Lost Son. Hermann Broch
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Название: Lost Son
Автор: Hermann Broch
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Журналы
isbn: 9781619021433
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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 had already fled to America three years earlier and was able to be an advocate for him there.
This correspondence of father and son will be of interest above all to those who know Hermann Broch’s work, as there is hardly any other epistolatory evidence from the years 1925 to 1928 that reveals anything about the author’s situation at that time. The Brochs, father and son, embody the harsh conflicts between the representatives of the Expressionist generation and the proponents of the young New Objectivity. The son that Broch could not understand became more or less lost to him, and Armand experienced this confrontation as losing his father. Their opposing positions became exacerbated by the ever-growing economic crisis, which the son did not wish to recognize (his fellow students at the elite school apparently did not discuss such things) but which the father felt to be an existential threat. Twenty years later, Broch gave the title “Verlorener Sohn” (“Lost Son”) to one of the novellas that make up his 1950 novel, Die Schuldlosen (The Guiltless), and this story is also an expression of his relationship with Armand.
1.
HERMANN TO ARMAND
SPINNFABRIK “TEESDORF”
Telephone 64-2-96
Austrian Postal Savings Bank Acct No. 10235
Telegraph address: SPINTEES WIEN
Factory: Teesdorf, Lower Austria,
Mail: Tattendorf, Lower Austria.
Telephone: Leobersdorf 13
Vienna, 17 January 1925
1., Gonzagagasse 7 1. Letter (after school vacation)
Hello, old boy,
Your first letter finally arrived today. If Leroux hadn’t already written me five days earlier, I should have been worried about you. Your rather spare birthday greeting to Grandfather also got here only today. You could at least have thanked your grandparents for your stay here at their house. Please take care of this in your next letter to Grandmother.
I am only sorry that this visit did not turn out to be an untroubled one. I won’t give you any long lectures about it, I am convinced that they would just bore you. Nonetheless, I do think that now, from a distance, you will see things more clearly, and that much of your own behavior will seem inexplicable to you from that remove. When you are here, you can’t see the forest for all the trees of your wishes, and most of all, you don’t see that here you are surrounded with a kind of love that you will find nowhere else on earth. At the moment it probably seems more like a burden to you; but someday you will feel that here is your natural home, and this feeling will become stronger and stronger the older you get. The family, after all, is the only human community that is not based on coincidence.
In the present case and for the moment, then, it’s a pity, but I cannot risk asking you to come here for the Easter vacation, because I can’t allow any more of these scenes to be inflicted on your grandparents.
After your last trip I have a good deal more confidence in your ability to travel on your own. You gave us few details; were you alone in your coupé? etc. All in all you certainly have a good, practical head, and my criticisms (which really weren’t criticism) and which apparently offended you, I would redefine to this extent: in practical matters you are no longer a dumb little rogue, but, alas, you still are, with regard to your wishes, your actions, and your ability to get along with others. But I still cautiously hold the view that this, too, will soon change.
Here, as you can well imagine, there is no real news to report. I am as always overwhelmed with problems and work, but am nonetheless not dissatisfied with life, having the firm belief that all this has a deeper purpose and meaning, and that life, as short as it is, alas, is worth living and worth working at.
The things you asked for will be mailed on Tuesday. I will write to M. Dedet about your taking Spanish, but I fear it will be hard to get you in at the middle of the school year.
Write me again soon. Warm regards,
Your P.!
[KW13/1, 59–60]
SPINNFABRIK TEESDORF: Broch’s father, Josef Broch, had acquired the Teesdorf Weaving Factory in Teesdorf outside of Vienna in 1906, with the idea that his two sons, Hermann and Friedrich, would run the business and derive an income from it. Hermann was the chief business executive, Friedrich was the chief engineer. The Brochs lived in the Herrenhaus (masters’ house) on the factory property. The business was sold in 1927.
GONZAGAGASSE 7: Besides the house in Teesdorf, the Brochs also had a city residence in Vienna’s First District. Broch used this residence until his emigration to Britain and then the United States in 1938.
HELLO, OLD BOY: Hermann Friedrich Broch (1910–1994) was the only child from the marriage of Hermann Broch and Franziska Broch, née von Rothermann. After leaving the Collège de Normandie, he did not attend university or take up a profession. He tried to find a career in many different areas, in particular the tourism industry. In the thirties he spent a great deal of time in Italy and Greece. In 1941 he was able to flee Europe for the United States, and during the Second World War he served in the U.S. Army. After the war he worked mostly as a tour leader and translator. Later in life he made a name for himself as literary translator of the works of Elias Canetti, Gregor von Rezzori, and his father.
AFTER SCHOOL VACATION: In the fall of 1924 the fourteen-year-old Hermann Friedrich Broch was sent off to school at the Collège de Normandie. There was probably some correspondence between father and son earlier СКАЧАТЬ