Abstract

In his first novel, the trilogy The Sleepwalkers, published between 1930 and 1932, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch -one of the greatest representatives of the critical literature of the Fin-de-Siecle Vienna together with Robert Musil and Joseph Roth introduced in the middle of the plot long essayistic digressions that start with a discourse on architectural ornament. For Broch, the singularity of his present lay in the fact that an epoch captive to death and hell has to live within a style incapable of producing the Ornamental. Broch's ornament theory, in open opposition to that of Adolf Loos, comes from the writer's early aesthetic concerns, formulated just when the controversy around the Looshaus in Vienna's Michaelerplatz erupted towards 1910.