to invite Labouchère; his parents are really very nice, but I can’t stand the guy, even though I do enjoy going to visit them. But first of all, we don’t have the room, and second, he eats too much. But I am hopeful that he won’t take me up on the invitation, since he has to have his tonsils removed. Alas, we have a lot of time to make these decisions, for as you yourself have said, despite every effort these 2 months will not pass quickly. So it sounds all the better to say I will be back in Vienna in 7 weeks, and when at long last the day of departure is finally here, the joy of it will be redoubled. There is little news here, lots of work and also lots of diversion: the day before yesterday we had the annual match against the “Roches,” which we lost 4:1. One guy brought a jazz group, one on the banjo, the other on the saxophone, and so we had pretty nice music during the movie. Today I played on the team for the first time, so now I too will take part in the matches.
As happy as I was to get your letter, I am still so sorry that you have so much to do, and that times are so hard. Hopefully things will really get better, so that you can relax for a change. In any case, come and see me when you travel to Zurich. It’s so close, after all! And you’ll be able to take a week off at least. How are you and Auntie Allesch these days? Give her my very best wishes. And please write me very soon.
Here’s a hug from your loving son
Hermann
LABOUCHÈRE: Ernest Albert Labouchère (born 1911), a fellow student of Armand’s year. He was also his hall-mate in the dormitory Les Tilleuls. Ernest attended the school along with his brother Charles David (b. 1913). The two had two other siblings: Alix Grace Lobstein, née Labouchère (1919–1999) and Robert Eugène Labouchère (b. 1922). The Labouchères were Huguenots who emigrated from France to the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, settled in Amsterdam, and became bankers. The mother of Charles and Ernest Labouchère was Elaine Labouchère, née Whitney; their father was the Amsterdam banker Albert Everard Labouchère (1882–1941). The parents owned villas in Amsterdam and Paris. The mother adopted the family name of her stepfather, John J. Hoff, when the latter married her mother, Grace Whitney Hoff (1862–1938) in 1900. Grace Whitney Hoff’s father, David Whitney, Jr., (1830–1900), was one of the richest American lumber manufacturers of his time and lived in Detroit. First, Grace Whitney Hoff had married John Everett Evans, who likewise came from one of the richest Detroit families, and upon his death she married John J. Hoff, the chief representative in France of Standard Oil of New York (now Exxon Mobil). John J. Hoff was so prominent that an oil tanker built in 1913 was named for him. John and Grace Whitney Hoff actively promoted U.S. involvement in the First World War on the side of England and France. Shortly after their marriage they became French citizens; they owned a townhouse in Paris (with a view of the Bois de Boulogne), the Château de Peyrieu in the Département Ain, and the Château du Breau near Paris. Ernest and Charles Labouchère spent their vacation periods with their grandparents at the castle in Peyrieu. Grace Whitney Hoff pursued philanthropic and charitable activities in Detroit as well as in Peyrieu and Paris. During World War One she assisted war widows and orphans in Peyrieu, and after the war she financed an international dormitory for female students, the Foyer International des Étudiantes on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, which still exists today. She was awarded the Cross of the French Legion of Honor. The Hoffs were often visited in their villa in Paris and their castles (mostly they lived in Peyrieu) by members of the European nobility, such as Henriette, Duchesse de Vendôme, the sister of the King of Belgium; the Vicomtesse de Fontenay, the wife of the French ambassador to the Vatican; as well as the American ambassador to France Myron T. Herrick, a family friend; Bhupindar Singh, the Maharajah of Patalia in India; and French Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Besides these, many internationally known artists came calling in Peyrieu, including the composer Jules Massenet, the violinist Albert Spalding, and the opera singer Emma Eames.
THE “ROCHES”: The Collège des Roches in Verneuil/Normandy—an elite school comparable to the Collège de Normandie, was nearby. It closed in 1972 but soon reopened as École des Roches (Collège, Lycée). Armand mentions a tennis match between the two schools.
AUNTIE ALLESCH: Ea von Allesch (1875–1953), a writer for various fashion magazines and newspapers. Broch had an intimate friendship with her from 1917 to 1927. She let Broch have a room in her apartment in Peregringasse 1 (Vienna, ninth district) between 1922 and 1928. Cf. Hermann Broch, Das Teesdorfer Tagebuch für Ea von Allesch (The Teesdorf Journal for Ea von Allesch), ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995), which includes the letters that Broch wrote to Ea from July 1920 to January 1921 in the form of a diary.
7.
HERMANN TO ARMAND
SPINNFABRIK “TEESDORF”
Telephone 64-2-96
Austrian Postal Savings Bank Acct No. 10235
Telegraph address: SPINTEES WIEN
Factory: Teesdorf, Lower Austria,
Mail: Tattendorf, Lower Austria.
Telephone: Leobersdorf 13
Vienna, 6. February, 1925
1., Gonzagagasse 7 No. 4
Hello, old boy:
I am indeed mistrustful of you, as was Adele about that unloaded toy pistol, but of course with more reason—still, your letter pleased me. I shall answer it in reverse order, so philosophy first, then:
In general I naturally have the view that philosophy cannot be taught, but that everyone must tackle these universal questions through one’s own consistent, serious reflection, but I would like to give you a few guidelines.
Life seems meaningless in view of death: that is an incontrovertible fact. The only question is whether we can oppose another fact to this one, one which is just as incontrovertible, or rather, one of greater significance.
Now it is obvious that most people experience life as a positive value, and are not misled by this apparent pointlessness. It’s even more obvious, however, that all values that human beings strive to hold onto are in some way connected with eternity, thus, with overcoming the power of death: the joy they take in nature, which not for nothing is called “eternal nature,” the joy they find in works of art, which also have validity that lasts over the centuries, and most especially the joy of knowledge, in the discovering of every new “eternal truth,” which should be as eternal as 2 x 2 = 4; all these true joys come from people’s sense of the eternal contained within them, and of their own potential eternalness. If you ask what road you should take in life, given that the question isn’t just a nice rhetorical phrase—you, too, would be incomparably happier and more satisfied if you had the great answer to the riddle of life in your hands.
Of course I could give you many more examples to demonstrate how anything of value is connected to the eternal: for example, the respect for one’s own name and family, the continuation of which over generations proves that a father’s love for his son, and vice versa (a large part of Chinese religion is based on this!) takes into account this idea of eternity. Or to stay in the dimension of reality: the diamond is the most valuable material because it is the longest lasting.
Still, examples are not proofs, and we need a fact just as unassailable as the fact of death. Now, the fact of death is only unassailably a fact if one views man as a two-legged being which was born and thus must also die, since all animals die. This is a view of man seen, so to speak, from the “outside.”
But here is where our second fact begins, which has much, much more weight than the first. For your own alive-ness, your being a human, your experience exists only in your thinking. You stand there, singularly alone with your thinking in the midpoint of your experience, and if you now look at yourself, so to speak from the inside out, no longer are you a human being in the usual sense of the word, that is, mortal per se; you are simply a thinking “I” and nothing else. This fact is of course a much firmer, solider fact