"A Desire for Knowledge and Intellectuality". Hermann Broch and the Science-Centred Popular Education in Vienna

The metaphysical exigency does not allow itself to be silenced. If that were possible, there wouldn’t be any philosophy, not even a positivistic one. (HERMANN BROCH)

1. Introduction

Hermann Broch and popular education – that may seem like a somewhat strange thematic framework to some, seeing as Broch has been and is characterised primarily as a difficult avant garde author to approach, at times even as an intellectual who despised the masses,¹ of whom, therefore, one would hardly assume that he had (adult) educational ambitions. However, since at least the wealth of material of the studies by Paul Michael Lützeler, it has become known that Broch was not only a lecturer at Viennese adult education centres at the beginning of the 1930s, thus exhibiting an exoteric/popular side to a certain extent, but moreover that Broch gave a very elaborate lecture there, among others, on “James Joyce”, in fact on the occasion of the 50th birthday of the author whom he greatly admired, a lecture that was often quoted later on and, as Joseph Strelka writes, was a “highly interesting analysis of Ulysses“.² The lecture was subsequently published in 1936 by the Herbert Reichner Verlag publishing house of Vienna through the agency of Stefan Zweig.³

What does the fact that Broch lectured and gave readings at Viennese adult education centres say, and what does this say about popular education at that time if it says anything at all? After all, Broch also lectured at other public places, such as on the radio, the new mass media back then, or at the Österreichischer Kulturbund (Austrian Cultural Federation). Are these public lectures by Broch just a matter of a minor episode of the author’s early career (incidentally, his most productive period), or do these and other “excursions into the popular“, as Lützeler called them in his biography of Broch that appeared in German in 1988, exhibit a certain consistency in the context of Broch’s epistemological-theoretical reflections, and does this exoteric characteristic indicate aspects of his self-conception as an intellectual? Or is it precisely the specific quality of adult education centres at that time that builds the basis for that temporary engagement?

In the following, an attempt is made to briefly show that both the one as well as the other apply from the author’s point of view. [p. 83]

2. Adult education centres and Modernism – a still largely unknown relationship

From 1931 to 1934, Hermann Broch held a total of seven lectures and readings at the main office of the Ottakring adult education centre at Ludo-Hartmann-Platz square and at its branch in the second district of Vienna. He gave three individual lectures as part of the Literary Working Group of the Ottakring adult education centre as well as four what were known as “Friday lectures“ at one of its four branches, namely at the Leopoldstadt adult education centre which was based in the federal secondary school at Zirkusgasse 48.⁴

But what kind of an institution was the Ottakring adult education centre of that time, one – to only mention a few names at this point – proposed by Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Mach and financially supported by Karl Wittgenstein or the Rothschild family, where Hans Kelsen or Adolf Loos lectured, for which the president of the PEN-Club, H. G. Wells, donated books and where Sigmund Freud himself, although his “drop out” student Alfred Adler largely dominated the psychological teaching at the adult education centre, was a registered, even if a “non-course attending”, member?

The first “Volksuniversität” (people’s university) – for this is what the word adult education centre (Volkshochschule) really means in German – was founded in the workers’ district of Ottakring in December 1901. Science-centred and not associated with any particular worldview, this was the spearhead of the Viennese popular education movement at the time of the Monarchy and First Republic. On account of a police ordinance, this first evening adult education centre in Europe was forced to bear the less suspicious name of “Volksheim“ (people’s home) up to the beginning of the First Republic because the agenda expressed in the compound word adult education centre (Volkshochschule – “people’s university”) appeared downright offensive to the conservative authorities. In close personal cooperation on organisational and education policy issues with the Wiener Volksbildungsverein (Vienna Popular Education Association), which was founded in 1887 and is known today as the polycollege in Stöbergasse, and the Viennese Urania, which was founded in 1897, one wanted, in the words of the philosopher Friedrich Jodl, who was one of those central founding personalities, to contribute to the “intellectual expansion of the city“⁵ ; a demand, which from today’s point of view with regard to the concrete educational work performed, the players involved and the public response, can be considered to be at least partially realised.⁶

Despite the merits of democratising access to knowledge and education, not enough light has been shed in Austria on the history of neutral popular education in its decisive connection to the cultural products of Viennese Modernism. No one less than Ernst Schönwiese, who was a dedicated adult education centre staff member for years as a writer and editor, stated in 1973: “The adult education centre movement in Austria still lacks a historical account. Its significance for cultural life is still not widely known.”⁷

And in fact: besides the often examined Viennese salon and coffee house culture at the time of the Monarchy and First Republic, there were other “creative milieus“, where programmatic concepts could be popularised in the fields of art and science and be put into practice to some extent. Besides many of the artists and writers who are today held to be well-nigh icons of Viennese Modernism [p. 84], a considerable number of established researchers and Noble prize winners as well as innovators in their field⁸, for whom it was a matter of a new connection of theory and practice or, in other words, of a new, trend-setting alliance of science, education, art and the public, can be found in the programmes and as sponsors of adult education centres as well as among the scientific and academic lecturers.⁹

Johann Dvorák has pointed out the significance of this radical modernism, which was concerned with a real synthesis of universalism and particularism, and with a connection of science, art and the public in the context of an all-embracing civilisation of society, for cultural policy in the context of adult education centres:

“What made the radical modernism in science and art special was its affinity to a culture that was highly individual and highly collective at the same time, was the attempt at a repeated connection between the ‘culture of the book’ (...) and the ‘culture of labour’ (...). It is true that in the labour movement a culture of collectivity had been formed with regard to organisation, political action, and the representation of interests of organised labour, but an intellectualisation of everyday life, a collectivity of erudition, a communication about works of art and scientific world views could be more likely introduced by representatives of modern art and science.”¹⁰

3. The Literary Working Group of the Ottakring adult education centre in Vienna

Besides lectures, courses and individual events, what were known as “working groups“, as part of one of which Hermann Broch lectured, were the most developed type of educational activity at adult education centres.¹¹

In the form of a seminar, experts and lay people were joined together in an interactive and egalitarian-democratic¹² way into intensive working groups, some lasting several years, whose research sometimes resulted in separate scientific publications.

At the end of the 1920s, there were around 22 of these semi-autonomous working groups with their own statute, committee and chairperson. The range of these extended from the Physical, Chemical, Geographical, Art Historical, Political Scientific, Tourist, Photographic and Educational Working Groups up to the Allotment Garden Working Group. Apart from the Philosophical Working Group, the Literary Working Group, which was founded in December 1902, was the oldest as well as the largest working group of the Ottakring adult education centre. After 1920, these kinds of working groups also formed in the newly founded branches in the II, III, XX, and [p. 85] XI districts of Vienna, although they were in existence for different lengths of time.

