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SOCIAL DISINTEGRATION IN THE MODERN WORLD: HERMANN BROCH

The Guiltless by Hermann Broch

Ralph Manheim (Translator)

Broch (1886-1951)

Product Details:

• Pub. Date: December 2000
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• ISBN-13: 9780810160781
• ISBN: 0810160781

The Guiltless

Murder, lust, shame, hypocrisy, and suicide are at the center of The Guiltless, Hermann Broch’s novel about the disintegration of European society in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Broch’s characters—an apathetic man who can barely remember his own name (Broch mostly refers to him as A.); a high-school teacher and his lover who return from the brink of a suicide pact to carry on a dishonest relationship; Zerline, the lady’s maid who enslaves her mistresses, prostitutes the young country girl Melitta to gentleman A., and metes out her own justice against the “empty wickedness” of her betters—are trapped in their indifference, prisoners of a sort of “wakeful somnolence.” These men and women may mention the “imbecile Hitler,” yet they prefer a nap or sexual encounter to any social action. In Broch’s mind this kind of ethical perversity and political apathy paved the way for Nazism.

Broch believed that writing can purify, and by revealing Germany‘s underlying guilt he hoped to purge indifference from his own and future generations. In The Guiltless, Broch captures how apathy and ennui– very human failings—evolve into something dehumanizing and dangerous.

This novel was born out of several previous short novellas, which Broch weaved together, adding new chapters and ordered to tell one multilayered story, a rich, complex and deep one. It is the story of A., a Dutch financier who lives in Germany.

The three parts of the book correspond to the years 1913, 1923 and 1933. Besides portraying the pre-Hitlerian Germany, it is a metaphysical novel, in the strictest sense of the concept. The fundamental subject is indifference as an attitude towards life.

“A” is indifferent to practically everything, including the suffering of his lover and, of course, political and social problems. The book is called “The guiltless” because no one assumes themselves as responsible for the dangerous path Germany was following in those years. However, “A” will pay a price for his indifference.

This novel is, then, a reflection on the social environment that led to Nazism. Broch is a dense but good writer, and I think this novel is recommended to any serious lovers of literature, but also for those interested in observing a recreation and a meditation on Germany in those three crucial decades for the world.

Composed of eleven chapters differing in tone and style, the novel portrays an apathetic and ethically debased European society.

Biography

Broch (1886-1951) had careers as a mathematician, engineer, and director of a Viennese textile firm before publishing his first work, the trilogy Sleepwalkers, in 1930-32. In 1935 he spent 5 months in a Nazi prison; in 1940 he emigrated to the U.S.

About the Author:

Born in Vienna in 1886, Broch is considered one of the great names of 20th Century German literature. Critics will place him in a pantheon that includes Joyce, Musil, Kafka, Mann, and Proust. Son of a well-off Jewish textile manufacturer (at an early age he converted to Catholicism), Broch had a thirst for high intellect. Eventually he gave up his academic plans, his future as an industrialist, in pursuit of literature, through which he would deal with ethical questions and realms of experience rejected by the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. Likewise he devoted his life to the study of mass psychology and politics.

“The Sleepwalkers”

“The Sleepwalkers” (published when the author was 40) is a trilogy, a three-dimensional work with one underlying philosophical unit.

The first book, “The Romantic” portrays 19th century realism with von Pasenow as main character, a Prussian aristocrat clinging to ethical values considered outdated.

The second book, “The Anarchist,” portrays the accountant Esch who is in search of a “balance” of values in unstable pre-war Germany.

Both characters will meet in the third book “The Realist,” and will find hope in a fanatical religious sect, which foresees the coming of a Redeemer (fascism, Hitler). They will be defeated by Huguenau, an army deserter and opportunist, representing the new ethical standards of a society free of values or to put it correctly “with no values.” There are several parallel plots, a number of alienated characters, and cumbrous symbolism. To make things a bit more complex and elaborate, there are 16 chapters of poetry, and 10 chapters (Disintegration of Values) of sound and intensive philosophy.

According to Broch, “sleepwalkers” refer to a gap between the death of an ethical system and the birth of another, as much as a somnambulist finds himself in a state between sleep and awake. The novel reflects the disintegration of values in Germany between 1880 and 1920, the psychological distress and disorientation of interwar Germany in which Nazism set its foot. Broch views the Renaissance as the starting point of disintegration of a unified Christian world into a multifaceted society with no ethical roots.

