Hesse, Hermann
"There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself." (06/06/2023)
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Hermann Hesse | |
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| Born | 2 July 1877 Calw, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire |
| Died | 9 August 1962 (aged 85) Montagnola, Ticino, Switzerland |
| Resting place | Cimitero di S. Abbondio, Gentilino, Ticino |
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| Genre | Fiction |
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Hermann Hesse (born July 2, 1877, Calw, Germany—died August 9, 1962, Montagnola, Switzerland) was a German novelist and poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. The main theme of his work is the individual’s efforts to break out of the established modes of civilization so as to find an essential spirit and identity.
Hesse grew up in Calw and in Basel. He attended school briefly in Göppingen before, at the behest of his father, he entered the Maulbronn seminary in 1891. Though a model student, he was unable to adapt and left less than a year later. As he would later explain ,
I was a good learner, good at Latin though only fair at Greek, but I was not a very manageable boy, and it was only with difficulty that I fitted into the framework of a pietist education that aimed at subduing and breaking the individual personality.
Hesse, who aspired to be a poet, was apprenticed in a Calw tower-clock factory and later in a Tübingen bookstore. He would express his disgust with conventional schooling in the novel Unterm Rad (1906; Beneath the Wheel), in which an overly diligent student is driven to self-destruction.
Hesse published his first book, a collection of poems, in 1899. He remained in the bookselling business until 1904, when he became a freelance writer and brought out his first novel, Peter Camenzind, about a failed and dissipated writer. The novel was a success, and Hesse returned to the theme of an artist’s inward and outward search in Gertrud (1910) and Rosshalde (1914). A visit to India in these years was later reflected in Siddhartha (1922), a poetic novel, set in India at the time of the Buddha, about the search for enlightenment.
During World War I, Hesse lived in neutral Switzerland, wrote denunciations of militarism and nationalism, and edited a journal for German war prisoners and internees. He became a permanent resident of Switzerland in 1919 and a citizen in 1923, settling in Montagnola.
A deepening sense of personal crisis led Hesse to psychoanalysis with J.B. Lang, a disciple of Carl Jung. The influence of analysis appears in Demian (1919), an examination of the achievement of self-awareness by a troubled adolescent. This novel had a pervasive effect on a troubled Germany and made its author famous. Hesse’s later work shows his interest in Jungian concepts of introversion and extraversion, the collective unconscious, idealism, and symbols. Hesse also came to be preoccupied with what he saw as the duality of human nature.
Der Steppenwolf (1927; Steppenwolf ) describes the conflict between bourgeois acceptance and spiritual self-realization in a middle-aged man. In Narziss und Goldmund (1930; Narcissus and Goldmund), an intellectual ascetic who is content with established religious faith is contrasted with an artistic sensualist pursuing his own form of salvation. Hesse’s last and longest novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; English titles The Glass Bead Game and Magister Ludi), is set in the 23rd century. In it Hesse again explores the dualism of the contemplative and the active life, this time through the figure of a supremely gifted intellectual. He subsequently published letters, essays, and stories.
After World War II, Hesse’s popularity among German readers soared, though it had crashed by the 1950s. His appeal for self-realization and his celebration of Eastern mysticism transformed him into something of a cult figure to young people in the English-speaking world in the 1960s and ’70s, and this vein of his work ensured an international audience for his work afterward.
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Hermann Karl Hesse (German: [ˈhɛʁman ˈhɛsə] ; 2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. Although Hesse was born in Germany's Black Forest region of Swabia, his father's celebrated heritage as a Baltic German and his grandmother's French-Swiss roots had an intellectual influence on him. He was a precocious, if not difficult child, who shared a passion for poetry and music with his mother, and was especially well-read and cultured, due in part to the influence of his polyglot grandfather.
As a youth he studied briefly at a seminary, struggled with bouts of depression and even once attempted suicide, which temporarily landed him in a sanatorium. Hesse eventually completed Gymnasium and passed his examinations in 1893, when his formal education ended. However, he remained an autodidact and voraciously read theological treatises, Greek mythology, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Nietzsche. His first works of poetry and prose were being published in the 1890s and early 1900s with his first novel, Peter Camenzind, appearing in 1904.
