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Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) | |
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German poet and novelist, who explored in his work the duality of spirit and nature and individual's spiritual search outside restrictions of the society. Hermann Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Several of Hesse's novels depict the protagonist's journey into the inner self. A spiritual guide assists the hero in his quest for self-knowledge and shows the way beyond the world "deluded by money, number and time." "I have encountered religion in two forms, as child and grandchild of upright pious Protestants and as a reader of Hindu revelations, among which I place at the top of the list the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the discourses of the Buddha. Nor was it any accident that in them midst of a genuine, living Christian atmosphere I exåerienced my first religious stirrings in Hindu form. My father and my mother and her father as well spent their whole lives in the service of the Christian mission to India, and although it was only one of my cousins and I who realized that there is no order of precedence among religions, nevertheless my father, mother, and grandfather had not only a rich and fairly thorough knowledge of Hindu forms of belief but also a sympathy, though only half admitted, for those forms. I breathed and participated in spiritual Hinduism from childhood just as much as I did in Christianity" (from 'My Belief' (1931), My Belief: Essays on Life and Art by Hermann Hesse, edited and with an introduction by Theodore Ziolkowski, translated by Denver Lindley, with two essays translated by Ralph Manheim, Triad/Panther Books, 1979, p. 177) Hermann Hesse was born into a family of Pietist missionaries and religious publishers in the Black Forest town of Calw, in the German state of Württemberg. Johannes Hesse, his father, was born a Russian citizen in Weissenstein, Estonia. Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, the daughter of the Pietist Indologist Hermann Gundert, spent her early years in Talatscheri, India. Hesse's parents, who had served as missionaries in India, expected him to follow the family tradition in theology. Hesse entered the Protestant seminary at Maulbronn in 1891, but he was expelled from the school. After unhappy experiences at a secular school, Hesse left his studies. He worked as a bookshop clerk, mechanic, and book dealer in Tübingen, where he joined literary circle called Le Petit Cénacle. During this period Hesse read voluminously and determined the become a writer. In 1899 Hesse published his first works, Romantische Lieder and Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht. Hesse became a freelance writer in 1904 after the publication
of his novel Peter Camenzind.
In the Rousseauesque "return to nature"
story the protagonist leaves the big city to live like Saint Francis of
Assisi. The book gained literary success and Hesse married Maria
Bernoulli (1868-1963), a photographer nine years his senior, with whom
he had three children. Hesse had abandoned city life: he lived with his family in the village of Gaienhofen on the German shore of Lake Constance. Like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Hesse was interested in the Orient. However, he did not practice Yoga, although he used its breathing technique. "Real Yoga can only be practiced in India", he once said. To
escape from the burdens of marriage and family, and the materialistic
values of his bourgeois world, Hesse went in 1911 to Asia.
The journey was a disappointment ‒ the "soulful, searching gaze of most
Indian worshipers," he stated, "far from being an invocation to
the gods, or a plea for salvation, is simply a request for money" (Asia, Modernity, and the Pursuit of the Sacred: Gnostics, Scholars, Mystics, and Reformers by Joel S. Kahn, 2016, pp. 47-48). Although Hesse was appalled by the misery he saw in Ceylon, Sumatra, and Malaya, his pilgrimage gave
start to his studies of Eastern religions and the novel Siddhartha. Eine indische Dichtung
(1922). In the story, based on
the early life of Gautama Buddha, a Brahman son rebels against his
father's teaching and traditions. Eventually he finds the ultimate
enlightenment. The culture of ancient Hindu and the
ancient Chinese had a great influence on Hesse's works. Hesse recorded
his 1911 voyage to the East Indies in his essays, poetry and short
fiction, which has been published in English under the title Singapore Dream: And Other Adventures: The Travel Writings of an Asian Journey
(1918). He was accompanied on the three-month-long tour with his
friend the artist Hans Sturzenegger, whose brother Robert ran a family
business in Singapore. Originally they planned to visit Southern India, but never managed to do so. For several
years in the mid-1910s Hesse underwent psychoanalysis under Carl Jung's
assistant J.B. Lang (1883-1945) at Sonnmat, a private clinic near
Lucerne. Lang was an
eccentric, who appeared as Pistorius in (1919) and who remained
Hesse's close friend. At that time Hesse was heavily influenced by
Jung, whom he met in 1916, before becoming a staunch supporter and
defencer of Freud. (Hermann Hesse: His Life and Work by Joseph Mileck, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980, p. 101) The symbolism in the novel Demian Roßhalde
(1914) is Jungian. Hesse explored, among others, the
question of whether the artist
should marry: the author's replay was negative. During these years his wife suffered from
growing mental instability and his son was seriously ill. "Despair is