From the outset, the adult education centres and their forerunner organisations were – beside all the other activities and contents – one thing first and foremost: places of reading and the introduction of literature by means of generally available libraries including reading rooms, readings by authors as well as its own publication series and easily accessible bookstores in the 1920s.¹³ Despite the focus on passing on the findings from all areas of modern science – recent research rightfully talks about science-centred in this context – the discussions on art, music and literature remained an autonomous focus of their work, although one that has been largely ignored by research up to now.

This was the case, although, for example, Paul Amadeus Pisk, a student of Schönberg, was the head of the music department, Kurt Pahlen the head of the theatre studio and Walter Sorell the opera studio and a number of artists, musicians and writers, who are important today and some of which who were also so at that time, achieved success. As early as 1902, Arthur Schnitzler read from the “Green Cockatoo“, and after World War I Franz Karl Ginzkey, Felix Salten, Egon Friedell or Stefan Zweig. In 1929, Martin Andersen-Nexö read to 500 participants in Urania. Beside Alfons Petzold, the young Anton Wildgans was discovered in the Ottakring Volksheim and Elias Canetti was presented to the public for the first time, in fact, by Hermann Broch.

According to its own statute, the aim of the “Working Group for Literature“ was “to promote and deepen knowledge of the valuable literature of world literature”, which was to be achieved by a lending library, courses, individual lectures as well as artistic events.¹⁴ In addition, supplements for weekly literary periodicals were occasionally written.¹⁵

Besides the most important works of the “older literature” (and some of it is really down-to-earth stuff), it was, of course, “particularly concerned with the important publications of contemporary and the latest literature“, in order to offer “many of us the opportunity“, “to get more acquainted with the literary movement of the present“¹⁶, as this was proclaimed in a newsletter of the literary club of the Ottakring adult education centre in the mid-1920s.

There was also a Literary Working Group at the Margareten adult education centre as well as at the Viennese Urania, but their activity didn’t achieve the scope and the quality as the one in the Ottakring adult education centre and its branches. However, Urania appeared before the public with its own publication series, in which Hermann Bahr, among others, published a lecture for the first time.¹⁷

At the beginning of the 1930s, the library of the Working Group for Literature in the central office of the Ottakring adult education centre had 500 members and approx. 9000 volumes, which were available to members of the working group free of charge.¹⁸

The Leopoldstadt adult education centre, founded in 1920, also had a small library including a reading room on the ground floor of the federal secondary school in Zirkusgasse, which was open in the evening from 7-9 pm on every weekend and was “avidly used” according to [p. 86] contemporary sources. In addition, the Literary Working Group had its own small library, which was mainly put together from book donations by, among others, Zsolnay-Verlag publishing house and Rowohlt Verlag publishing house, and private persons such as Theo Feldmann, Ernst Schönwiese, Hans Jaray, Karl Mayländer as well as the Literary Working Group of the Ottakring adult education centre.¹⁹

For Hermann Broch, who, beside his engineering education, started university studies, among others, under Ludwig Boltzmann, against his father’s wishes between 1904-1906 and then registered for philosophy, mathematics, theoretical physics and psychology at the university from 1926 to 1930, the adult education centre of that time may – as it was for many others – have been a fascinating intellectual and social biotope; a seemingly heterotopic community of experts and lay people, whose key players, namely the experts, acted in an egalitarian and cosmopolitan way, and where the popularisation of science and art was oriented towards the ideal of the humanisation and democratisation of society – a practically applied ethic that may have suited the neo-Kantian and neo-Platonist Broch.

And although numerous exponents of the Vienna Circle and the association founded in 1929 by Ernst Mach, who represented a radical anti-metaphysics²⁰ – an epistemological position that Broch resolutely opposed – were employed at the adult education centres, which were underpinned by the social democratic municipal administration, the basic stance against the encroaching irrationalism as well as the collective work for social reform in terms of educating the people by getting in contact with the “living movements of the present“²¹, as it was stated in the program of the Vienna Circle (1929), completely agreed with the intentions of Broch’s cultural policy and humanitarian engagement.

Moreover, in this exciting juxtaposition and interblending of the widest variety of scientific disciplines, artistic, musical and literary activities as well as new methodological and educational forms of teaching that were experimented with here, there were numerous acquaintances and friends to meet, who Broch knew from the Viennese coffee houses or the bourgeois salons of Bertha Zuckerkandl or Eugenie Schwarzwald. The latter, as is known, was herself a lecturer at the Ottakring adult education centre.

Apart from his former tutor in Teesdorf, David Josef Bach, a school friend of Arnold Schönberg (1897-1900)²², who had been lecturing at the adult education centre since 1920, Broch also met here – whether ad personam or merely as part of the program has to be left unanswered for the time being – among others Alfred Adler, who had already been his guest in Teesdorf, as well as his friends or fellow writers such as Alfred Polgar, Gina and Otto Kaus, Alfred Paris Gütersloh, Robert Musil, Egon Friedell, Stefan Zweig, his friend Robert Brunngraber²³, his friends, the married couple, Karl and Charlotte Bühler, his friends and fellow psychoanalysts August Aichhorn or Heinz Hartmann (the son of Ludo Moritz Hartmann), and finally his teachers at university, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf [p. 87] Carnap, Hans Thirring or Viktor Kraft, who were involved in the adult education centre movement as lecturers, to name just a few.

Ernst Waldinger provides a fascinating insight into the network-like, topographically dislocated spaces of interaction of overlapping intellectual circles in his reminisces on Theo Feldmann and the work of the Literary Working Group at that time:

“Writers like Alfons Petzold, from Guido Kolbenheyer, who, unfortunately, then went completely different and unpleasant ways that were diametrically opposed to the ideas of the Volksheim, up to Fritz Hochwälder, the trained upholsterer and born playwright, who acquired the basics of his comprehensive knowledge there, sat in the lecture halls of the Volksheim. My amicable relationships and the support that I received from Josef Luitpold began there. (...) Many of my contacts, especially the close one with Hermann Broch, began by get-togethers in cafés after the authors’ readings in Hall 7 of the Volksheim and were also long-lived in the American refuge and survived the end of the physical and cultural catastrophe of the Reich of the basest demons in the entire German-speaking region.“²⁴

In view of these personal contacts as well as the fact that the adult education centres of that time not only acted as the hub between the public and politics in the field of science, but also in certain fields of art, it comes as no surprise that Broch, at the moment when he decided to devote himself completely to a career as a writer after selling his Teesdorf textile company in 1927, entered this forum back then as, at least in Austria, a still largely unknown writer.²⁵

Furthermore, Broch was driven, as Ernst Schönwiese has pointed out, by a “strong ethical force” to have a “direct, practical impact on his time“, to create in this way the preconditions for developing a “construct of ideas for creating understanding between the author and the reader”²⁶. Moreover, there is his exceptionally great interest in democratising education and knowledge, which is also revealed in that he established a library with 4000 volumes, and built a gym for the workers’ gymnastic and sports club as well as an outdoor swimming pool for his workers in Teesdorf from company resources and, in addition, initiated a local cultural association.²⁷

Hermann Broch held his first public reading as an author in the Literary Working Group in the winter semester 1930/31, and precisely on February 6, 1931 in Hall VI of the Ottakring adult education centre. On this occasion, he began with a short theoretical introduction “On the Foundations of the Sleepwalkers Novel“, and then read from “Esch or Anarchy“, the second part of his novel trilogy that had not been published yet.

