Volume 1 of The Sleepwalkers: A story of one man, or a broader look at social forces?

The end of Book One (The Romantic) of Hermann Broch's 1928-31 3 vol novel, The Sleepwalkers, leaves me puzzled and confused. So the main character, the young German officer Joachim, tries to leave money to his Berlin girlfriend, the sometime-prostitute, poorly educated, "lower" class Ruzena, but she, always classy in her way, completely declines the money and berates Joachim, w/ particular venom toward J's (only?) friend, Bertrand. J then formally proposes to Elisabeth, the daughter of a wealthy landowner who lives near his family estates; this is the marriage that all of the families hoped would take place. But it's obvious his heart isn't in it - nor is hers, as in fact the conniving Bertrand had declared his love for her but, realizing they would never be able to marry, he takes off on a business expedition, possibly to India (the ends of the earth for a European in this setting - 1888). So J is right to think he has been betrayed by Bertrand, but what about this marriage? Why does he enter into it w/ such lack of feeling and emotion? The volume ends with their chaste wedding night, a totally strange night in which J seems to have hallucinations that his wife's face is not a human face but is some kind of landscape, with mountains and valleys. He's obviously sexually experienced, but just not drawn to this woman; she doesn't seem afraid or frigid, in fact seems more forward than he is, but they end up sleeping side by side w/out touching. In the end, I have no idea what to make of this: Is this a portrait of a somewhat mentally disturbed young man, pressured by conflicting forces in his society (drawn toward the sexually adventurous woman but married to the proper German daughter, loyal to his country - he's a soldier though we see nothing of his military profession - and his family but always in the shadow of his older brother who died in a duel "of honor" and of his father, who is increasingly mentally ill himself and trying to disinherit his only son? Is this story meant to represent the forces at work in society in the late 19th century? If so, it doesn't really click - at least not in comparison w/ the other great German language epics of its time: Magic Mountain, Man Without Qualities, Berlin Alexanderplatz - all of which are imbued w/ their time, wrestle w/ grand ideas, and present a broad spectrum of society and not just the torments of a late Romantic. That said, this volume reads well and has some fine, weird passages, the wedding night among them; I will at least have a go at volume 2, sent in 1903 and called The Anarchist (which sounds promising already).

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