In 1911, Hesse visited India, where he became acquainted with Indian mysticism. His experiences in India—combined with his involvement with Jungian analysis—affected his literary work, which emphasizes Eastern spiritual values. His best-known works include: Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spirituality. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Life and work
[edit]Family background
[edit]Hermann Karl Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in the Black Forest town of Calw, in Württemberg, German Empire. His grandparents served in India at a mission under the auspices of the Basel Mission, a Protestant Christian missionary society. His grandfather Hermann Gundert compiled a Malayalam grammar and a Malayalam-English dictionary, and also contributed to a translation of the Bible into Malayalam in South India.[1] Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born at such a mission in South India in 1842. In describing her own childhood, she said, "A happy child I was not...". As was usual among missionaries at the time, she was left behind in Europe at the age of four when her parents returned to India.[2]
Hesse's father, Johannes Hesse, the son of a doctor, was born in 1847 in Weissenstein, Governorate of Estonia in the Russian Empire (now Paide, Estonia). His son Hermann was at birth a dual citizen of the German Empire and the Russian Empire.[3] Hermann had five siblings, but two of them died in infancy. In 1873, the Hesse family moved to Calw, where Johannes worked for Calwer Verlagsverein, a publishing house specializing in theological texts and schoolbooks. Marie's father, Hermann Gundert (also the namesake of his grandson), managed the publishing house at the time, and Johannes Hesse succeeded him in 1893.
Hesse grew up in a Swabian Pietist household, with the Pietist tendency to insulate believers into small, deeply thoughtful groups. Furthermore, Hesse described his father's Baltic German heritage as "an important and potent fact" of his developing identity. His father, Hesse stated, "always seemed like a very polite, very foreign, lonely, little-understood guest".[4] His father's tales from Estonia instilled a contrasting sense of religion in young Hermann. "[It was] an exceedingly cheerful, and, for all its Christianity, a merry world... We wished for nothing so longingly as to be allowed to see this Estonia... where life was so paradisiacal, so colourful and happy". Hermann Hesse's sense of estrangement from the Swabian petite bourgeoisie grew further through his relationship with his maternal grandmother Julie Gundert, née Dubois, whose French-Swiss heritage kept her from ever quite fitting in among that milieu.[4]
Childhood
[edit]From childhood, Hesse was headstrong and hard for his family to handle. In a letter to her husband, Hermann's mother Marie wrote: "The little fellow has a life in him, an unbelievable strength, a powerful will, and, for his four years of age, a truly astonishing mind. How can he express all that? It truly gnaws at my life, this internal fighting against his tyrannical temperament, his passionate turbulence [...] God must shape this proud spirit, then it will become something noble and magnificent – but I shudder to think what this young and passionate person might become should his upbringing be false or weak."[5]
Hesse showed signs of serious depression as early as his first year at school.[6] In his juvenilia collection Gerbersau, Hesse vividly describes experiences and anecdotes from his childhood and youth in Calw: the atmosphere and adventures by the river, the bridge, the chapel, the houses leaning closely together, hidden nooks and crannies, as well as the inhabitants with their admirable qualities, their oddities, and their idiosyncrasies. The fictional town of Gerbersau is pseudonymous for Calw, imitating the real name of the nearby town of Hirsau. It is derived from the German words gerber, meaning "tanner", and aue, meaning "meadow".[7] Calw had a centuries-old leather-working industry, and during Hesse's childhood the tanneries' influence on the town was still very much in evidence.[8] Hesse's favourite place in Calw was the St. Nicholas Bridge (Nikolausbrücke), which is why a Hesse monument was built there in 2002.[9]
Hermann Hesse's grandfather Hermann Gundert, a doctor of philosophy and fluent in multiple languages, encouraged the boy to read widely, giving him access to his library, which was filled with works of world literature. All this instilled a sense in Hermann Hesse that he was a citizen of the world. His family background became, he noted, "the basis of an isolation and a resistance to any sort of nationalism that so defined my life".[4]