As is known from the accounts of other public figures, lecturing in front of an adult audience that is potentially of equal rank, but inhomogeneous in terms of class, age and education [p. 88] presented a considerable challenge to the specialist and rhetorical capabilities of some of the speakers. On account of this, Ludo Moritz Harmann and other university teachers who acted as functionaries of the adult education centres strictly held the view that the highest demands would have to be made on the instructors at the adult education centres both in terms of their competence in the subject as well as rhetoric.

The celebrity photographer and wife of an industrialist, Trude Geiringer, who accompanied the unknown Broch at that first lecture, remembered that he initially began “to speak at normal volume“, and then began to speak more and more quietly until no one understood him anymore. Whereupon he apologised and began to speak louder again, but he soon began to whisper again, whereupon she gave him a sign from the first row.²⁸

After this initial experience, Broch didn’t lecture again at the Ottakring adult education centre until the following year. On the occasion of the 50th birthday of James Joyce, he held the lecture mentioned at the beginning on the writer much admired by him on April 22, 1932. It was originally commissioned by his publisher Daniel Brody, who planned a Joyce Festschrift with contributions from many authors. Apart from the theory of the “Totalitätskunstwerk“ (work of art as a totality) developed in the lecture and illustrated by Joyce’s Ulysses, the lecture also included both elements of Broch’s theory of kitsch as well as his epistemological reflections on the relativity of knowledge.

The lecture at the Volksheim that is recorded only differs from the printed version of 1936, as Lützeler has demonstrated, by some rephrasing at the beginning and the end of the lecture.

At the beginning of his lecture, he explained to his audience that the real purpose of his remarks was to “make Joyce more accessible to them, and maybe even introduce him to some of them for the first time.” Following this, Broch stated – perhaps with a certain reference to himself and surely not without producing a certain degree of resistance in his audience – that the author’s lack of renown despite the fame of Ulysses arises from the intentional and deliberate difficulty in understanding the work, which “makes the greatest demands on the readers with its absolute inconsiderateness and opens an abyss all the way to the bottom between the artist and his audience with all the aggressiveness of the deliberate and self-assured creative person.“²⁹

Without being able to go into detail about that lecture at this point, when everything is considered it can be seen that Broch demanded a good deal of intellectual abstraction from his audience with these remarks on Joyce, which were controversially discussed later on, and that it was in no way a popular introduction for an audience with little idea of literature.

This is also noticeable in connection with his “popular“ radio lecture “Art at the End of a Culture”³⁰, which was scheduled for Whit Sunday 1933 (June 3, 6:30 pm), in which, besides the question of the contemporaneity of the dissemination of “intellectual and artistic cultural property“ by radio and adult education centres, which he welcomed, he also particularly dealt with questions of education in general (which we will return to briefly later on). However, this lecture, [p. 89] because the audience found it to be little “suited for a holiday“ and too “theoretical“, was substituted without further ado by a Broch reading from his own works³¹ by Hans Nüchtern, the head of the science and popular education department of the RAVAG (the Radio Communication Corporation) back then.³² The radio had already been brought into line since March 1933; ^{33 and 34} , a lecture that can still be looked up today an gives an impression of how Broch approached his audience.

The conspicuously demanding theoretical level of Broch’s adult education centre lectures can be explained, beside the fact that these took place as part of the Literary Working Group, by the fact, among others, that these lectures were also attended by young, prospective authors and those who wanted to become authors.³⁵ For example, there was the worker poet, Adolf Unger, who was supported by Josef Luitpold Stern, and Alfred Werner, a talented lyric poet, who established himself as a top journalist in the USA after his emigration, Hermann Hakel, who edited the “1935 Almanac“, the lyric poet Friedrich Bergammer, who attracted the attention of Hofmannsthal, and the Joyce expert Georg Spiro, of whom Elias Canetti was impressed and who had given Ernst Schönwiese the initiative to found the “Silberboot” (Silver Boat) literary journal (1935).³⁶

The Leopoldstadt adult education centre even had its own small (evening) bookstore, which was run by a young man by the name of Hans Mai-unresolved-er, who became “one of the most important essayists of the German language”³⁷ after the war under the pseudonym Jean Améry (an anagram of his surname). It was Leopold Langhammer³⁸, the long-time secretary of the Viennese Popular Education Association in Stöbergasse, who was the first to particularly encourage the only eighteen-year old Hans Maier (Améry), who completed an apprenticeship as a bookseller between 1930 and 1938, and was able to acquire him for the Leopoldstadt adult education centre bookstore starting in 1932.³⁹ Améry, who in 1931 started to intensively deal with Ernst Mach and Otto Neurath in his philosophical studies and who was also in contact with the Vienna Circle, soon met, among others, Hermann Broch and Elias Canetti here.⁴⁰

In the bookstore run by Améry as well as in the small lending library, the participants of the adult education centre branch at Zirkusgasse 48 could be provided to some extent with the literature that was presented in the Literary Working Group: besides the “Writers of the New Russia“ (Boris Plinjak, Issaak Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, Alexander Block) and the French Gide, Proust and Rolland, above all contemporary Anglo-American literature, e.g. Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, John Dos Passos, Aldous Huxley – who, by the way, Broch admired⁴¹ –, Virginia Woolf or Julien Green.⁴²

In general, the participants had a “particularly energetic intelligence and a joyous, virulent intellectuality“⁴³, as Ernst Schönweise wrote in his published recollections on his work as the chairman of the Literary Working Group of the Ottakring adult education centre and the one in Leopoldstadt from 1931 to 1935. Schönwiese, who held his first lecture at the Leopoldstadt adult education centre on Ernst Toller’s play “Hoppla, We’re Alive“ in 1929, is also considered to be an important lyric poet himself and was a friend of Broch until the end of his life. [p. 90]