Broch’s trilogy is the chronicle of the evolution of Germany in particular and the whole of Europe in general between the years 1888 and 1918.

The philosophical focus of the trilogy should be searched for in the third novel, Huguenau or the Realist and within that in the essay ‘Disintegration of Values”, which is allegedly written by a Bertrand Mueller, who according to Broch himself is the same Bertrand who appears in the first two novels of the trilogy. The essay on disintegration of values closely follows Max Weber’s Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. In fact not before we understand Weber’s theory of modernity and the role of the Protestant Reformation in the rise of modern capitalism can we appreciate the full vigor of Broch’s narrative.

In ten separate parts, Broch explains masterfully the notion of style of an age, the relation of plastic arts with the the style, the concept of inner logic within each individual value-system and the effect of it on the life of the individual. The third part of the novel, the realist, is the culmination of the trilogy as such. It is where all the characters meet and it is there that Broch uses all different narrative modes. A certain air of inevitablity is prevalent in Broch’s narrative of the disintegration of values, which, in turn, appears to follow a certain Hegelian Historicism. This third novel of the trilogy consists of five separate parts, three of which are stories taking place in a German city near the Belgian borders and the other two are the story of the Salvation Army Girl in Berlin, which is Bertrand Mueller’s journal and then his essay on the disintegration of values. It is Broch’s wonderful technique to combine all five narratives as one by integrating the story of Huguenau in the essay, as though Mueller, omnisciently and from afar comments on the life of the people in this small and remote town. Bertrand Mueller, therefore, is Broch’s own alter ego. He, along with Broch, is the author of Disintegration of Values.

“The Sleepwalkers” deviates from the psychological novel as first conceived in the 19th century and endlessly reincarnated to this day by entering into a new territory where fiction is subservient to and illustrative of philosophical principles. Thus the task of the reader is to decipher a surface which is at different times prosaic, irrational, symbolic, etc. This is not allegory or fable. The characters and situations are neither two dimensional nor transparently representational of secondary meanings. Rather, the author has let his intended supratext breathe through more tangible and specific fictive embodiments. He does this with various degrees of success, more often than not needlessly obscuring his meaning by burying it too deeply. It is not as if the reader discovers Broch’s meaning for himself so that by the end when it’s spelled out in straightforward expository essay form the reader has already come to the same or deeper understanding. In fact, without Broch’s plain exposition, contained in chapters entitled “Disintegration of Values,” The work offers a vision of modernity that is at core irrefutable and in many aspects unique.

More: “Hermann Broch” by Ernestine Schlant

Broch’s trilogy is the chronicle of the evolution of Germany in particular and the whole of Europe in general between the years 1888 and 1918.

Broch (1886-1951)

BANK FOR INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS BIS REVIEW NO. 134: THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM

BIS Review

Bank for International Settlements

BIS Review No 134 available

Press, Service (press@bis.org)

Publications, Service (Publications@bis.org)

Thu 10/29/09

Please find BIS Review No 134 attached as an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. Alternatively, you can access this BIS Review on the Bank for International Settlements’ website by clicking on http://www.bis.org/review/index.htm.

What’s included?

BIS Review No 134 (29 October 2009)

Mark Carney: Bank of Canada’s economic overview and monetary policy stance

Durmuş Yılmaz: Turkey’s economy and the financial crisis

Marion Williams: Governance and regulation of the financial sector – post meltdown: what has changed?

Lars Nyberg: Towards a new European supervisory structure

Paul Tucker: The debate on financial system resilience – macroprudential instruments

please e-mail press@bis.org.

BIS Review

Bank for International Settlements

BIS Review No 134 available

http://www.bis.org/review/index.htm

Press, Service (press@bis.org)

Publications, Service (Publications@bis.org)

Thu 10/29/09

"THE CREATION AND DESTRUCTION OF VALUE": HAROLD JAMES GLOBALIZATION BOOK

The Creation and Destruction of Value:

The Globalization Cycle

Professor Harold James (Author)

Review

No one is better qualified than Harold James to explore the similarities and differences between recent events and the early 1930s. A model of lucid exposition, The Creation and Destruction of Value confirms that if you want to understand our current predicament, history is a much better guide than economics.

–Niall Ferguson, Harvard University, author of The Ascent of Money

A masterly account. James commands his subject like no other. The lessons of 1931 for today’s world are compelling. Like Humpty Dumpty, globalization is broken, and it will take time to put it together again.

