4 - The articulation of guilt in Broch's Der Versucher

Summary

Der Versucher (The Tempter; otherwise known as Die Verzauberung and Der Bergroman) tells of the fatal influence exerted upon a mountain community by a gold-obsessed charismatic leader, who persuades it to reinstitute human sacrifice; narrated by a doctor who is a precursor of Mann's Serenus Zeitblom, the book is Hermann Broch's allegory of the workings of National Socialism. Set in the heartland of the Heimatfilm, it was the first major German literary text to dramatize the relationship between the Heimat ideology and National Socialism. The work's ultimate failure may reflect the difficulty of establishing the mediations between country and city in a land only recently unified – a difficulty Edgar Reitz utilizes to virtually sever the links and cut the countryside free of responsibility for the Third Reich – and may also demonstrate that the mountain is too central a totem of German literature for the self-reflexive effort to critique the ideology associated with it to succeed. Now that Heimat ideology seems to be resurgent in the German-speaking countries – Reitz's Heimat itself having been extended into a second installment – Broch's work of the mid-thirties has acquired a new timeliness.