Schönwiese compared the seminars, created by the Literary Working Group and linked to readings with exercises and discussions, later on with the activities of the Austrian Society for Literature under Wolfgang Kraus in the 1970s – with the decisive difference that the pay at the adult education centre was more of a “contribution for expenses” than real payment.⁴⁴

On account of this intense and serious examination of literature at the adult education centre⁴⁵, Schönwiese arrived at the view that some of Broch’s essays, for example, “The World View of the Novel“ (1933) or “The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age“ (1934) were inspired by the readings in the Literary Working Group.⁴⁶

In his opinion, the promotion and the enormous boom of literary activities at adult education centres at the time were due in particular to the professor of literature and Grillparzer expert Emil Reich – who, besides Ludo Moritz Hartmann, had been one of the most important activists for adult education centres since 1895. With the fortune he inherited from his brother, he had founded a literature prize, namely the “Julius Reich Prize of the University of Vienna“, which was highly regarded and coveted at his time. Beside Theodor Kramer, Ernst Waldinger, Erika Mitterer and Friedrich Torberg (all of whom were lecturers at adult education centres), Schönwiese himself was also awarded this prize.⁴⁷

When the 27-year old Schönwiese held a seminar on Broch’s novel trilogy “The Sleepwalkers“, including extracts – the third volume had not been published yet, and Broch had sent him an advance copy – on April 26, 1932, four days after Broch’s Joyce lecture, this aroused a “general shaking of heads” among the participants, among whom there was also Ea von Allesch, who had had a relationship with Broch for years.

Shortly afterwards, Broch himself gave a Friday evening lecture from “Huguenau“ to 70 participants as part of the Literary Working Group of the Leopoldstadt adult education centre on April 29, 1932. In a letter to his publisher Brody on May 2, he reported delightedly: “I read two poems and the revolution, and the people responded so well that on the spur of the moment they have asked me to give some further lectures.”⁴⁸

And after another Friday reading from the third part of his novel trilogy and from his new drama “Die Entsühnung” (The Expiation)⁴⁹ on December 1 – to 100 participants this time – he enthusiastically wrote his publisher about the “wild success“⁵⁰.

A few weeks later, on January 23, 1933, Broch presented the 28-year old Elias Canetti, who then read from his unpublished debut “Auto-da-Fe“ to the 80 participants of the Leopoldstadt Literary Working Group, as part of the “Writers promoting Writers“ series. In November 1936, on Broch’s 50th birthday, Canetti paid him back by giving a laudatory speech about him as part of a ceremony at the Ottakring adult education centre.

And now to briefly illustrate who besides Broch gave lectures [p. 91] on literary topics or read from their own works at the Ottakring adult education centre or one of its branches at that time, I would like to mention at least a few names from the multitude of authors who lectured as part of the Literary Working Group⁵¹: thus, the young Theodor Kramer, the young lyric poet Erika Mitterer, correspondent, among others, of Rilke, the likewise young lyric poet Heinz Politzer, who helped no one less than Max Brod on the edition of Kafka’s works, the novelists Herta Staub and Soma Morgenstern, the Karl Kraus expert Karl Jaray, the lyric poet Fritz Brügel, the important short story author Hermann Grab (Theodor W. Adorno made an effort later on to initiate his rediscovery), furthermore, Franz Theodor Csokor, Richard Schaukal, Oskar Maurus Fontana, Alfred Polgar, Ernst Waldinger, Oskar Maria Graf, Albert Paris Gütersloh, Robert Musil, Hilde Spiel, Rudolf Brunngraber, Berthold Viertel or the above-mentioned Theo Feldmann – a list of famous and important authors that could easily be continued. However, it should also be mentioned at this point that in the adult education centres of that time, which were open to all worldviews, authors such as Josef Weinheber, who was later the textbook National Socialist writer, the National Socialist writer Bruno Brehm, or Guido Zernatto, the general secretary of the Austrian fascist single political party of the “Fatherland Front” (VF), of course, read from their own works.

On March 17, Broch gave a lecture for the third and final time in the central office of the Ottakring adult education centre, again as part of the Literary Working Group located there. The lecture was called “The Worldview of the Novel”, a lecture he had given before in the Cobden Club in Budapest⁵² and which, as Broch noted, “had caused a sensation” in the Ottakring Volksheim.⁵³ In this lecture, Broch elaborated his theory of kitsch as a theory of inferior art. In a perfectly educational, but nonetheless fascinating way, in that he presented literary examples, he developed the thesis in front of his audience that kitsch – as an expression of pure fishing for effect – isn’t to be judged aesthetically, but morally and ethically, and considered in this way represents “evil in itself” in art⁵⁴. The lecture was then published in “Die Neue Rundschau” in a revised version under the title of “Evil in the Value System of Art“.

On January 26, 1934, Broch gave his last reading from “The Unknown Quantity“, the “Expiation“ as well as a chapter from the Filsmann novel that remained a fragment to 40 participants in the Leopoldstadt branch.

In the wake of February 1934, the whole education system was realigned to the reactionary patriotism, the workers’ libraries were closed and political cleansings were carried out in the adult education centres. However, the suppressive measures of the Austrian fascists in the sector of workers’ and popular education institutions were only partially successful in the Viennese adult education centres up to 1936. Despite dismissals and corresponding pressure on the design of the programme, the Ottakring adult education centre could act as a cultural – and also a subcutaneously hidden political – antipole for a while.

This can be seen in that unlike other places where the “martial law on the selection of books“, as the responsible popular education advisor Dr. Karl Lugmayer called it, and which hardly tolerated anything besides the Baroque-Catholic and the blood and soil Heimat and Provincial literature,⁵⁵ was followed, a [p. 92] certain counter-programme, as a definite expression of resistance, was at least partially pursued at the Ottakring adult education centre under the direction of Viktor Matejka.

Thus, for example, beginning in October 1935, Ernst Krenek gave a course on the “sociological consideration of art” in the Ottakring Literary Working Group and the attempt was even made, under the long-time secretary of the Volksheim Karl Ziak, to reactivate the inactive Working Group for Literature in the Landstraße branch. On February 26, 1936 Carl Zuckmayer still gave a reading from his own works in the Ottakring Literary Working Group.

After a public scandal surrounding “The Case of Job” oratorio, a late Expressionistic “operetta about the Ständestaat (state of the old estates)“⁵⁶ that was performed at the end of the summer semester 1936 as a promotional event for the speaking choir course at the Ottakring adult education centre led by the Social Democrat Franz Ibaschitz, the “Reichspost” newspaper sensed Bolshevist content and defamation of religion, and the cultural war affair finally ended with the dismissal of Matejka.

