Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time, translated and edited and with an introduction by Michael P. Steinberg (University of Chicago Press) £25.75, £12.75 pb.

Broch's enthusiasm for Hofmannsthal as a cultural hero was limited. Few critical works can have been undertaken in such an unadulatory mood as was Broch's to begin with; he described Hofmannsthal as 'a highly talented man, who out of weakness succombed too much to the conditions of his time . . . and became a bad poet'. It was a view that mollified in the course of writing the expansive, if turgid critique of Middle-European culture between 1880-1920 which became Broch's goal. The first chapters show that he had no intention of succumbing to the times in question. He tears into their aesthetic pretentions and shams with a polemical vigour that scarcely masks a bad temper and personal spleen.

In the early chapters, Hofmannsthal is largely absent, occasionally being used as a stalking-horse for Broch's attacks on the 'non-style', the 'kitsch' and the aesthetic blasphemy he discerned in the Jung Wien writers among whom Hofmannsthal is numbered. At this stage Broch writes like a Kraus who has mislaid his satirical edge. It is exhaustive and exhausting and gives the impression of a man of talent and energy forced to write against his will.

There is a noticeable improvement once Hofmannsthal's life and works come in for consideration. Broch drops his Hercules-before-the-Hydra stance and begins to use an ...