Mosaics of a Broken World: Hermann Grab’s Social Science, Literature and Music

This study focuses on the broken world that the Prague German writer and musician Hermann Grab (1903–1949) first encountered in 1924 with his study of sociology at Heidelberg. While Grab initially sought to comprehend the new world and make an impact from a sociological perspective, he later embraced literature and music as a means of expressing a way forward. This text highlights Grab’s exploration of the dynamics of change in the modern world and their implications for a reformed approach to musical education. His work as a writer and music teacher is emblematic of Prague, where many authors uniquely integrated art and science. Alongside new forms of literary writing, he reflected on a renewal of music education as a reaction to the dissolution of values noted by others at the time, most famously by Hermann Broch. Building on this premise, Grab’s doctoral thesis, his novel, and one of his short stories, as well as his views on music education, are brought to bear in order to show how Grab turns the pieces of a fractured world into mosaic tiles whose combination in different art forms points to something beyond this dissolution of values.