On account of this scandal, the science-oriented popular education up to now was put to an end by the “municipal ordinance on the regulation of popular education” which was passed shortly afterward on August 12, 1936⁵⁷ in that all the competences of popular education were now under the direct and strict control of the mayor Richard Schmitz, following the Führerprinzip (leader principle), for which the “Reichspost” immediately expressed the “genuine gratitude of all Austrians”.

The protest of the participants of the Ottakring Literary Working Group⁵⁸ in the light of the following reorganisation in terms of a strengthening of the Christian Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) couldn’t prevent the temporary end of the usual work of the adult education centre. Among the few literary lecturers who lectured as part of the Literary Working Group, which virtually only continued to exist on paper, only Friedrich Torberg stands out, who continued to read from his own works in winter semester 1937/38.

Finally, on March 27, 1938, the “Reichspost” announced: “The adult education centres are finally free of Jews.”

From February 1934 on, Broch didn’t give any more lectures at adult education centres and only published a few articles, among them, on the “Renewal of the Theatre” or on directing in the “Wiener Zeitung” (Vienna newspaper) up to 1935.⁵⁹ He had already documented his anti-fascist position in an essay of 1932, in which he denounced the “criminal character of this time” in the light of the anti-intellectual persecution of the National Socialists.⁶⁰

After Hitler’s seizure of power and the beginning of the government dictatorship of the Dollfuß regime, Broch completely lost all hope in literature’s possibility to make an impact and he concerned himself with questions of concrete political action from now on. In the context of the League of Nations resolution that he drafted against National Socialism and Fascism in 1936, it says on this:

“(...) when the world no longer listens to the philosopher and poet because they can no longer hear him since they no longer understand his language, only the political, then it is almost immoral for me to want to lead a life of thought and writing in this kind of world, for it amounts to the isolation of living in an ivory tower.“⁶¹ [p. 93]

4. Literary critical “affect on the audience” – some remarks on Broch’s reflections on education

Broch’s considerations regarding his “excursions into the popular”, which can only be found in fragments, appear in a rudimentary way – an elaborated idea of education doesn’t exist – among others in his comments on the League of Nations resolution, even if so to speak only ex negativo. It says here:

“I had given up my writing activity, as far as it was oriented towards the audience in a popular way, in favour of the League of Nations work because I had learned to realise that one couldn’t raise one’s hopes of contributing (...) even the slightest to (...) changing the course of (...) history by a literary affect on the audience.“⁶²

Broch, who had dealt intensively with the “fragmentation of values” of Modernism, i.e. the loss of meaning and the decay of values, both in his early theoretical essays as well as in his literary work, in particular, in the “Sleepwalkers“, saw a deeply humanitarian component attached to his work as an author and intellectual, and an enlightening, educational challenge to “endlessly develop humanity“. However, during the time of his exile, he assigned the role and responsibility for this to the sciences: Humanity now seemed to be a “precise scientific task”⁶³ to him.

In the course of his intensive studies in philosophy, mathematics and physics, Broch arrived at the view for the time being at the end of the 1920s in the light of the general “crisis of the sciences” (E. Husserl) and the predicted collapse of positivism “in its naive, original form“⁶⁴ that the logical “cannot readily grasp the entirety of the world“⁶⁵; and that the ethical, metaphysical and irrational of a time remain constantly pushed away or disregarded. An “agreement between apriorism and empiricism” in the context of an objectified philosophy and science “no longer” seemed “possible”⁶⁶ to him.

“The metaphysical exigency does not allow itself to be silenced. If that were possible, there wouldn’t be any philosophy, not even a positivistic one“⁶⁷, wrote Broch later regarding this matter in his autobiography.

Broch let the protagonist of his 1933 (popularisation of) science novel, the mathematician Richard Hieck, arrive at this conclusion. In a sense, this second work is an attempt to popularise his philosophical and epistemological views in literary form to a wide audience.⁶⁸ The “Unknown Quantity“, the title of this well selling book that was almost turned into a Hollywood movie, offers a completely fascinating insight into the world of work and research at the University of Vienna back then. The “Unknown Quantity” remains an indissoluble element of the strongly autobiographical protagonist’s reality “that is behind [p. 94] all precise expressibility in an overpowering way“ in the form of the irrational, the metaphysical and love. “The aim of knowledge is situated outside knowledge. At least, outside the institute“⁶⁹, sums up the mathematician Hieck, who had just received his doctorate, at the end of the novel, and with him Broch himself as well.

For Broch, it seemed that the time of the “ethical work of art“ had dawned, whereby the “mission of the poetic“ was to be understood clearly as the “mission of a knowledge that grasps totality and that is above any empirical or social conditionality”⁷⁰, as he elaborated in his Joyce lecture of 1932.

The impulse for Broch’s turn to literature was, in his own words, an ethical motive that continued later in the context of his political work, namely not to enter the ivory tower of the intellectual worker and the intellectual which he considered to be irresponsible.⁷¹ In the light of the “high political tension“ in Europe, which he had already clearly perceived in 1928, that in his opinion “no longer allowed“ one “to reckon with decades of developments“, whoever wanted to be heard had “to choose shorter and more direct ways than those that could be provided by philosophy.“⁷² In his autobiography, Broch wrote:

“This had been the initial reason for my turn to non-scientific, literary expression, but in addition there was a second and actually more rational reason, namely that of the immediate ethical impact (...). Ethical impact is largely to be found in educational work, and the poetic work is a far better means than science for this. This was the second reason for my turn to literature.”⁷³

In accordance with his anti-“peep show theory“ of knowledge, which was based on Husserl’s phenomenology as well as the general theory of relativity, and in which the cognitive subject is included as an irreducible bias, Broch arrived at the view that in light of the crisis of knowledge as well as the self-modesty of philosophy to what could be said in protocol statements the task of poetry from now on was to capture social reality in all of its complexity and contradictoriness in a more or less simultaneous unity. In an explicit analogy to the theory of relativity, which endeavours to create a theoretical unity of physical object and physical subject, Broch saw what seemed to him to be fundamentally necessary regarding the modern novel redeemed in Joyce’s Ulysses, namely the “unity of the object of representation and the means of representation“⁷⁴, a unity that “sometimes truly appeared as if the object were violated by language, and language by the object all the way up to complete disintegration“⁷⁵. This is, of course, an understanding of art, as Broch knew, that presupposed not only a very high, if not in fact the highest form of education on the part of the artist, but of the recipients as well.