–David Marsh, author of The Euro: The Politics of the New Global Currency

The reflections of Harold James, an economic historian at Princeton University and a long-time student of what makes globalization happen, would be of interest even in times more tranquil than these. But at a moment when the march of global integration has been stalled by a financial crisis unparalleled since the 1930s, Mr. James is a particularly fitting guide…At a time when economists are accused of having forgotten history, yet few historians can explain the world of bank bail-outs and the turmoil they cause, Mr. James has a rare gift for being able to marshal an impressive knowledge of economic and financial history in order to highlight previously unrecognized connections with the past.

(The Economist)

Product Description

Harold James examines the vulnerability and fragility of processes of globalization, both historically and in the present. This book applies lessons from past breakdowns of globalization—above all in the Great Depression—to show how financial crises provoke backlashes against global integration: against the mobility of capital or goods, but also against flows of migration.

By a parallel examination of the financial panics of 1929 and 1931 as well as that of 2008, he shows how banking and monetary collapses suddenly and radically alter the rules of engagement for every other type of economic activity. Increased calls for state action in countercyclical fiscal policy bring demands for trade protection. In the open economy of the twenty-first century, such calls are only viable in very large states—probably only in the United States and China. By contrast, in smaller countries demand trickles out of the national container, creating jobs in other countries. The international community is thus paralyzed, and international institutions are challenged by conflicts of interest. The book shows the looming psychological and material consequences of an interconnected world for people and the institutions they create.

The Creation and Destruction of Value:

The Globalization Cycle

Professor Harold James (Author)

JORDAN TELECOM RESULTS

Jordan Telecom 3Q09 Financial

Results

AB Invest Research Division

research@ab-invest.net

Thu 10/29/09

Please click on the following link to read the

Jordan Telecom 3Q09 Results Brief.

http://www.ab-invest.net/dmdocuments/JTEL_Financial_Results_Update.pdf

Sincerely,

AB Invest Research Division

Contact us

http://www.atlasinvest.net/html/contact_us/contact_us.html

Jordan Telecom 3Q09 Financial Results

AB Invest Research Division

Jordan Telecom 3Q09 Results Brief

http://www.ab-invest.net/dmdocuments/JTEL_Financial_Results_Update.pdf

research@ab-invest.net

The Arab Bank plc

Thu 10/29/09

THE POINCARE CONJECTURE: TWO BOOKS

Poincare’s Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve

One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles

by George G. Szpiro

• Pub. Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
• Format: Hardcover, 320pp
• ISBN-13: 9780641941603
• ISBN: 0641941609

George Szpiro begins his masterfully told story in 1904 when Frenchman Henri Poincaré formulated a conjecture about a seemingly simple problem.

Imagine an ant crawling around on a large surface. How would it know whether the surface is a flat plane, a round sphere, or a bagel- shaped object? The ant would need to lift off into space to observe the object. How could you prove the shape was spherical without actually seeing it? Simply, this is what Poincaré sought to solve.

In fact, Poincaré thought he had solved it back at the turn of the twentieth century, but soon realized his mistake. After four more years’ work, he gave up.

Henri Poincare (1854-1912)

The Poincare Conjecture:

In Search of the Shape of the Universe

Donal O’Shea (Author)

Product Details:

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company
• March 6, 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080271532X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802715326

Henri Poincare (1854-1912)

MIDDLE EAST AVIATION BUSINESS NEWS

No alliance with Etihad says Emirates chief

Cargo plane makes emergency landing at Sharjah

Gulf Air employees in pay protest

Aviation Business Weekly Update

(newsletters@mail.itp.net)

Wed 10/28/09

LEAD STORY

No alliance with Etihad, says Emirates chief

by ASC Staff

Sheikh Ahmed says there is no truth in long-running rumour.
read full leader »

NOVEMBER

• Dubai Airshow preview
• Interview: Emirates chairman HH Sheikh Ahmed
• Project profile: ADAC

Sarah Cowell
Editor
t: +971 4 435 6286
e:sarah.cowell@itp.com

David Ingham
Editorial Director
t: +971 4 435 6255
e: david.ingham@itp.com

Fareed Dubery
Commercial Director
t: +971 4 435 6339
e: fred@itp.com

Aviation Business Weekly Update

Wed 10/28/09

BANK FOR INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS BIS REVIEW NO. 133: GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM

BIS Review

Bank for International Settlements

BIS Review No 133 available

Press, Service (press@bis.org)

Publications, Service (Publications@bis.org)

Wed 10/28/09

Please find BIS Review No 133 attached as an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. Alternatively, you can access this BIS Review on the Bank for International Settlements’ website by clicking on http://www.bis.org/review/index.htm.

