A Companion to Twentieth Century German Literature 2nd edition

Hermann Broch’s novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945) is an interior monologue evoking the last 18 hours of the great poet’s life, and a long lyrical meditation on the impotence of art. In a 600‐word entry on Broch here the authors remark parenthetically that the “realization of the helplessness of the word when faced by the unspeakable” became a recurrent theme in twentieth‐century literature, “especially in German‐speaking countries”. The Companion contains entries on “over four hundred authors of fiction, poetry and drama from Germany, Austria and Switzerland”; this new edition has been expanded to cover developments since the cataclysm of...