And education, in the idealized sense of Goethe (for whom the word Bildung not only meant education, but also the development and maturing of character), was without a doubt a central category of knowledge for Broch:

“The artist in this highest sense not only succeeds in entertaining and teaching his audience, but also has an impact solely on the education and development [p. 95] of his own being. It is education as Goethe understood it, as he offered it to philosophy and the sciences, it is that hard and strict task of knowledge that accompanied him his whole life, that compelled him to assimilate all of life’s phenomena and to “re-educate” them in the truest sense of the word with an insatiable hunger.“⁷⁶

This education of the “artist in the highest sense” was also to have an outward, exoteric impact according to Broch, which he already saw in a specific sense in the “explosive dissemination of cultural property”:

“Never before in history have intellectual and artistic cultural property been made available to a wide public mass in such an intensive way as it is happening today. The decisive step forwards had been reserved for the radio, which has accomplished something that all the direct means of dissemination, be it adult education centres, concerts, or lectures by itinerant teachers, could never have done to such an extent.“⁷⁷

However, he saw, as he wrote in the manuscript for his lecture “Art at the End of a Culture“ (1933), that Western culture had been trapped in a “tragic fate” for some time, in which, “despite the tremendous efforts”

“(...) to look after intellectual cultural property and to root it in the people by a constantly increasing dissemination by means of which it would always be preserved (...) the development has exceeded what we call intellectual interests.“⁷⁸

Whoever, as Broch continued, “still recognises his actual aim in life” in intellectual knowledge “will suddenly see that he has thus lost contact to the actual pressing problems of our time.”⁷⁹

Despite this rather pessimistic diagnosis, it seemed to him like Goethe that “to preserve and disseminate further (...) the idea alone and eternally” and “all the educational property as a manifestation of the Platonic is (...) a moral reason for existence“, in fact, finally, the guarantee of “providing intellectuals access to the world again which apparently, of course merely apparently, has been cut off from their ethical issues.”⁸⁰

In his well-worked out considerations on “university reform”, which he formulated in his exile in the USA from 1944 to 1946, Broch took up some of the thoughts on education policy that he had dealt with before, although from completely different points of view, and – which is completely fascinating – with certain conceptual similarities to the concept of science of the Vienna Circle and the programme represented here of a unity of science. [p. 96]

In the context of other different (semi)private US post-war plans for democratic reconstruction, Broch, “who no longer wished to return to his homeland“⁸¹, conceived of turning the New York “School for Social Research” – an institution, which had been founded in 1919 and which had been in contact with the Ottakring Volksheim in the 1920s – into a university “Academy for Democracy and Peace“. In accordance with the “unity of the human spirit”, a “new organon of science”⁸² was to be created – without thus wishing to establish an umbrella science – in the form of a “methodological unification of scientific disciplines and their findings“⁸³. In light of the “human desire for holistic knowledge“ as well as the real, fragmented condition of science and the world, the specific contribution in terms of content of this international, humanitarian fundamental research institution including an affiliated vocational preparation academy was to be, among others, the “critique of civilisation”. As a concrete educational institution, its contribution was to consist of breaking down the traditional limits between the passive consumers of education and the producers and providers of knowledge.⁸⁴ Although Broch even formulated curricular considerations in this reform paper, the plan contained within it remained vague in the end, and was limited with regard to questions of education and the theory of science to “pointing out some directions and making hints“⁸⁵. Against the backdrop of the Cold War that was going to break out soon, the paper remained obsolete in the end.

5. In Lieu of a Conclusion

I would like to conclude with a quote from Broch that in light of the present crisis of science and education is still able to reassure a little or at least comfort even 70 years later with precisely the philosophic “principle of hope” expressed in it:

“The idea irrefutably penetrates and the ideal, even if it is still so vilified, penetrates into life again and again. And let us take a look around for once: I believe that the world has never been so impregnated with ideals, almost every bowling club has something to defend that it calls its idea, moreover, its sublime idea. But it would be all too petty to make fun of it. Instead, it has to be stated that even the slightest phenomenon is still a mirror of greater events, and that even the least desire for structuring one’s life according to an idea is still not all that far away from the desire for knowledge and intellectuality, not all that far away from the symbols of art in which eternal knowledge is to be carried.”⁸⁶

Notes:

¹ Cf. Barnouw, Dagmar: Hermann Broch – das autonome Ich. In: Neue Rundschau, Nr. 2 (1976) 328, 332. (Tagblattarchiv der Arbeiterkammer Wien -unresolved-. Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek).

² Strelka, Joseph P.: Poeta Doctus. Hermann Broch. Tübingen-Basel 2001, p. 33.

³ A lecture, which as it has been correctly pointed out in my opinion has brought to light Broch’s own theoretical approaches to art, epistemology and education just as much as his reflections on Joyce’s work itself, which made the reading all the more fascinating.

⁴ This was founded on January 26, 1920 as the first post-war branch of the Ottakring adult education centre, which had already been founded in 1900, and was the first evening adult education centre in Europe.

⁵ Friedrich Jodl on the occasion of the opening of the Margareten adult education centre, Neue Freie Presse, 23. February 1911.

⁶ For this, see: Stifter, Christian H.: Die Wiener Volkshochschulbewegung in den Jahren 1887 bis 1939: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit. In: Ash Mitchel G./ Stifter Christian H. (ed.): Wissenschaft, Politik und Öffentlichkeit. Von der Wiener Moderne bis zur Gegenwart (= Wiener Vorlesungen. Konversatorien und Studien, 12). Vienna 2002, p. 100.

⁷ Schönwiese, Ernst: Zentrum Zirkusgasse 1935. In: Die Pestsäule, Nr. 8., August-September 1973, p. 34. I would like to thank Univ.-Prof. Dr. Peter Strelka/USA for this valuable reference. More than two decades ago, Wilhelm Bründel had outlined this in the following way: “There is not a history of Viennese popular education. It is becoming both easier and harder to write one from day to day. Easier, since the details of the beginning and the early development are becoming less important over time (...). Harder in many respects if one (...) endeavours to really understand the particularity and the historical progression of this phenomenon.” Bründl, Wilhelm: Eigenart und Entwicklung der Wiener Volkshochschulen, Vienna (1954), p. 9.

⁸ For this, cf. Stifter, Christian H.: „Geistige Stadterweiterung“. Zur Geschichte der Wiener Volksbildung von der Jahrhundertwende bis zur Gegenwart. Ideen-, struktur- und sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Entwicklung der Wiener Volkshochschulen. Unpublished research manuscript (on behalf of MA 18). Vienna 2002, p. 10.

⁹ For this, cf. Taschwer, Klaus: Wissenschaft für viele. Zur Wissenschaftsvermittlung im Rahmen der Wiener Volksbildung um 1900. Dissertation of the University of Vienna 2002.