What’s included?

BIS Review No 133 (28 October 2009)

Christian Noyer: Beyond Pittsburgh – the future of financial regulation

Mark Carney: Reforming the global financial system

Martín Redrado: Institutional framework and economic growth

Donald L Kohn: International perspective on the crisis and response

Heng Swee Keat: The next stage – policy challenges in Asia

e-mail press@bis.org.

BIS Review

Bank for International Settlements

BIS Review No 133 available

http://www.bis.org/review/index.htm

Press, Service (press@bis.org)

Publications, Service (Publications@bis.org)

Wed 10/28/09

TWO NOVELISTIC VIEWS OF COLONIAL MALAYA

John Burgess Wilson

(pseudonym Anthony Burgess)

(25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993)

His Malayan trilogy The Long Day Wanes was Burgess’s first published venture into the art of fiction. Its three books are Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East.

This trilogy is composed of books published over a 3 year period [1956-59].

John Burgess Wilson (pseudonym Anthony Burgess) (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic.

His Malayan trilogy The Long Day Wanes was Burgess’s first published venture into the art of fiction. Its three books are Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East.

It was Burgess’s ambition to become “the true fictional expert on Malaya”; with the trilogy, he staked a claim to have written the definitive novel of the expatriate experience of Malaya.

The trilogy joined a family of Eastern fictional explorations, among them Orwell‘s treatment of Burma (Burmese Days), Forster‘s of India (A Passage to India) and Greene‘s of Vietnam (The Quiet American). In these works, Burgess was working in the tradition established by Kipling for British India, and Conrad and Maugham for Southeast Asia.

Conrad, Maugham and Greene made no effort to learn local languages. But Burgess operated more in the mode of Orwell, who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese (necessary for Orwell’s work as a police officer) and Kipling, who spoke Hindi (having learnt it as a child). Like his fellow English expats in Asia, Burgess had excellent spoken and written command of his operative language(s), both as a novelist and speaker, including Malay. (It may be argued that a respect and sensitivity for contexts both historical and cultural led to an enhanced understanding of the concerns of indigenous people in Burgess’s Malayan trilogy.)

Malayan Trilogy

Anthony Burgess (Author)

Time for a Tiger

The Enemy in the Blanket

The Beds in the East

Product Details:

• Paperback: 591 pages
• Publisher: Random House of Canada, Limited
• New Ed edition 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0749395923
• ISBN-13: 978-0749395926

This trilogy is composed of books published over a 3 year period [1956-59], and are called Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and The Beds in the East.

The Trilogy was re-issued later as The Long Day Wanes in 1981.

The central character is Victor Crabbe, an idealist liberal working first as a teacher, then as a headmaster, and finally in the Administration of the Education department in Malaya [now Malaysia]. Anthony Burgess (John Burgess Wilson) denied that Crabbe was based on himself, but there are some obvious similarities in the careers and in Burgess’s own attitudes to his compatriots.

In the first book, Time for a Tiger, Crabbe has profound difficulties with his wife, Fenella, who like many expatriate wives in that time had a problem in coming to grips with life in a petty-minded and prejudiced environment. This is the last few years before Malaysia was granted independence, and so there is no more empire-building, only commercial exploitation. This theme is repeated throughout the 3 books. Crabbe has a permanent guilt about the death of his first wife in a car accident, for which he may or may not have been responsible, and this theme also recurs throughout the trilogy.

She leaves him at the end of “The Enemy in the Blanket” and so in the third book he is alone and struggling with internal politics in running his department – his overall concern is to do a good job and to leave the education department in good hands for the future, when the country attains its independence.

The Beds in the East is about “the coming of the Americans.”

Somerset Maugham was writing about a much earlier era in colonial history.

The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy (The Norton Library)

Han Suyin

Cultural and political conflicts between East and West in modern history play a central role in Han Suyin’s work. She also explores the struggle for liberation in Southeast Asia and the internal and foreign policies of modern China since the end of the imperial regime. Many of her writings feature the colonial backdrop in East Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries.

