Hermann Hesse

• 1. Introduction

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  Hermann Hesse died on the 9th of August 1962, aged 85, in Montagnola, Switzerland, and a memorial in The New York Times called his works largely inaccessible to American readers. Within a few years that judgment collapsed completely. By the mid-1960s his novels were paperback bestsellers across the United States, and to date his books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. He had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, yet his largest audience arrived after he was gone. How does a German-Swiss poet, born in 1877 in a small Black Forest town, become a fixture of a youth movement decades later? What in a Pietist seminary boy who tried to flee his school, and once attempted suicide, produced Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game? The answers run through India and Estonia, through Carl Jung's consulting room, and through a wartime essay that turned his own country against him.

• 2. Mission Blood And Estonian Light

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  Hesse's grandparents served at a mission in India under the Basel Mission, a Protestant Christian missionary society, and that inheritance reached deep into his work. His grandfather Hermann Gundert compiled a Malayalam grammar and a Malayalam-English dictionary, and helped translate the Bible into Malayalam in South India. Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born at such a mission in South India in 1842, and was left behind in Europe at the age of four when her parents returned to India. She later said of her own childhood, "A happy child I was not."

  Hesse's father, Johannes Hesse, was born in 1847 in Weissenstein, in the Governorate of Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire and now Paide. That made his son Hermann a dual citizen of the German Empire and the Russian Empire at birth. Hesse described his father's Baltic German heritage as "an important and potent fact" of his developing identity. His father, he said, "always seemed like a very polite, very foreign, lonely, little-understood guest."

  Johannes told tales of Estonia as "an exceedingly cheerful, and, for all its Christianity, a merry world," a place the young Hermann longed to see. The household itself was Swabian Pietist, a tendency that drew believers into small, deeply thoughtful groups. Hesse's maternal grandmother, Julie Gundert, née Dubois, carried French-Swiss heritage that kept her from ever quite fitting in among the Swabian milieu. From that mix Hesse drew, he noted, "the basis of an isolation and a resistance to any sort of nationalism that so defined my life."

• 3. A Proud And Difficult Boy

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  When Hermann was four, his mother Marie wrote to her husband about a child who frightened her with his force. "The little fellow has a life in him, an unbelievable strength, a powerful will," she wrote, describing her struggle against "his tyrannical temperament, his passionate turbulence." She prayed God would shape this proud spirit into something noble, while shuddering at what he might become if his upbringing went wrong. Hesse showed signs of serious depression as early as his first year at school.

  Calw, the Black Forest town in Württemberg where Hesse was born on the 2nd of July 1877, became the model for the fictional town of Gerbersau in his juvenilia. The name fuses the German words gerber, meaning tanner, and aue, meaning meadow, fitting a town with a centuries-old leather-working industry whose tanneries still marked it in his childhood. His favourite place there was the St. Nicholas Bridge, the Nikolausbrücke, which is why a Hesse monument was built there in 2002.

  Hesse's grandfather, fluent in multiple languages and a doctor of philosophy, opened his library of world literature to the boy and urged him to read widely. Music ran through the family too. His mother wrote poetry, his father was known for his language in sermons and religious tracts, and his half-brother Theo became his first model of the artist by entering a music conservatory in 1885. By 1889-90, Hesse had decided he wanted to be a writer.

• 4. Flight From The Seminary

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  In 1891 Hesse entered the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Maulbronn Abbey, where pupils lived and studied among one of Germany's best-preserved abbeys, attending 41 hours of classes a week. He did well at first, writing that he enjoyed essays and translating classic Greek poetry into German. Then came a serious personal crisis. In March 1892 he fled the seminary and was found in a field a day later.

  What followed was a punishing circuit of institutions and schools, with intense conflicts with his parents. In May, after a suicide attempt, he was placed at an institution in Bad Boll under the care of the theologian and minister Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, then in a mental institution in Stetten im Remstal, and then a boys' institution in Basel. At the end of 1892 he attended the Gymnasium in Cannstatt, now part of Stuttgart. In 1893 he passed the One Year Examination, which ended his schooling, and the same year took up drinking and smoking with older companions.

  A bookshop apprenticeship in Esslingen am Neckar lasted three days before he quit. In the summer of 1894 he began a 14-month mechanic apprenticeship at a clock tower factory in Calw, where the monotony of soldering and filing turned him back toward spiritual pursuits. He later returned to this period, and especially his Maulbronn days, in his novel Beneath the Wheel.

• 5. The Long Climb To Print

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  On the 17th of October 1895 Hesse began work at a bookshop in Tübingen specialising in theology, philology, and law, where his job was to organise, pack, and archive books. After each twelve-hour workday he pursued his own reading, spending idle Sundays with books rather than friends. He studied Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, and Greek mythology, and began reading Nietzsche in 1895, whose idea of the dual impulses of passion and order in humankind would weigh heavily on most of his novels.

  In 1896 his poem "Madonna" appeared in a Viennese periodical, and he released a small volume, Romantic Songs. A published poem of 1897, "Grand Valse," drew a fan letter from Helene Voigt, who married the young publisher Eugen Diederichs the next year. To please her, Diederichs published Hesse's prose collection One Hour After Midnight in 1898. Neither book sold. Only 54 of the 600 printed copies of Romantic Songs sold in two years, and his mother disapproved of them as too secular and "vaguely sinful."

  Working from late 1899 in a Basel antique bookshop, Hesse was exempted from military service in 1900 due to an eye condition, alongside nerve disorders and headaches that affected him his whole life. In 1902 his mother died, and he could not bring himself to attend the funeral, writing to his father, "I think it would be better for us both that I do not come, in spite of my love for my mother." The breakthrough came with Peter Camenzind, printed by Samuel Fischer in 1904 and popular throughout Germany. Sigmund Freud praised it as one of his favourite readings.

• 6. India On The Page And In Person

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  Gaienhofen, the home on Lake Constance where Hesse settled after marrying Maria Bernoulli in 1904, was where his interest in Buddhism reawakened. After a letter to Kapff in 1895 titled Nirvana, he had stopped alluding to Buddhist references in his work. From 1904, Arthur Schopenhauer's ideas drew his attention again, he discovered theosophy, and both renewed his interest in India. That current would surface years later in Siddhartha, published in 1922.

  The physical journey disappointed him. In 1911 Hesse left for a long trip to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, also visiting Borneo and Burma, but the experience "was to depress him." The spiritual inspiration he sought eluded him, though the journey marked his literary work strongly. His marriage was already under strain, a dissonance he confessed in his 1914 novel Rosshalde after the family moved to Bern in 1912.

  Siddhartha became one of the most popular Western novels set in India during the later Hesse boom. An authorized translation appeared in Malayalam in 1990, the very language that had surrounded his grandfather Hermann Gundert for most of his life. A Hermann Hesse Society of India formed to bring out authentic translations of Siddhartha in all Indian languages, and has already prepared Sanskrit, Malayalam, and Hindi versions.

• 7. War, Jung, And A House In Ticino

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  At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Hesse volunteered with the Imperial Army, saying he could not sit by a warm fireplace while other young authors died at the front. Found unfit for combat, he was assigned to the care of prisoners of war. While poets across the warring countries traded mutual hate, Hesse wrote an essay titled "O Friends, Not These Tones," published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on the 3rd of November, urging fellow intellectuals to reject nationalistic madness. "That love is greater than hate, understanding greater than ire, peace nobler than war," he wrote, was what the war should burn into memory.

  The response turned his world over. He was attacked by the German press, received hate mail, and was distanced from old friends, though the French writer Romain Rolland visited him in August 1915 and his friend Theodor Heuss stood by him. In 1917 he wrote to Rolland that the attempt to apply love to political matters had failed. Deeper crises followed: the death of his father on the 8th of March 1916, the serious illness of his son Martin, and his wife's schizophrenia. Forced from military service, he began psychotherapy and came to know Carl Jung personally. During three weeks in September and October 1917 he wrote Demian, published after the armistice in 1919 under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair.

  In April 1919 Hesse resettled alone in Ticino, moving on the 11th of May to Montagnola and renting four rooms in a castle-like building, the Casa Camuzzi. He began to paint, an activity reflected in "Klingsor's Last Summer," published in 1920, and later called his first Ticino year "the fullest, most prolific, most industrious and most passionate time of my life." He gained Swiss citizenship in 1923, married the singer Ruth Wenger in 1924 and divorced in 1927, the year Steppenwolf appeared, then began life with the art historian Ninon Dolbin, reflected in Narcissus and Goldmund in 1930.

• 8. Detachment And The Late Masterwork

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  In 1931 Hesse moved with Ninon to a larger house near Montagnola, built for his lifelong use by his friend and patron Hans C. Bodmer, married her, and began planning The Glass Bead Game. As Nazism rose, he aided the exiles Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann in 1933, and his third wife was Jewish. Seven weeks after Hitler took power, he wrote that spiritual types must stand with the spirit and not sing along when people belt out the patriotic songs their leaders order. In the 1930s he quietly reviewed and publicised banned Jewish authors, including Franz Kafka.

  Critics faulted Hesse for never condemning the Nazi Party outright, a silence that flowed from his "politics of detachment," though his detestation of their politics was, observers held, beyond question. German journals stopped publishing him in the late 1930s, and the regime treated him as undesirable, unerwünscht, yet never officially banned or burned his books, which stayed in print on popularity alone. He said he survived the Hitler years and the Second World War through the eleven years of work on The Glass Bead Game, printed in Switzerland in 1943 and his last novel.

  His last twenty years brought short stories, often of childhood, and poems often on nature, alongside ironic essays about his alienation from writing and watercolours. He once estimated his average daily correspondence exceeded 150 pages. Toward the end of his life, the composer Richard Strauss set three of his poems, "Frühling," "September," and "Beim Schlafengehen," in the song cycle Four Last Songs, first performed posthumously in 1950.

  By 1955, sales of Hesse's books by his publisher Suhrkamp had reached an all-time low, as critics and intellectuals turned elsewhere. The reversal came in the mid-1960s in the United States, where his novels suddenly became bestsellers in cheap paperback editions. The revival has been credited to the way his work touched the themes of the 1960s counterculture, with the quest-for-enlightenment lines of Siddhartha, Journey to the East, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game resonating with those ideals.

  The "magic theatre" sequences in Steppenwolf were read by some as drug-induced psychedelia, though there is no evidence Hesse ever took psychedelic drugs or recommended them. Much of the American boom traces back to enthusiastic writings by two counterculture figures, Colin Wilson and Timothy Leary. From the United States the renaissance spread back to Germany, where more than 800,000 copies sold in the German-speaking world from 1972 to 1973.

  His name echoes through the culture that adopted him. The Magic Theatre in San Francisco, founded in 1967, took its name from Steppenwolf, as did the 1960s rock band Steppenwolf and the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. A quote from Demian appears on the cover of Santana's 1970 album Abraxas, naming the album. He is buried in the cemetery of Sant'Abbondio in Gentilino, beside his friend and biographer Hugo Ball and the conductor Bruno Walter.