Much more accessible. It struck me as an allegory on fascism. ( )

The arrival of a charismatic and pernicious stranger in a mountain village upturns the life of its inhabitants. Espousing ideas of purity, return to nature and the forgotten ways of their ancestors, and rejection of progress, he attracts the young men to his movement. The villagers retain a deep connection with the soil, with the fruits of the labors of their hands, and when the young man, whose rash and mysterious personality made attempts to open the long-closed gold mines deep in the mountains, he awakens the long dormant dreams of the villagers of wealth. This mountain is their Mother, and its riches are the entitlement of her sons and daughters. Under his spell, the darkest urges of their collective consciousness are awakened which lead to a climax of bestial horror that recalled their pagan origins, and a tragedy that vindicated the resistance of the few. After these events, the village returns to normal life, and even the stranger is absorbed into the inalterable cycle of daily life. But part of humaneness has been lost forever.

Broch wrote the first version of this novel in 1935, at the dawn of the Third Reich, and was working on the third version when he died in 1951. It was first published in 1976. (The English translation was published in 1986. The translator is the author's son). In this philosophical novel of powerful symbolisms, he depicts the impact of Adolf Hitler on the hearts and minds of the German people. Broch's commentary at the end of the book explains his interest in getting into the heart of mass psychology, their functions and impact. He probes the motivations and the hidden recesses of the individual's psyche, the areas of the mythical mind that lead him or her to acts that are illogical, hysterical. Through the journals of the village doctor, our narrator, Broch explores the metaphysical sources of this mania, the interplay which constantly links the landscape of the soul with the scenery of the action. It is both profound and ominous in its characterization of the Nazi phenomenon. ( )

Another phenomenal effort by a barely known writer. Hermann Broch, the author of The Sleepwalkers (a trilogy) was a major Austrian writer who is commonly labeled as a "Modernist" whatever that means or meant. The book is a parody, or a tragedy if you prefer, of Hitler's ascent to power. In reality the book is much more: it is a credible and vivid description of life in post-war Austria, in a small village surrounded by fictional mountains. The story is simple, a drifter comes to the village and upsets the equilibrium that centuries of peasant life have solidified. The village doctor is the narrator and also the conscience of the village. He is respected by all, but nevertheless the irrational Marius with his lackey Wenzel has power on a few first, many later on inhabitants. The book goes well beyond the Hitler parody (but it does compare interestingly with Norman Mailer's last book The Castle in the Forest. There is a story line that relates to environmentalism (but the book was written in 1976, so it did predict some aspects of the Green movement extremes), a love story with a Communist woman, a profound mediation on the powers of medicine, and also a description of nature that has few rivals. A gem of a book. Only weakness is the stuffy translation, if I were a publisher, I'd immediately work on a new translation. ( )