Geist und Zeitgeist

Hermann Broch is one of the great novelists of European modernism. His poetry - such as the Sleepwalker Trilogy and the novel The Death of Virgil - is based on cultural-critical thoughts, which he elaborated in a series of essays. Broch knew that the crises and conflicts of his present and the future are ultimately cultural in nature, and that they cannot be overcome or settled if the foundations and developments of civilization remain unreflective. Broch's entire poetic-thinking work revolves around the theme of European value decay or its overcoming.This collection of essays contains the author's most powerful theoretical works. What is culture in general and how can cultural processes be described and analyzed? How can art be distinguished from kitsch? What is the tension between myth and poetry? What is the significance of human rights after Auschwitz? For Broch, culture is a symbolic form of overcoming death. According to Broch, civilizational developments with their constants and ruptures can only be described in an interdisciplinary way. For him, kitsch is primarily a matter of ethical judgment and not merely an aesthetic phenomenon. For Broch, myth is the telos of poetry. Among the novelists of his day, he says, Kafka came closest to this goal. Broch's essays show what interdisciplinary work can accomplish in the field of cultural historiography. His concept of "cheerful apocalypse" has entered the language of international cultural criticism. The modernist Hermann Broch's analysis of culture turns out to be similar to that in postmodernism: segmentation and differentiation are emphasized. But unlike in Postmodernism, Broch still mourns the disintegration of the formerly unified European culture. A detailed afterword by the editor comments on the.