Hofmannsthal’s world

Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Kafka are the twentieth-century German writers who have made a deep impression in this country. But the three prominent Austrian writers of this century—Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch—have never found a wider audience. Hofmannsthal is mainly known as the librettist of six operas by Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena, and Arabella. His extensive work as a novelist and essayist was translated only when the Bollingen Foundation published Selected Prose (1952), the first of three volumes of Hofmannsthal’s writing. Broch wrote its introduction.

Hermann Broch was born in 1886. He was a textile manufacturer in his youth and later established a literary reputation with his three-part...