the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue,
justice and understanding and to fulfil their requirements. Children
live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side." (from The Journey to the East, translated by Hilda Rosner, London: Peter Owen and Vision Press, MCMLVI, p. 83) In 1912 Hesse and his family took a permanent residence in Switzerland, settling first in a suburb of Bern. Martin, his third son, who was born in 1911, became seriously ill. His recuperation was slow and eventually he was placed as a foster child in Kirchdorf. Martin lived with Johanna and Alice Ringier from 1914 until 1927. Hesse volunteered for service in the German army in 1914, but was rejected because of poor health. He spent the years of World War I in Switzerland, where he was in charge of the German Embassy's Central Office for the Distribution of Books to German Prisoners of War. In his writings, Hesse attacked the prevailing moods of militarism and nationalism. By his countrymen, Hesse was called a traitor. During the summer of 1916, when writing became distasteful for him, he turned to painting. Mostly he painted mountain landscapes, lakes, gardens, trees, and houses. Demian was highly appreciated
by Thomas Mann, who compared its importance to
James Joyce's Ulysses and André Gide's The Counterfeiters. T. S. Eliot visited Hesse in 1922 in Montagnola, but it was Hesse's slim volume of essays, entitled Blick ins Chaos: Drei Aufsätze (1921, In Sight of Chaos), that had stirred Eliot's
interest. "In your book Blick ins Chaos," Eliot said, "I detect a
concern with serious problems that has not yet penetrated to England,
and I should like to spread its reputation." (quoted in The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past by Walter Kalaidjian, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, p. 201) The
novel attracted especially young veterans of the WW I. With
Aldous Huxley he shared belief
in the need for spiritual self-realization. "None of us intellectuals is at home in reality," Hesse wrote in Steppewolf.
"We are strange to it and hostile. This is why the part played by
intellect even in our own German reality, in our history and politics
and public opinion, has been so lamentabe a one." (Steppenwolf, translated by Basil Creighton, revised by Walter Sorrell, Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin Books, 2009, p. 159; Der Steppenwolf, first published in Germany, 1927) Demian was first published under the name of its narrator, Emil Sinclair, but later Hesse admitted his authorship. In the Faustian tale the protagonist is torn between his orderly bourgeois existence and a chaotic world of sensuality. The author had praised unreservedly Jung's study Psychological Types, but in 1921 he suddenly canceled his analysis with Jung and started to consider him merely one of Freud's most gifted pupils. Leaving his family in 1919, Hesse moved to Montagnola, a small
town near Lugano. There he had for years an apartment in an old house.
On its balcony Hesse wrote Klingsors
letzter Sommer: Erzählungen (1920); its terminology is Freudian. In his latter years Hesse lived in a house especially built for him by a friend. Siddharta has been one of Hesse's most widely read work. Its English translation in the 1950s became a spiritual guide to a number of American Beat poets. Hesse's short marriage to Ruth Wenger in 1924, the daughter of the Swiss writer Lisa Wenger, was unhappy. He had met her in 1919 and wrote in 1922 the fairy tale Piktors Verwandlungen for Ruth. In the story a spirit, Piktor, who contains within him in a way all Hesse's characters, becomes an old tree and finds his youth again from the love of a young girl. These years produced Der Steppenwolf (1927). Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, once said that Steppenwolf is among his favorite books because it "exposes the problem of modernity's isolated and self-isolating man". The protagonist, Harry Haller, goes through his mid-life crisis and must chose between life of action and contemplation. His initials perhaps are not accidentally like the author's. "The few capacities and pursuits in which I had happened to be strong had occupied all my attention, and I had painted a picture of myself as a person who was in fact nothing more than a most refined and educated specialist in poetry, music and philosophy; and as such I had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities, instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrance and gave the label of Steppenwolf." (Steppenwolf, 2009, p. 151) Haller feels that he has two beings inside him, and faces his shadow self, named Hermine. This Doppelgänger figure introduces Harry to drinking, dancing, music, sex, and drugs. Finally his personality is disassembled and reassembled in the 'Magic Theatre' - For Madmen Only. During the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) Hesse stayed aloof from politics. Betrachtungen (1928) and Krieg und Frieden (1946) were collections of essays, which reflected his individualism and opposition to mass movements of the day. Narziß und Goldmund (1930, Narcissus and Goldmund) was a pseudomedieval tale about an abbot and his worldly pupil. The characters represent two contrary tendencies of the soul, both in search of the Great Mother. In 1931 Hesse married Ninon Dolbin (1895-1966). Ninon was
Jewish. She had sent Hesse a letter in 1909 when she was 14, and the
correspondence had continued. In 1926 they met accientally. At that
time Ninon was separated -
she had married
the painter B.F. Doldin and planned a career as an art historian. Hesse
moved with her to Montagnola, and his restless life became more calm.
