Mountain Novel, Hitler Novel

D.A.N. Jones

• The Spell by Hermann Broch, translated by H.F. Broch de Rothermann
  Deutsch, 391 pp, £11.95, May 1987, ISBN 0 233 98049 0
• Hermann Broch: A Biography by Paul Michael Lützeler, translated by Janice Furness
  Quartet, 329 pp, £25.00, June 1987, ISBN 970 43 2604 1

The first thing to notice about The Spell is that it is a good, readable story. Hermann Broch is considered ‘very hard to read’, wrote Martin Seymour-Smith in his useful guide, Novels and Novelists. ‘He used most of the Modernist technical devices available to him, but mainly stream of consciousness.’ Broch’s work has often attracted comments like that and they sound, to the general reader, like the kiss of death. Nevertheless, The Spell is as straightforwardly readable – and haunting – as the stories of Walter De La Mare, say, or as Emily Brontë. Secondly, it is a reflection on the largest public event in Broch’s life – the takeover of Germany and Austria by the Nazis, heralding their attempt to conquer the world, using ‘crowd-psychology’. Thirdly, it is uncompleted, though it may not seem incomplete. Broch worked on it for almost twenty years, while completing other work. More than one version of The Spell has been published. One of them is called The Tempter.