TO SUM UP THE WORK of Hermann Broch, in a possible-impossible sum, to use Broch's language, the work centers around the question of how totality is theoretically tenable in a fragmented, differentiated world and obtainable in the process of writing. At the same time, the texts confront the paradox of always being the expression of what they simultaneously seek to overcome.

The art of modernism reacted to the accelerated rhythm of modern life, the tempo set by machine, money, communications systems and media, by revolutionizing poetic language. Broch himself contributed to this reaction, driving out the devil of fragmentation with the Beelzebub of a polyhistoric, formally complex novel. The enthusiastic stance of the various avant-gardes, however, which celebrated the frenzied productive powers and the tides of traffic as a kind of liberation from the old order, liberation from the terror of the signified, was completely foreign to Broch the Platonist. The author thus appears caught in a peculiar position, as a modern writer conscious of form who pushed the novel to its limits and as a conservative cultural critic for whom the masses, the metropolis, popular culture, and the purely self-referential façade of functional architecture could come to epitomize evil.

The figure that comes to bear in producing the texts is one of ambivalence. On the level of the psychic constructed in his letters and in Psychische Selbstbiographie, which was written in 1942 as an autobiography largely informed by psychoanalysis, it appears as a double bind between ethical duty and individual neurotic disposition, as a futile struggle with a self-imposed ideal of performing one's duty.