The Sleepwalkers - Opening

Part One

THE ROMANTIC

(1888)

I

IN the year 1888 Herr von Pasenow was seventy, and there were people who felt an extraordinary and inexplicable repulsion when they saw him coming towards them in the streets of Berlin, indeed, who in their dislike of him actually maintained that he must be an evil old man. Small, but well made, neither a shrivelled ancient nor a pot-belly, he was extraordinary well proportioned, and the top-hat which he always sported in Berlin did not look in the least ridiculous on him.

HERMANN BROCH

The

SLEEPWALKERS

a trilogy

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN

BY WILLA AND EDWIN MUIR

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 1996

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously

in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by

Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,

New York, in 1945.

Manufactured in the United States of America