“Stars in the Water”: Hermann Broch’s Die Unbekannte Größe and the Language of Interwar Experience

Abstract

This article investigates the role of the “Sterne im Wasser” as the central leitmotif in Hermann Broch’s Die Unbekannte Größe (1933). As a plot device, the “Sterne im Wasser” motif fuels Broch’s construction and parody of the main character Richard Hieck’s mathematical world view. Richard’s failures to assign meaning to the “Sterne im Wasser” by means of mathematical reasoning mirror Broch’s critique of the narrowly discursive attempts at meaning-making, and especially logical positivism, that characterize the Viennese interwar period and the late modernist obsession with linguistic precision. Beyond the parodic dimension of Broch’s novel, however, the “Sterne im Wasser” motif also models the production of meaning via metaphor and self-consciously performs literature’s ability to create meaning where other discursive languages fail. What Broch regards as his least successful novel in fact delivers a powerful defence for the necessity of literature in the age of scientific precision.