An English translation in 1932 by Edwin and Willa Muir received good reviews and the work has been admired since World War II by serious European critics, who put Broch in the company of Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Robert Musil as well as James Joyce and Marcel Proust.

[1] The first part, set mostly in Berlin and an unnamed eastern province of Prussia, concerns an unsure young aristocrat and army officer, Joachim von Pasenow.

He wavers between his romantic devotion to a Czech prostitute Ruzena Hruska and his duty which is to court Elisabeth von Baddensen, the heiress of a neighbouring landowner and his social equal.

Set along the River Rhine, mainly in the cities of Cologne and Mannheim, this part is centred on August Esch, an able bookkeeper but restless with every job that he takes and every friend he makes.

He eats at the bar of the widow Gertrud Hentjen, who keeps all men at a distance, and drinks there with Martin Geyring, a socialist trade union organiser.

When Geyring is unjustly imprisoned, Esch ascribes this to the owner of a large local business (Eduard von Bertrand from the first part), whom he scorns as an exploiter and a homosexual.

The now elderly Major von Pasenow is the military commandant of the town, striving to maintain order and dignity as the population succumbs to starvation and disease.

Esch has moved there with his wife to run the modest local newspaper, finding an outlet for his restless search for meaning in an informal religious sect, which von Pasenow joins.

Closing reflections from the author predict that the destruction of values in Germany has left the way open for an amoral and ruthless new Leader to emerge, who will prophesy a new future for the disoriented nation.

In creating the plot of the book, Broch was inspired by his associates and friends for several characters and events, for example his mistress and confidante the Viennese journalist Ea von Allesch, who gave him the idea of the vaudeville artiste Ilona.

The third reflects the artificial and disjointed nature of the time it describes by a fractured narrative, jumping between threads of the story, moving between prose to verse, and inserting philosophical speculations which provide a theoretical framework to the whole book.

The book is also mentioned in Michelangelo Antonioni's film La Notte (1961), where the novelist Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) finds a copy lying around in the mansion of a philistine magnate where a vapid party is being held, upon which he incredulously asks his wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) "Who here would be reading The Sleepwalkers?"

If it owes a good deal to Joyce and Proust, then Broch has transformed their interior techniques and many-faceted sensibilities into something as harshly German as the painting of Bosch.