Young Hesse shared a love of music with his mother. Both music and poetry were important in his family. His mother wrote poetry, and his father was known for his use of language in both his sermons and the writing of religious tracts. His first role model for becoming an artist was his half-brother, Theo, who rebelled against the family by entering a music conservatory in 1885.[10] Hesse showed a precocious ability to rhyme, and by 1889–90 had decided that he wanted to be a writer.[11]
Education
[edit]
In 1881, when Hesse was four, the family moved to Basel, Switzerland, staying for six years and then returning to Calw. After successful attendance at the Latin School in Göppingen, Hesse entered the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Maulbronn Abbey in 1891. The pupils lived and studied at the abbey, one of Germany's most beautiful and well-preserved, attending 41 hours of classes a week. Although Hesse did well during the first months, writing in a letter that he particularly enjoyed writing essays and translating classic Greek poetry into German, his time in Maulbronn was the beginning of a serious personal crisis.[12] In March 1892, Hesse showed his rebellious character, and, in one instance, he fled from the Seminary and was found in a field a day later. Hesse began a journey through various institutions and schools and experienced intense conflicts with his parents. In May, after an attempt at suicide, he spent time at an institution in Bad Boll under the care of theologian and minister Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. Later, he was placed 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 concluded his schooling. The same year, he began spending time with older companions and took up drinking and smoking.[13]
After this, Hesse began a bookshop apprenticeship in Esslingen am Neckar, but quit after three days. Then, in the early summer of 1894, he began a 14-month mechanic apprenticeship at a clock tower factory in Calw. The monotony of soldering and filing work made him turn himself toward more spiritual activities. In October 1895, he was ready to begin wholeheartedly a new apprenticeship with a bookseller in Tübingen. This experience from his youth, especially his time spent at the Seminary in Maulbronn, he returns to later in his novel Beneath the Wheel.
Becoming a writer
[edit]
On 17 October 1895, Hesse began working in the bookshop in Tübingen, which had a specialized collection in theology, philology, and law.[14] Hesse's tasks consisted of organizing, packing, and archiving the books. After the end of each twelve-hour workday, Hesse pursued his own work, and he spent his long, idle Sundays with books rather than friends. Hesse studied theological writings and later Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, and Greek mythology. He also began reading Nietzsche in 1895,[15] and that philosopher's ideas of "dual…impulses of passion and order" in humankind was a heavy influence on most of his novels.[16]
By 1898, Hesse had a respectable income that enabled financial independence from his parents.[17] During this time, he concentrated on the works of the German Romantics, including much of the work of Clemens Brentano, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Novalis. In letters to his parents, he expressed a belief that "the morality of artists is replaced by aesthetics".
During this time, he was introduced to the home of Fräulein von Reutern, a friend of his family's. There he met with people his own age. His relationships with his contemporaries were "problematic", in that most of them were now at university. This usually left him feeling awkward in social situations.[18]
In 1896, his poem "Madonna" appeared in a Viennese periodical and Hesse released his first small volume of poetry, Romantic Songs. In 1897, a published poem of his, "Grand Valse", drew him a fan letter. It was from Helene Voigt, who the next year married Eugen Diederichs, a young publisher. To please his wife, Diederichs agreed to publish Hesse's collection of prose entitled One Hour After Midnight in 1898 (although it is dated 1899).[19] Neither work was a commercial success. In two years, only 54 of the 600 printed copies of Romantic Songs were sold, and One Hour After Midnight received only one printing and sold sluggishly. Furthermore, Hesse "suffered a great shock" when his mother disapproved of "Romantic Songs" on the grounds that they were too secular and even "vaguely sinful".[20]
From late 1899, Hesse worked in a distinguished antique bookshop in Basel. Through family contacts, he stayed with the intellectual families of Basel. In this environment with rich stimuli for his pursuits, he further developed spiritually and artistically. At the same time, Basel offered the solitary Hesse many opportunities for withdrawal into a private life of artistic self-exploration, journeys and wanderings. In 1900, Hesse was exempted from compulsory military service due to an eye condition. This, along with nerve disorders and persistent headaches, affected him his entire life.
