Hermann Broch's novel “The Death of Virgil” (Der Tod des Vergil) (1945) is set during the collapse of the Roman Republic and reflects on two themes that greatly preoccupied the author during his time of exile: the psychology of the masses and the crisis of art.

The poet Virgil is returning from Athens to Brindisi. The city is celebrating, as the victorious Augustus has also just returned. When Virgil is mocked by the revelling masses, he begins to doubt the value of his poetry, which seems to have grown irredeemably remote from the wretched reality of the masses. “In terms of its form, only a few passages of the ‘The Death of Virgil’ conform with the conventions of the novel”, writes literary scholar Jürgen Heizmann. “It is at once a lyrical song, a monologue-based self-reflection and a philosophical essay (...).” (Bettina Bannasch/Gerhild Rochus (Hg.), Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Exilliteratur, 2013).

The novel was published in both German and English at the same time in 1945 by Pantheon Books, the publishing company of exiled publisher Kurt Wolff in New York. Due to trade embargoes, the German-language version could only be sold in Germany from 1949 onwards. The copy shown here was apparently sold to Sweden. The provenance indicators on the endpaper shows two previous owners before the book found its way into the collection of the German Exile Archive 1933-1945: the publisher Adolf Neumann and the literary scholar Walter A. Berendsohn.

Further reading:
Heizmann, Jürgen: Hermann Broch. Der Tod des Vergil (1945), in: Bannasch, Bettina / Rochus, Gerhild (Hg.): Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Exilliteratur. Von Heinrich Heine bis Herta Müller, Berlin: de Gruyter 2013, S. 256-263.