This volume examines Hermann Broch’s unpublished papers, his correspondences, as well as his major works of fiction in terms of his political and international peace programs and his mass hysteria theory. Its goals are clearly stated, the research is accurate and thorough, and the volume is impressive in terms of the scholarly strength of the fourteen contributors, who represent many of the twenty-first century’s leading scholars on Broch’s émigré years. The breadth and quality of the individual essays is also impressive, and they provide thorough overviews of Broch’s approaches to “mass hysteria and peace politics.” The work is the product of two separate conferences on Broch from 2020 and 2022, and though Paul Michael Lützeler is not a contributor to the volume (it is dedicated to him, and he co-coordinated the 2020 conference), his presence is strongly felt in almost all its chapters. In many ways, the volume encapsulates Lützeler’s last decade of scholarship on Broch and the growing interest in Broch’s émigré experience and intellectual commitments, providing a concise summary of the topics, direction, and current advances in this scholarship.

The editors, however, stress the urgency of re-reading Broch’s theory in the midst of a reemergence (or renewed awareness) of totalitarianism and genocide. As they state:

The editors’ urgency in terms of making Broch’s thought more available serves to highlight the central problem of Broch’s Massenwahntheorie and his work on human rights: its sui generis style, auto-didactic sourcing, and isolated nature of its composition. These characteristics make understanding, and then positioning, Broch’s ideas within larger scholarly and policy debates very difficult. Much of what is found in the volume is an attempt to disentangle or clarify Broch’s ideas vis-à-vis his contemporaries (Weber, Lukács, Adorno, Arendt, and Voeglin inter alios) and to position Broch next to more recent theory, as well as to show that the language of his political thought is very much the language of his fiction. Taken as a whole, the volume convinces the reader that there is a logical structure to Broch’s goal of internationalism, open democracy, and protection of human rights. But to understand it, one must set his ideas next to those of his contemporaries, sometimes as sounding boards and collaborators, sometimes as antagonists, realizing that much of what is valuable is seen only if one integrates the structures and goals of Broch’s fictional work into his political vocabulary. One must also understand that Broch’s thought was ahead of its time, requiring one to read him today through the lens of post-colonial theory, post-modern literary criticism, and systems theory, as well as in conjunction with his turning away from fiction.

The two guiding concepts for examining Broch’s political work are “Massenwahntheorie” and “Friedenspoetik.” The first term refers to Broch’s fragmented work on mass hysteria and crowd psychology. Here, the chapters that address mass hysteria provide good historical background to where, how, and why Broch made politics his central intellectual project for the last fifteen years of his life. The second term refers not simply to Broch’s desire for an international system to promote and protect “world peace,” but more importantly for exploring how this goal fits within his literary corpus. The volume is a valuable contribution for scholars working on Broch and on the political, literary, and intellectual histories of the mid-twentieth century. This work is clearly directed at a scholarly reader; the complicated nature of the ideas and the scattered nature of the primary sources require a reader familiar with Broch’s literature and Nachlass. Nonetheless, the work will provide for the lay reader some insight into the shifting focus of Broch’s writing in America, as well as his experience of exile.

The volume is divided into seven sections with two chapters per section: “Moderne und Masswahn” (essays by Kirk Wetters and Barbara Picht), “Demokratie und Friedenssemantik” (Sarah McGaughney and Thomas Borgard), “Tod, Frieden und Erlösung” (Jürgen Heizmann and Chrisoph Zeller), “Anthropologie und politische Theorie” (Elena Agazzi and Daniel Weidner), “Emigration und politische Praxis” (Sebastian Wogenstein and Patrick Eiden-Offe), “Propaganda und Erziehung” (Martin Klebes and Doren Wohlleben), and “Schuld und Nachleben” (Daniela Doutch and Agnieszka Hudzik). As with all edited volumes, thematic unity seems at first glance problematic. But if one reads each essay carefully and in succession, there is clearly an identifiable and useful point to the volume. Namely, that a studied reading of Broch today as a theorist for human rights and internationalism is well justified with some guidance in terms of historical and biographical context, theoretical and literary vocabulary, and critical tools for reading Broch’s complex theoretical alchemy. However, the merger of Broch’s literary voice into his political program also suggested to me a question in terms of the evaluating Broch’s political and social scientific writing: In working to justify Broch’s theoretical relevance today, should we not also mourn the sidelining of his poetic voice, which may have more effectively filled the gaps in which so many programs and theories for ending injustice, authoritarianism, and genocide have proved lacking?