In 1901, Hesse undertook to fulfill a long-held dream and travelled for the first time to Italy. In the same year, Hesse changed jobs and began working at the antiquarium Wattenwyl in Basel. Hesse had more opportunities to release poems and small literary texts to journals. These publications now provided honorariums. His new bookstore agreed to publish his next work, Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher.[21] In 1902, his mother died after a long and painful illness. He could not bring himself to attend her funeral, stating in a letter 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".[22]
Due to the good notices that Hesse received for Lauscher, the publisher Samuel Fischer became interested in Hesse[23] and, with the novel Peter Camenzind, which appeared first as a pre-publication in 1903 and then as a regular printing by Fischer in 1904, came a breakthrough: from now on, Hesse could make a living as a writer. The novel became popular throughout Germany.[24] Sigmund Freud "praised Peter Camenzind as one of his favourite readings".[25]
Between Lake Constance and India
[edit]
Having realised he could make a living as a writer, Hesse finally married Maria Bernoulli (of the famous family of mathematicians[26]) in 1904, while her father, who disapproved of their relationship, was away for the weekend. The couple settled down in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, and began a family, eventually having three sons. In Gaienhofen, he wrote his second novel, Beneath the Wheel, which was published in 1906. In the following time, he composed primarily short stories and poems. His story "The Wolf", written in 1906–07, was "quite possibly" a foreshadowing of Steppenwolf.[27]
His next novel, Gertrude, published in 1910, revealed a production crisis. He had to struggle through writing it, and he later would describe it as "a miscarriage". Gaienhofen was the place where Hesse's interest in Buddhism was re-sparked. Following a letter to Kapff in 1895 entitled Nirvana, Hesse had ceased alluding to Buddhist references in his work. In 1904, however, Arthur Schopenhauer and his philosophical ideas started receiving attention again, and Hesse discovered theosophy. Schopenhauer and theosophy renewed Hesse's interest in India. Although it was many years before the publication of Hesse's Siddhartha (1922), this masterpiece was to be derived from these new influences.
During this time, there also was increased dissonance between him and Maria, and in 1911 Hesse left for a long trip to Sri Lanka and Indonesia. He also visited Sumatra, Borneo, and Burma, but "the physical experience... was to depress him".[28] Any spiritual or religious inspiration that he was looking for eluded him,[29] but the journey made a strong impression on his literary work. Following Hesse's return, the family moved to Bern (1912), but the change of environment could not solve the marriage problems, as he himself confessed in his novel Rosshalde from 1914.
During the First World War
[edit]At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Hesse registered himself as a volunteer with the Imperial Army, saying that he could not sit inactively by a warm fireplace while other young authors were dying on the front. He was found unfit for combat duty, but was assigned to service involving the care of prisoners of war.[30] While most poets and authors of the warring countries quickly became embroiled in a tirade of mutual hate, Hesse, seemingly immune to the general war enthusiasm of the time,[31] wrote an essay titled "O Friends, Not These Tones" ("O Freunde, nicht diese Töne"),[a] which was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, on 3 November.[32] In this essay he appealed to his fellow intellectuals not to fall for nationalistic madness and hatred.[31][32] Calling for subdued voices and recognition of Europe's common heritage,[33] Hesse wrote: "That love is greater than hate, understanding greater than ire, peace nobler than war, this exactly is what this unholy World War should burn into our memories, more so than ever felt before".[34] What followed from this, Hesse later indicated, was a great turning point in his life. For the first time, he found himself in the middle of a serious political conflict, attacked by the German press, the recipient of hate mail, and distanced from old friends. However, he did receive support from his friend Theodor Heuss, and the French writer Romain Rolland, who visited Hesse in August 1915.[35] In 1917, Hesse wrote to Rolland, "The attempt...to apply love to matters political has failed".[36]
This public controversy was not yet resolved when a deeper life crisis befell Hesse with the death of his father on 8 March 1916, the serious illness of his son Martin, and his wife's schizophrenia. He was forced to leave his military service and begin receiving psychotherapy. This began for Hesse a long preoccupation with psychoanalysis, through which he came to know Carl Jung personally, and was challenged to new creative heights. Hesse and Jung both later maintained a correspondence with Chilean author, diplomat and Nazi sympathizer Miguel Serrano, who detailed his relationship with both figures in the book C. G. Jung & Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships. During a three-week period in September and October 1917, Hesse penned his novel Demian, which would be published following the armistice in 1919 under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair.
