Der Tod des Vergil Reading Order

Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945) by Hermann Broch is the most audacious formal experiment in the Austrian novel and one of the most extreme single-book achievements in the German literary tradition: the last eighteen hours of Virgil's life, arriving in Brundisium with the manuscript of the Aeneid, delirious with fever, contemplating burning the poem because he believes it to be aesthetically and morally insufficient — a poem of empire rather than of human truth. The novel is written in four parts (Water, Fire, Earth, Air), each corresponding to one of the classical elements and one phase of Virgil's dying consciousness; the prose ranges from interior monologue to lyrical meditation to philosophical dialogue (with Augustus, who will not let Virgil burn the Aeneid) to something approaching pure lyric poetry in which the sentences extend for pages. Broch wrote The Death of Virgil in Vienna in 1938, was arrested by the Gestapo after the Anschluss, was released through the intervention of friends including James Joyce, and completed the novel in American exile. The historical parallel — a German-speaking Jewish writer fleeing nazism while completing an almost unreadable lyrical masterpiece on the ethics of art — is inescapable and gives the novel a biographical dimension that Broch did not plan. The novel is simultaneously a work of art about the limits of art, a meditation on whether beauty can justify itself in a world of violence, and a formal extreme in which the German prose lyric is pushed as far as it has ever gone.