His home, the "Casa Hesse" was build by the benefactor H.C. Bodmer for
the author. Hesse's cats who lived there given names such as
Schneeweiss, Zürcher, Löwe, and Zwinkler. Hesse's books continued to be published in Germany during the
Nazi regime, and were defended in a secret circular in 1937 by Joseph
Goebbels. Like many German readers in their youth, Goebbels
had identified with the character of Peter Camenzind, a disillusioned aesthete, who went through adolescence without friends. Early in 1939 Hesse wrote to his sister: "The world looks a bit dim. Nothing surprises me, of course, not even the increasing signs of greater crudity in German political life." ('A Genius of Self-Regard' by Peter Gay, New York Times, Jan. 21, 1979) Jewish refugees in France accused Hesse of supporting the Nazis, whom he did not openly oppose but lapsed into deliberate silence. However, he helped political refugees and when Narcissus and Goldmund was reprinted in 1941, he refused to leave out parts which dealt with pogroms and anti-Semitism. In 1943 he was placed on the Nazi blacklist. Das
Glasperlenspiel, Hesse's masterpiece on
which he had worked for over a decade, was came out in 1943. The novel
reflected his idea of the underlying unity of all being. The setting is in the future in the imaginary province of Castilia, an intellectual, elitist community, dedicated to mathematics and music. Knecht ('servant') is chosen by the Old Music Master as a suitable aspirant to the Order. He goes to the city of Waldzell to study, and there he catches the attention of the Magister Ludi, Thomas von der Trave (an allusion to Hesse's rival Thomas Mann). He is the Master of the Games, a system by which wisdom is communicated. Knecht dedicates himself to the Game, and on the death of Thomas, he is elected Magister Ludi. After a decade in his office Knecht tries to leave to start a life devoted to realizing human rights, but accidentally drowns in a mountain lake. In 1942 Hesse sent the manuscript to Berlin for publication. It was not accepted by the Nazis and the work appeared in Zürich, Switzerland. However, during the postwar years, Hesse's last major novel, The Glass Bead Game, was compulsory reading in German schools. After receiving the Nobel Prize Hesse published no major works. Between the years 1945 and 1962 he wrote some 50 poems and about 32 reviews mostly for Swiss newspapers. Hesse died of cerebral hemorrhage in his sleep on August 9, 1962 at the age of eighty-five. He had suffered from leukemia for six years, but did not know that the had it. Colin Wilson placed Hesse's name in his bestseller, The Outsider (1956), beside Dostoevsky, Sartre and Camus. In the 1960s and 1970s Hesse became a cult figure for young readers. The interest declined in the 1980s. The Californian rock group Sparrow changed its name to Steppenwolf after Hesse's classic, and released 'Born to be Wild' (1968), which was featured in the film Easy Rider. The name was suggested by the ABC-Dunhill producer Gabriel Mekler who had read the novel. Hesse's books have gained readers from the New Age movements and he is still one of the bestselling German-speaking writers throughout world. For further reading: Mein Onkel Hermann: Erinnerungen an Alt-Estland by Monika Hunnius (1921); Herman Hesse by Hugo Ball (1947); The Novels of Hermann Hesse by T. Ziolkowski (1965); Hermann Hesse by F. Baumer (1969); Hermann Hesse, His Mind and Art by M. Boulby (1967); C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse by M. Serrano (1971); An Outline of the Works of Hermann Hesse by R. Farquharson (1973); Hesse by T.J. Ziolkowski (1973); Hermann Hesse: A Collection of Criticism, ed. J. Liebmann (1977); Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography by J. Mileck (1977); Hermann Hesse: Life and Art by Joseph Milek (1981); Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel: A Concealed Defense of the Mother World by Edmund Remys (1983); The Hero's Quest for the Self by D.G. Richards (1987); Hermann Hesse's Fictions of the Self by E.L. Satelzig (1988); Reflection and Action by James N. Hardin (1991); Hermann Hesse, edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (2002); Mysticism as Modernity: Nationalism and the Irrational in Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil and Max Frisch by William Crooke (2008); A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, edited by Ingo Cornils (2009); Spaces for Happiness in the Twentieth-century German Novel: Mann, Kafka, Hesse, Jünger by Alan Corkhill (2011); Hermann Hesse: das Leben des Glasperlenspielers by Heimo Schwilk (2012); Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow by Gunnar Decker (2018); Hermann Hesse and Japan: A Study in Reciprocal Transcultural Reception by Neale Cunningham (2021); Hermann Hesse's Global Impact: Past, Present, and Future, edited by Ingo Cornils and Neale Cunningham (2024) - Note: Hesse's novel Demian, saturated with archetypal imagery, was based on Carl Jung's theories of individuation. James Joyce's daughter Lucia was among Jung's patients in the 1930s. See also Zelda Fitzgerald. Selected works:
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