Casa Camuzzi
[edit]By the time Hesse returned to civilian life in 1919, his marriage had fallen apart. His wife had a severe episode of psychosis, but, even after her recovery, Hesse saw no possible future with her. Their home in Bern was divided, their children were accommodated in boarding houses and by relatives,[37] and Hesse resettled alone in the middle of April in Ticino. He occupied a small farmhouse near Minusio (close to Locarno), living from 25 April to 11 May in Sorengo. On 11 May, he moved to the town Montagnola and rented four small rooms in a castle-like building, the Casa Camuzzi. Here, he explored his writing projects further; he began to paint, an activity reflected in his next major story, "Klingsor's Last Summer", published in 1920. This new beginning in different surroundings brought him happiness, and Hesse later called his first year in Ticino "the fullest, most prolific, most industrious and most passionate time of my life".[38] In 1922, Hesse's novella Siddhartha appeared, which showed the love for Indian culture and Buddhist philosophy that had already developed earlier in his life. In 1924, Hesse married the singer Ruth Wenger, the daughter of the Swiss writer Lisa Wenger and aunt of Méret Oppenheim. This marriage never attained any stability, however.
In 1923, Hesse was granted Swiss citizenship.[39] His next major works, Kurgast (1925) and The Nuremberg Trip (1927), were autobiographical narratives with ironic undertones and foreshadowed Hesse's following novel, Steppenwolf, which was published in 1927. In the year of his 50th birthday, the first biography of Hesse appeared, written by his friend Hugo Ball. Shortly after his new successful novel, he turned away from the solitude of Steppenwolf and started a cohabitation with art historian Ninon Dolbin, née Ausländer.[40] This change to companionship was reflected in the novel Narcissus and Goldmund, appearing in 1930.
Later life and death
[edit]
In 1931, Hesse left the Casa Camuzzi and moved with Ninon to a larger house, also near Montagnola, which was built for him to use for the rest of his life, by his friend and patron Hans C. Bodmer.[40] In the same year, Hesse formally married Ninon, and began planning what would become his last major work, The Glass Bead Game (a.k.a. Magister Ludi).[41] In 1932, as a preliminary study, he released the novella Journey to the East.
Hesse observed the rise to power of Nazism in Germany with concern. In 1933, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann made their travels into exile, each aided by Hesse. In this way, Hesse attempted to work against Hitler's suppression of art and literature that protested Nazi ideology. Hesse's third wife was Jewish, and he had publicly expressed his opposition to anti-Semitism long before then.[42] Hesse was criticized for not condemning the Nazi Party, but his failure to criticize or support any political idea stemmed from his "politics of detachment [...] At no time did he openly condemn (the Nazis), although his detestation of their politics is beyond question."[43] In March 1933, seven weeks after Hitler took power, Hesse wrote to a correspondent in Germany, "It is the duty of spiritual types to stand alongside the spirit and not to sing along when the people start belting out the patriotic songs their leaders have ordered them to sing". In the 1930s, Hesse made a quiet statement of resistance by reviewing and publicizing the work of banned Jewish authors, including Franz Kafka.[44] In the late 1930s, German journals stopped publishing Hesse's work, and the Nazis eventually banned it.
According to Hesse, he "survived the years of the Hitler regime and the Second World War through the eleven years of work that [he] spent on [The Glass Bead Game]".[39] Printed in 1943 in Switzerland, this was to be his last novel. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
During the last twenty years of his life, Hesse wrote many short stories (chiefly recollections of his childhood) and poems (frequently with nature as their theme). Hesse also wrote ironic essays about his alienation from writing (for instance, the mock autobiographies: Life Story Briefly Told and Aus den Briefwechseln eines Dichters) and spent much time pursuing his interest in watercolours. Hesse also occupied himself with the steady stream of letters he received as a result of the Nobel Prize and as a new generation of German readers explored his work. In one essay, Hesse reflected wryly on his lifelong failure to acquire a talent for idleness and speculated that his average daily correspondence exceeded 150 pages. He died on 9 August 1962, aged 85, and was buried in the cemetery of Sant’Abbondio in Gentilino, where his friend and biographer Hugo Ball and another German personality, the conductor Bruno Walter, are also buried.[45]
Religious views
[edit]As reflected in Demian, and other works, he believed that "for different people, there are different ways to God".[46] Despite the influence he drew from Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, he stated about his parents that "their Christianity, one not preached but lived, was the strongest of the powers that shaped and moulded me".[47][48]
Influence
[edit]
In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Hesse's first great novel, Peter Camenzind, was received enthusiastically by young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life in this time of great economic and technological progress in the country (see also Wandervogel movement).[49] Demian had a strong and enduring influence on the generation returning home from the First World War.[50] Similarly, The Glass Bead Game, with its disciplined intellectual world of Castalia and the powers of meditation and humanity, captivated Germans' longing for a new order amid the chaos of a broken nation following the loss in the Second World War.[51]
Towards the end of his life, German (born Bavarian) composer Richard Strauss (1864–1949) set three of Hesse's poems to music in his song cycle Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra (composed 1948, first performed posthumously in 1950): "Frühling" ("Spring"), "September", and "Beim Schlafengehen" ("On Going to Sleep").
