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Hermann Broch. Das Teesdorfer Tagebuch fuer Ea von Allesch. Paul Michael Luetzeler, ed., with H. F. Broch de Rothermann. Frankfurt a.M. Suhrkamp. 1995. 246 pages. DM 40. ISBN 3-518-40674-4.
Beginning in July 1920, Hermann Broch wrote for a period of six months "letters in form of a diary" or Tagebuchbriefe, addressed to Ea von Allesch. Broch had met Ea von Allesch in 1917, but their affair did not start until after the end of World War I. In 1920 Broch was thirty-four years old and director of the parental Spinnereifabrik in Teesdorf. He was trying to establish himself as a serious intellectual whose major endeavor at that time was work on a "theory of historiography and philosophy." Ea von Allesch, nee Emma Elisabeth Taeubele, was eleven years older than Broch, a notable beauty, and the uncontested queen of the Viennese coffeehouses. The list of her friends and admirers reads like a Who's Who of Viennese coffeehouse society in the early...