The Innocents

The Innocents is Hermann Broch's searching "novel in eleven narratives," a mosaic of stories, dialogues, and lyric interludes that traces German life from the Wilhelmine years to the threshold of Nazism. Its central concern is not spectacular villainy but the quieter guilt of passivity: the bourgeois refusal to judge, act, or assume historical responsibility. Written in Broch's high modernist mann...