The Guiltless Author:Hermann Broch, Ralph Manheim (Translator) Completed in 1949, The Guiltless is Broch's third novel. Its long-awaited English translation, by Ralph Manheim, appears now for the first time. Structurally, it is perhaps the most enigmatic: eleven chapters, differing in tone and character, are grouped into three parts for the decades beginning in 1913, 1923, and ... more »1933. From the whole emerges a remarkable pointillist portrait of a people who seem to sense, just beyond the everyday limits of their consciousness, the disintegration of the value system in which their lives are embedded.
This deep cultural malaise that nourished Nazism is reflected here in Andreas, the phlegmatic but successful young businessman; in Baroness W.'s garden party for Weimar society; in Assistant Principal Zacharias's drunken discourse; in the bizarre love scene of the severe young Hildegard.« less