In the 1950s, Hesse's popularity began to wane, while literature critics and intellectuals turned their attention to other subjects. In 1955, the sales of Hesse's books by his publisher Suhrkamp reached an all-time low. However, after Hesse's death in 1962, posthumously published writings, including letters and previously unknown pieces of prose, contributed to a new level of understanding and appreciation of his works.[52]
By the time of Hesse's death in 1962, his works were still relatively little read in the United States, despite his status as a Nobel laureate. A memorial published in The New York Times went so far as to claim that Hesse's works were largely "inaccessible" to American readers. The situation changed in the mid-1960s when Hesse's works suddenly became bestsellers in the United States.[53] The revival in popularity of Hesse's works has been credited to their association with some of the popular themes of the 1960s counterculture (or hippie) movement. In particular, the quest-for-enlightenment theme of Siddhartha, Journey to the East, and Narcissus and Goldmund resonated with those espousing counter-cultural ideals. The "magic theatre" sequences in Steppenwolf were interpreted by some as drug-induced psychedelia although there is no evidence that Hesse ever took psychedelic drugs or recommended their use.[54] In large part, the Hesse boom in the United States can be traced back to enthusiastic writings by two influential counter-culture figures: Colin Wilson and Timothy Leary.[55] From the United States, the Hesse renaissance spread to other parts of the world and even back to Germany: more than 800,000 copies were sold in the German-speaking world from 1972 to 1973. In a space of just a few years, Hesse became the most widely read and translated European author of the 20th century.[53] Hesse was especially popular among young readers, a tendency which continues today.[56]
There is a quote from Demian on the cover of Santana's 1970 album Abraxas, revealing the source of the album's title.
Hesse's Siddhartha is one of the most popular Western novels set in India. An authorised translation of Siddhartha was published in the Malayalam language in 1990, the language that surrounded Hesse's grandfather, Hermann Gundert, for most of his life. A Hermann Hesse Society of India has also been formed. It aims to bring out authentic translations of Siddhartha in all Indian languages and has already prepared the Sanskrit,[57] Malayalam[58] and Hindi[59] translations of Siddhartha. One enduring monument to Hesse's lasting popularity in the United States is the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Referring to "The Magic Theatre for Madmen Only" in Steppenwolf (a kind of spiritual and somewhat nightmarish cabaret attended by some of the characters, including Harry Haller), the Magic Theatre was founded in 1967 to perform works by new playwrights. Founded by John Lion, the Magic Theatre has fulfilled that mission for many years, including the world premieres of many plays by Sam Shepard.
There is also a theatre in Chicago named after the novel, Steppenwolf Theatre.
Throughout Germany, many schools are named after him. The Hermann-Hesse-Literaturpreis is a literary prize associated with the city of Karlsruhe that has been awarded since 1957.[60] Since 1990,[61] the Calw Hermann Hesse Prize has been awarded every two years alternately to a German-language literary journal and a translator of Hesse's work.[62] The Internationale Hermann-Hesse-Gesellschaft (unofficial English name: International Hermann Hesse Society) was founded in 2002 on Hesse's 125th birthday and began awarding its Hermann Hesse prize in 2017.[63]
Musician Steve Adey adapted the poem "How Heavy the Days" on his 2017 LP Do Me a Kindness.