¹⁰ Dvorák, Johann: Politik und Kultur der Moderne in der späten Habsburger-Monarchie, Innsbruck – Vienna 1997, p. 22.

¹¹ On the “working groups“, and in particular the Literary Working Group, see the elaborate study by Filla, Wilhelm: Wissenschaft für alle – ein Widerspruch? Bevölkerungsnaher Wissenstransfer in der Wiener Moderne. Ein historisches Volkshochschulmodell. Innsbruck – Vienna – Munich 2001. Unfortunately, this volume doesn’t contain any specific information on the development of the Literary Working Group after 1933.

¹² “The working groups just like the Volksheim itself were built on a democratic foundation. They elect their own functionaries, have their own administration and their own accounting and enjoy a certain autonomy within the adult education centre system.” Quoted from: Mitteilungen der Volkshochschule Wien Volksheim (MVHO), 4th vol., No. 6, 7. December 1931, p. 1.

¹³ Thus, for example, the annual report of the Ottakring Volksheim adult education centre of 1927 (October 1, 1925-Sept. 30, 1926) still says on page 96 that: “The bookstore is an integral part of all the association’s activities. Its task is, first, to make good popular-scientific literature, recommended by the lecturers, available for purchase to the participants in connection with the courses. Second, our bookstore also ought to carry good books of the instructive aesthetic literature.”

¹⁴ Rules of procedure, undated (probably at the beginning of the 1930s). Österreichisches Volkshochschularchiv (ÖVA) (Archive of the Austrian Association of Adult Education Centres), collection of the Ottakring “Volksheim” adult education centre (B-VHO).

¹⁵ For example, cf.: Licht übers Land. Wochenschrift für Kunst und Literatur. Zu dem Abend: „Neue Kunst“ im Volksheim, undated.

¹⁶ A letter of the Volksheim literary club (undated). ÖVA, B-VHO, Literary Working Group.

¹⁷ Bahr, Hermann: Um Goethe. Vienna (Verlagshaus Wiener Urania) 1917.

¹⁸ Newsletters of the Ottakring Volksheim, 4th vol., No. 6., 7. December 1931, p. 1.

¹⁹ Chairpersons :

Ottakring AEC: Dr. Stefan Hock (1902-1914), K. A. Kolischer (1914-?), Josef Luitpold Stern (1920/21-1921/22), Theodor Feldmann (1922/23-1931/32)

Leopoldstadt AEC: Prof. Dr. Ernst Hoffmann (1920/21-1923/24), Dr. Richard Tengler (1924/25-1925/26), Prof. Dr. Ferdinand Bronner (1926/27-1927/28), Dr. Wilhelm Löwinger (1928/1929), Dr. Gertrud Steuer (1929/30-1930/31), Dr. Wilhelm Löwinger (1931/32), Dr. Ernst Schönwiese (1932-37)

Landstraße AEC: Dir. Dr. Max Lambertz (1925/26), Dr. Wilhelm Löwinger (1926/27-1927/28), Dr. Karl Ziak (1932/33-?)

Popular Education Association: Dr. August Stern (1911-1912/13), Dr. Berthold Hirschl (1913/14-1917/18), Dr. Leopold Langhammer (1920/21), August Besold (1920/21), Dr. Franz Häußler (1923/24-1930/31)

²⁰ Cf. Geier, Manfred: Der Wiener Kreis. Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Hamburg 1992, p. 106.

²¹ Quoted from Geier, Der Wiener Kreis, p. 83.

²² Lützeler, Paul Michael: Hermann Broch. Eine Biografie. Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 34.

²³ Cf. Strelka, Joseph P.: Poeta Doctus, 2001, p. 3.

²⁴ Waldinger Ernst (New York): Erinnerungen an Theo Feldmann. In: Die österreichische Volkshochschule, 17 (1966), p. 10.

²⁵ In this context, it has to be remembered that Broch became the bestselling (Austrian and German-speaking) author after the Sleepwalkers was published in the English-speaking world, and achieved success of which others could only dream.

²⁶ Schönwiese, Ernst: Einleitung. In: Broch, Hermann: „Nur das Herz ist das Wirkliche“. Edited and with an introduction by Ernst Schönwiese. Graz-Vienna 1959, p. 6.

²⁷ Lützeler, Hermann Broch. Eine Biografie, p. 78.

²⁸ ibid., p. 136.

²⁹ ibid.

³⁰ Broch, Hermann: Die Kunst am Ende einer Kultur. Ein Radiovortrag (1933). In: Broch, Hermann: Philosophische Schriften 1, Kritik. Kommentierte Werkausgabe. Ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler. vol. 10/1, Frankfurt am Main 1977, p. 53-58.

³¹ Cf. Venus, Theodor: Bis zum Ende gespielt – Zur Geschichte des ‚Reichssenders Wien‘ im Dritten Reich. In: Rathkolb, Oliver/Duchkowitsch, Wolfgang/Hausjell, Fritz (ed.): Die veruntreute Wahrheit. Hitlers Propagandisten in Österreichs Medien. Vienna-Salzburg 1988, p. 118.

³² Lützeler, Hermann Broch. Eine Biografie. Frankfurt a. Main, p. 146.

³³ Venus, Theodor: Als aus der Österreichischen Radio-Verkehrs AG (RAVAG) der „Reichssender Wien“ wurde. In: Wien 1938. Vienna 1988, p. 141 ff.

³⁴ Hans Nüchtern was incidentally a board member of Urania and a lecturer there (only once at the Ottakring adult education centre). Starting in 1934 he was the leading functionary under Rudolf Henz of the VF (Fatherland Front) front organisation “Neues Leben“ (New Life), which was created according to the model of the Italian-Fascist Dopolavoro, and sat as a member of the jury in the Austrian-Fascist State Prize for Literature Committee under the direction of Josef Nadler. Cf. Jarka, Horst: Zur Literatur- und Theaterpolitik im »Ständestaat«. In: Kadrnoska, Franz (ed.): Aufbruch und Untergang. Österreichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938. Vienna 1981, p. 523 ff.

³⁵ After all, there was a separate “Group of Young Authors” within the Literary Working Group. ÖVA, B-VHO, annual report of the Leopoldstadt Literary Working Group 1932/33.

³⁶ Schönwiese, Ernst: Zentrum Zirkusgasse 1935. In: Die Pestsäule, No. 8., August-September 1973, p. 709.

³⁷ ibid., p. 704.

³⁸ Leopold Langhammer (1891-1975), was the secretary of the Viennese Association of Popular Education Centres from 1918 to 1938 after he had received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1916. He was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938/39 and was suspended from duty afterwards until 1945. In 1945, he was appointed the public administrator of the Viennese adult education centres and was responsible for denazification (as a former functionary of the Fatherland Front).