And the Rain My Drink (1956)

Han Suyin (Author)

Product Details:

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Triad Books; 1st THUS edition
• September 6, 1973
• ISBN-10: 0586037802
• ISBN-13: 978-0586037805

Novels

• Destination Chungking (1942)
• A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952)
• And the Rain My Drink (1956)
• The Mountain Is Young (1958)
• Winter Love (1962)
• Cast But One Shadow (1962)
• Four Faces (1963)
• L’abbé Pierre (1965, French only)
• L’abbé Prévost (1975, French only)
• Till Morning Comes (1982)
• The Enchantress (1985)

Autobiographical works

• The Crippled Tree (1965)
• A Mortal Flower (1966)
• Birdless Summer (1968)
• My House Has Two Doors (1980)
• Phoenix Harvest (1982). (This is Volume II of the hardback edition of My House Has Two Doors, published separately in paperback.)
• Wind In My Sleeve (1992)
• A Share of Loving (1988)
• Fleur de soleil, histoire de ma vie (1988, French only: Flower of sun: the story of my life)

Historical studies

• China in the Year 2001 (1967)
• Asia Today: Two Outlooks (1969)
• The Morning Deluge: Mao Tsetong and the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954 (1972)
• Lhasa, the Open City (1976)
• Wind in the Tower: Mao Tsetong and the Chinese Revolution, 1949-1965 (1976)
• China 1890-1938: From the Warlords to World War (1989; historical photo-reportage)
• Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China (1994)

And the Rain My Drink

INDIA AVIATION SUMMIT: HYDERABAD INDIA MARCH 2 2010

Indian Aviation Summit

Tue 27 Oct 2009

Indian Aviation: A Vision for the Future

Tuesday 2nd March 2010

Hyderabad India

We would like to invite you to submit your views about the forthcoming “Indian Aviation: A Vision for the Future” Summit to be held on Tuesday 2nd March 2010 in Hyderabad India.

This major conference will explore the latest developments in the commercial and business aviation sectors of India. The main purpose is to debate solutions to the current issues that affect the aviation industry in this huge marketplace as well as discuss new challenges for the future.
The aviation boom in India has brought about a revolution in the aviation industry and private carriers have created a new dimension especially for the domestic market. Air traffic in India has been growing and the biggest aircraft manufacturers have updated the ageing fleet of the state-owned airlines.
The growth of business aviation in India is also attracting the attention of manufacturers and operators.
Who should attend: airlines, business aircraft operators, aircraft manufacturers, entrepreneurs, banks, airports, law firms, financial analysts, leasing companies, air finance specialists and any aviation professional involved with the development of the aviation sector in India.

Please take a few moments to complete this questionnaire which includes speaking and sponsorship opportunities by clicking on the following link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=7_2bwnMmHqeYAYW1qRd_2bmk8g_3d_3d

Thank you very much in advance for your feedback.

Kind regards,

Panagiotis Panagopoulos

Director

Aeropodium

Web: www.aeropodium.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/aeropodium

Aeropodium

#7 85 Sunny Gardens Road London – NW4 1SH

United Kingdom

Indian Aviation Summit

Indian Aviation: A Vision for the Future

Tuesday 2nd March 2010

Hyderabad India

Web: www.aeropodium.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/aeropodium

Tue 27 Oct 2009

CANADIAN HOUSING MARKET

IMF Update: Working Paper No. 09/235

NewContent@InternationalMonetaryFund.org

Tue 10/27/09

New item: Working Paper No. 09/235

Is the Canadian Housing Market Overvalued?

A Post-Crisis Assessment

Author/Editor: Tsounta, Evridiki

Summary: Canadian house prices have increased significantly between 2003 and early 2008, with a marked downward trend since mid-2008, especially in the resource-rich western provinces. This paper estimates the evolution of equilibrium real home prices during this period in key provinces and finds that, following recent declines, home prices are now generally close to equilibrium throughout Canada. However, house prices in Alberta and British Columbia remain around 8 percent overvalued at the end of the sample (second quarter of 2009). Despite the limitations of econometric estimates of house-price dynamics, the measured small degree of overvaluation suggests that the Canadian housing market is essentially at equilibrium.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.cfm?sk=23336.0

DISCLAIMER: This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate.

IMF Update: Working Paper No.09/235

NewContent@InternationalMonetaryFund.org

New item: Working Paper No. 09/235:

Is the Canadian Housing Market Overvalued?

A Post-Crisis Assessment

Author/Editor: Tsounta, Evridiki

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.cfm?sk=23336.0

Tue 10/27/09