Eric Voegelin’s private letter to Hermann Broch, dated 5 June 1944 and presented here in a 2007 edited German transcription, connects practical literary support with a pointed defense of intellectual independence. Its movement is conversational: arrangements for subscriptions to Broch’s completed work lead into disagreement about poetry’s social position, followed by congratulations, travel plans, and news of Voegelin’s History of Political Ideas. The central argument distinguishes the social reception of intellectual achievement from the grounds of its significance. Isolation in mass society does not establish that poetry or philosophy has become meaningless.
The opening makes that distinction concrete before it becomes explicit. Voegelin has already ordered Broch’s work through Friedrich Krause’s New York bookshop. He and Robert Heilman have ordered both editions, with Heilman taking the English one; Voegelin offers to circulate three further subscription invitations and identifies Cleanth Brooks as another likely reader. This practical assistance matters to the subsequent disagreement. Voegelin is actively cultivating an audience, even while rejecting the idea that an audience’s size or responsiveness determines a work’s worth.
His response to Broch’s judgment on the sociology of poetry begins by conceding both intellectual loneliness and the desirability of social resonance:
Dass Dichtung, ebenso wie Philosophie oder andere geistige Aktivität von Rang in der Zeit einer Massenkollektivität einsam ist, das ist wohl klar; dass soziale Resonanz vorzuziehen wäre, ist auch gewiss.
English translation: That poetry, like philosophy or other intellectual activity of distinction, is lonely in an age of mass collectivity is surely clear; that social resonance would be preferable is also certain.
The disagreement concerns what follows from these premises. Voegelin asks whether distinguished intellectual creations must therefore cease to exist or be judged pointless, and emphatically rejects that inference. He locates the foundations of intellectual achievement in mysticism rather than society. This is the letter’s strongest conceptual move: social conditions can explain a work’s isolation without supplying the ultimate measure of its meaning. The claim remains compressed and polemical; the letter does not develop an account of mystical experience or explain precisely how it sustains artistic creation.
Voegelin then reverses the familiar accusation that intellectual withdrawal entails distance from reality. Anticipating an age of film as collective artwork and other cultural developments he finds repellent, he refuses to treat participation in collective life as an overriding obligation:
Wenn Sie mir die Alternative zwischen einem ivory-tower und einem tower of filth stellen, da bin ich doch noch eher für den ivory-tower. Im übrigen halte ich nicht viel von dem slogan „ivory tower“ -- nichts ist so realitätsfern wie die verdreckte Phantasiewelt, in der das Kollektivum lebt.
English translation: If you present me with the alternative between an ivory tower and a tower of filth, then I would still sooner choose the ivory tower. Besides, I do not think much of the slogan “ivory tower”—nothing is so remote from reality as the filthy fantasy world in which the collectivity lives.
The provocation shifts the issue from sociability to contact with reality. Collective acceptance offers no guarantee of such contact; collective fantasy may itself constitute estrangement. His defense of solitude is thus conditional and comparative, not simply indifference to readers.
The closing returns this argument to the circumstances of intellectual work. Voegelin congratulates Broch, proposes a meeting during his forthcoming eastern trip, and reports that preparing a fair copy of his History of Political Ideas has revealed a three-volume structure: ancient world, Middle Ages, and modern world. Two volumes are complete and the third half finished; he hopes to publish the first two while allowing more time for the last. Macmillan is considering the manuscript, with Louisiana University Press available as an alternative. These details frame the letter’s relevance: it records intellectual independence as a lived problem involving friendship, readers, publishers, and unfinished scholarship, while refusing to make social recognition the source of intellectual value.
This work was divided into 1 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 1 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian