When and where was Hermann Hesse born?
Hermann Karl Hesse was born on the 2nd of July 1877 in the Black Forest town of Calw. His family moved to Calw in 1873 where his father Johannes worked for a publishing house specializing in theological texts.
Hermann Karl Hesse was born on the 2nd of July 1877 in the Black Forest town of Calw. His family moved to Calw in 1873 where his father Johannes worked for a publishing house specializing in theological texts.
In March 1892 Hermann Hesse fled from the seminary after running away and being found in a field a day later. He experienced a serious personal crisis following an attempt at suicide in May 1892 which led him to spend time at institutions under the care of theologian Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt.
Hermann Hesse publicly expressed opposition to anti-Semitism and wrote to correspondents stating that spiritual types must stand alongside the spirit rather than sing along with patriotic songs. German journals stopped publishing his work in the late 1930s and the Nazis eventually banned it entirely while he reviewed banned Jewish authors including Franz Kafka.
During a three-week period in September and October 1917 Hermann Hesse penned his novel Demian. It would be published following the armistice in 1919 under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair due to public controversy surrounding his earlier essay O Friends Not These Tones.
The situation changed in the mid-1960s when his novels suddenly became bestsellers in the United States after being largely inaccessible to American readers previously. The popularity has been credited to association with themes of the 1960s counterculture movement where quest-for-enlightenment themes from Siddhartha and Steppenwolf resonated with those espousing counter-cultural ideals.