The first existentialist novel - The Sleepwalkers?

OK, at this point I've given it enough - read all of part/volume 1 and half of volume 2, = about half the entire novel - to say that Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers may have been important in its day (1928-31) but claims that he's in the same class as Mann, Musil, or even Dolbin are in my view overstatements. We go a long way toward the study of 2 men - The Romantic in vol 1 and The Anarchist in vol 2 - who are not exactly social misfits (the "romantic" is a well-established military officer, the anarchist a young man starting out in business and entrepreneurship) but are troubled and confused, like many young men of their day and always. Esch, the protagonist of vol 2, is struggling to begin a career as an entrepreneur (he has begun to organize a series of women's wrestling matches, which actually gets off to a prosperous start) and confused about his relationships w/ women - by the mid-point of the volume he is drawn to an older, widowed woman who runs a small restaurant - not really attracted to her physically but drawn to her as to a "mother" and provider - and confused about his society. Esch blames many others for the various failures and disruptions in his life, and has begun to think about killing the owner of a shipping company where he used to work - but these thoughts are inchoate. He also feels remorse about a labor organizer who's imprisoned after being set up by some goons who turned a peaceful meeting into violence - but Esch doesn't do anything about his remorse. In other words, he's a man of bitterness and resentment paralyzed by inaction - really the first of the existential heroes, the antecedent of Camus' Mersault. That said, given that the protagonists do very little, 800 pages is a long road to travel. This novel doesn't feel to me like an examination of a society in crisis, nor do I see anything that foretells the horrors facing Germany (and Europe) in the years ahead - both the First World War that preceded Broch's composition of this work and the 2nd, whose seeds were already taking root (compare w/ Berlin Alexanderplatz, which seems much more prescient about German culture). 
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