Published: 1930 | Review Added: 07-12-2009

Rating: 3 - Worth reading

Broch's trilogy of novels Die Schlafwandler is meant to be read as one work; however, it took me long enough to read the first novel, and I'm not sure how soon I'll get around to the others, so I'm reviewing it now while it's still fresh in my mind.

The theme of Die Schlafwandler is the decline of values in late 19th-Century and early 20th Century Europe. One assumes that this portentous subject becomes more explicit as the trilogy progresses, since the first book, Pasenow oder die Romantik, reads more or less like a straightforward late-19th Century realist novel. Its protagonist, young Prussian aristocrat Joachim von Pasenow, is divided between his ties to two young women: the conventional and uninteresting Elizabeth, to whom both his and her family would like to see him married; and the wayward Czech prostitute Ruzena, with whom he has a passionate and protective, but prospectless love affair.

Offering rather ambiguous help and advice to Pasenow is his friend Bertrand, a former army colleague who has turned his hand to business. Bertrand is portrayed as a superficially benign but secretly manipulative character, whom Pasenow perceives as intent on leading astray both Elizabeth and Ruzena.

A recurrent theme of Pasenow oder die Romantik is the embodiment of tradition in outdated Christian family values, and in army life. Pasenow has an obsession with his army uniform: only when properly "buttoned up" in his kit does he feel secure and valuable. He regards Bertrand's civilian life and attire as decadent and effeminate, yet is also attracted by the freedom and power they represent.

I found this novel less interesting than I felt it should have been. The theme of the decline of moral values is a meaty one, but Broch never addresses it directly: he uses it as the story's structural framework, rather than distilling it from the narrative. Thus, if you didn't know Broch's method, you'd likely be puzzled by some of his characters' behaviour - for example, Pasenow's odd suspicion that Bertrand is manipulating events, and Bertrand's own attitude to Pasenow, Ruzena and Elizabeth. We get no real insight into Bertrand's motivation: he seems purely a symbol of modernity and moral decline. Nor do we get a real sense of whether Pasenow's attachment to traditional mores is heartfelt, or a lukewarm and self-deluding refuge from the encroachment of modernity's moral relativism.

Broch's prose is rather leaden and suffers from the perennial Teutonic vice of verbosity. Not a whole lot happens; there is a single dramatic event early on, which fails to move the reader as much as it should, and the narrative could probably have been easily halved in length. There is some interesting philosophical dialogue that should perhaps, in a novel of ideas like this, have been given more prominence.

I will of course reserve judgment on Die Schlafwandler as a whole, but taken in isolation I would describe Pasenow oder die Romantik as a competently written but uninspired exercise in naturalistic storytelling, flawed by the imposition over it of a rather brittle symbolism.

[Return to top]

(c) Copyright 2002-2022