First thoughts on the 2nd volume of Broch's Sleepwalkers

Part 2 or volume 2 of Hermann Broch's 1928-31 novel, The Sleepwalkers, is called The Anarchist, and in keeping w/ that title it's more political and more about current events of the time (set in 1903 in various cities in Germany - Cologne, Mannheim) than was volume 1. The connection across the two volumes is tenuous: one of the main characters in vol 1 (set in 1888) was ambitious and selfish young businessman; in vol 2 this character is the owner of a large factory that employs the main character and others, though at least halfway thru the volume he never appears. In this volume a young man, August Esch, gets fired from his bookkeeping (only word-base in English w/ 3 consec double letters - first time I've ever written it I think!) job, and he suspects it's because another clerk was running a scam w/ the books - this becomes something of an obsession for Esch. W/ help from a union organizer - though Esch is not part of the union and in fact doesn't really favor the labor movement, he's an "independent" man - Esch gets a job at a firm in another city. In this job, he rooms w/ a co-worker and co-worker's sister, and various sexual entanglements arise. At one point Esch's friend the union organizer comes to the city and there's a meeting of radicals that turns violent thanks to some agents provocateurs, and the police swarm in and arrest the organizer and others. Esch, characteristically, thinks only of himself and soon embarks on a plan to work w/ a few others and begin a women's wrestling league as a circus-like entertainment (he has befriended some performers, as well as a rather sorrowful character who's a devout Xtian, perhaps homosexual, runs a tobacco shop and advocates for vegetarianism and the Salvation Army and moral rectitude - an incongruity even back in 1903 I think). So this doesn't seem to be a political novel a la, say The Secret Agent, but it's another look at a man caught in the swirl of currents disturbing his society - but remaining disengaged, a spectator. Nothing in the novel to this point - about 250 pp in - foreshadows in any obvious way the World War (which I suspect will be central of volume 3) or the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism, though there are some nasty comments about Jews but probably nothing extraordinary for the day, or maybe even today for that matter.
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