³⁹ Pfäfflin,Friedrich: Jean Améry. Daten zu einer Biographie. In: Steiner, Stephan (ed.): Jean Améry Hans Maier. Basle – Frankfurt a. Main 1996, p. 266.

⁴⁰ ibid.

⁴¹ Lützeler: Hermann Broch. Eine Biografie, p. 133.

⁴² Schönwiese, Zentrum Zirkusgasse 1935, p. 707.

⁴³ ibid., p. 704.

⁴⁴ ibid. p. 705. Incidentally, Eric Voegelin also said something similar: “Rather soon after I had gotten to know professors in the seminars at the university, the opportunity arose for me to get a teaching position with a very, very low salary at the Vienna Volksheim adult education centre.” In: Voegelin, Eric: Autobiografische Reflexionen. Edited, introduced and with a bibliography by Peter J. Opitz, Munich 1994, p. 105. I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Anton Szanya for this reference.

⁴⁵ The examination of literature was carried out in an extremely intense way within the Literary Working Group in that, for example, the person leading the discussion asked all the participants, including “those not trained in literature“ to write down their immediate impressions of a work arising from their subjective world of thoughts and feelings in the form of written opinions and to drop these off in anonymous envelopes in the office, which were then talked about, discussed and were to “be pooled together into an overall judgment of the work.”

⁴⁶ Schönwiese, Zentrum Zirkusgasse 1935, p. 706.

⁴⁷ ibid., p. 707.

⁴⁸ Lützeler, Hermann Broch. Eine Biografie, p. 141.

⁴⁹ Back then its title was still “For They Know Not What They Do“.

⁵⁰ Lützeler, Hermann Broch. Eine Biografie, p. 141.

⁵¹ Of course, there were other literary events, but these cannot be gone into here. For example, there were the events of the Library for the Unemployed, the events of the Artistic Working Group under Dr. Fritz Lehner, etc

⁵² Lützeler, Hermann Broch. Eine Biografie, p. 143.

⁵³ ibid., p. 143.

⁵⁴ ibid.

⁵⁵ Cf. Göhring, Walter: Volksbildung im Ständestaat und Ostmark. Österreich 1934-45, Mattersburg 1985, unpublished manuscript, p. 25.

⁵⁶ As Horst Jarka called it. For this, see: Filla, Wilhelm: Die österreichischen Volkshochschulen in der Zeit des Austrofaschismus 1934-1938. In: Mitteilungen des Vereins zur Geschichte der Volkshochschulen 5 (1994), 1-2, p. 22-23.

⁵⁷ Cf. Stifter, Christian H.: „Geistige Stadterweiterung“, p. 78. The “municipal ordinance of July 2, 1936 on the regulation of popular education in Vienna” came into effect with its publication in the law gazette on August 12, 1936. However, the law had already been obeyed in the Volksheim ahead of time. The author would like to thank Dr. Renate Lotz-Rimbach for this reference.

⁵⁸ Ziak, Karl: Erinnerungen an das Ottakringer Volksheim, audio tape transcript, p. 35. ÖVA, B-VHO.

⁵⁹ In 1936, he only stopped working on the second version of the “Versucher” (The Tempter) once more to prepare the story “The Return of Virgil” for a radio reading. Cf. Schönwiese, Ernst: Einleitung. In: „Nur das Herz ist das Wirkliche“, p. 18.

⁶⁰ Lützeler, Hermann Broch. Eine Biografie, p. 145.

⁶¹ Lützeler, Paul Michael: Einleitung. In: Broch, Hermann: Völkerbund-Resolution. Das vollständige Pamphlet von 1937 mit Kommentar, Entwurf und Korrespondenz. Ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler, Salzburg 1973, p. 8.

⁶² Quote from: Lützeler, Einleitung. In: Hermann Broch, Völkerbund-Resolution. 8 f. Also cf. Lützeler, Hermann Broch. Eine Biografie. Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 183.

⁶³ Broch, Hermann: Zur Universitätsreform. Edited and with an afterword by Götz Wienold. Frankfurt am Main 1969, p. 10.

⁶⁴ Broch, James Joyce und die Gegenwart. Rede zu Joyces 50. Geburtstag. Vienna 1936, p. 25.

⁶⁵ ibid., p. 26.

⁶⁶ Broch, Hermann: Massenpsychologie. Schriften aus dem Nachlass. Edited and introduced by Wolfgang Rothe. Zurich 1959, p. 38.

⁶⁷ ibid., p. 45.

⁶⁸ Watt, Roderick H.: Hermann Broch’s Die Unbekannte Größe: The central symbol of „Sterne im Wasser“. In: MLN. German Issue, Vol. 89, October 1974, No. 5, p. 841 f. I would like to thank Univ.-Prof. Dr. Joseph P. Strelka for this reference.

⁶⁹ Broch, Hermann: Die Unbekannte Größe. Vienna 1933, p. 172.

⁷⁰ Broch: James Joyce und die Gegenwart, 1936, p. 27.

⁷¹ Broch, Hermann: Massenpsychologie, p. 47.

⁷² ibid., p. 46.

⁷³ ibid., p. 45 f.

⁷⁴ Broch, James Joyce und die Gegenwart, 1936, p. 19.

⁷⁵ ibid.

⁷⁶ ibid., p. 28.

⁷⁷ Broch, Hermann: Die Kunst am Ende einer Kultur, GW 9, p. 53.

⁷⁸ ibid., p. 55.

⁷⁹ ibid.

⁸⁰ ibid., p. 57.

⁸¹ For this, cf. Weinzierl, Erika: „Schuld durch Gleichgültigkeit“. Hermann Broch, Briefe über Deutschland 1945-1949. In: Zeitgeschichte, 14th vol., April 1987, issue 7, p. 299-310.

⁸² Broch, Hermann: Zur Universitätsreform, p. 69.

⁸³ ibid., p. 12.

⁸⁴ In order to reach a broader public, a separate journal was to be published, which wouldn’t be exclusively scientific, high profile political activities were to be held by organising roundtable discussions, and radio propaganda was to be conducted with scientific and non-scientific content.

⁸⁵ Lützeler, Paul Michael: Theorie der Demokratie – Hermann Brochs wissenschaftliche Arbeiten im amerikanischen Exil (1938 bis 1946). In: Stadler, Friedrich (ed.): Vertriebene Vernunft II. Emigration und Exil österreichischer Wissenschaft. Internationales Symposion 19. bis 23. Oktober 1987 in Wien. Bd. II (= Veröffentlichung des Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institutes). Vienna – Munich 1988, p. 561.

⁸⁶ Broch: Die Kunst am Ende einer Kultur, p. 56.