The band Steppenwolf took its name from Hesse's novel.[64]
Awards
[edit]- 1906: Bauernfeld-Preis
- 1928: Mejstrik-Preis of the Schiller Foundation in Vienna
- 1936: Gottfried-Keller-Preis
- 1946: Goethe Prize
- 1946: Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1947: Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bern
- 1950: Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize
- 1954: Pour le Mérite
- 1955: Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
Books
[edit]
Novella
[edit]- (1899) Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (An Hour after Midnight)
- (1908) Freunde
- (1914) In the Old Sun
- (1916) Schön ist die Jugend
- (1919) Klein und Wagner
- (1920) Klingsors letzter Sommer (Klingsor's Last Summer)
Novels
[edit]- (1904) Peter Camenzind
- (1906) Unterm Rad (Beneath the Wheel; also published as The Prodigy)
- (1910) Gertrud
- (1914) Roßhalde
- (1915) Knulp (also published as Three Tales from the Life of Knulp)
- (1919) Demian (published under the pen name Emil Sinclair)
- (1922) Siddhartha
- (1927) Der Steppenwolf
- (1930) Narziß und Goldmund (Narcissus and Goldmund; also published as Death and the Lover)
- (1932) Die Morgenlandfahrt (Journey to the East)
- (1943) Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game; also published as Magister Ludi)
Short story collections
[edit]- (1919) Strange News from Another Star (originally published as Märchen) — written between 1913 and 1918
- (1972) Stories of Five Decades (23 stories written between 1899 and 1948)
Non-fiction
[edit]- (1913) Besuch aus Indien (Visitor from India)—philosophy
- (1920) Blick ins Chaos (A Glimpse into Chaos)—essays
- (1920) Wandering—notes and sketches
- (1971) If the War Goes On—essays
- (1972) Autobiographical Writings (including "A Guest at the Spa")—collection of prose pieces
- (2018) Singapore Dream and Other Adventures: Travel Writings from an Asian Journey
Poetry collections
[edit]- (1898) Romantische Lieder (Romantic Songs)
- (1900) Hinterlassene Schriften und Gedichte von Hermann Lauscher (The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher)—with prose
- (1970) Poems (21 poems written between 1899 and 1921)
- (1975) Crisis: Pages from a Diary
- (1979) Hours in the Garden and Other Poems (written during the same period as The Glass Bead Game)
Film adaptations
[edit]- 1966: El lobo estepario (based on Steppenwolf)
- 1971: Zachariah (based on Siddartha)
- 1972: Siddhartha
- 1974: Steppenwolf
- 1981: Kinderseele
- 1989: Francesco
- 1996: Ansatsu (based on Demian)
- 2003: Poem: I Set My Foot Upon the Air and It Carried Me
- 2003: Siddhartha
- 2012: Homecoming
- 2020: Narcissus and Goldmund
Citations
[edit]- ^ Gundert, Hermann (1872). A Malayalam and English Dictionary. C. Stolz. p. 14.
- ^ Gundert, Adele, Marie Hesse: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebuchern [Marie Hesse: A life picture in letters and diaries] (in German) as quoted in Freedman (1978) pp. 18–19.
- ^ Weltbürger – Hermann Hesses übernationales und multikulturelles Denken und Wirken [Hermann Hesse's international and multicultural thinking and work] (exhibition) (in German), City of Calw: Hermann-Hesse-Museum, 2 July 2009 – 7 February 2010.
- ^ a b c Hesse, Hermann (1964), Briefe [Letters] (in German), Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Suhrkamp, p. 414.
- ^ Volker Michels (ed.): Über Hermann Hesse. Verlag Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, vol 1: 1904–1962, Repräsentative Textsammlung zu Lebzeiten Hesses. 2nd ed., 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-06831-1, p. 400.
- ^ Freedman, p. 30
- ^ An English equivalent would be "Tannersmead".
- ^ Siegfried Greiner Hermann Hesse, Jugend in Calw, Thorbecke (1981), ISBN 978-3-7995-2009-6 p. viii
- ^ Smith, Rocky (5 April 2010). "A Special Fondness". Mr. Writer. Retrieved 4 March 2019.
- ^ Freedman (1978) pp. 30–32
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 39
- ^ Zeller, pp. 26–30
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 53
- ^ J. J. Heckenhauer.
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 69.
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 111.
- ^ Franklin, Wilbur (1977). The concept of 'the human' in the work of Hermann Hesse and Paul Tillich (PDF) (Thesis). St Andrews University.
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 64.
- ^ Freedman(1978) pp. 78–80.
- ^ Freedman(1978), p. 79.
- ^ Freedman(1978) p. 97.
- ^ Freedman (1978), pp. 99–101.
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 107.
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 108.
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 117.
- ^ Gustav Emil Müller, Philosophy of Literature, Ayer Publishing, 1976.
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 140
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 149
- ^ Kirsch, Adam (19 November 2018). "Hermann Hesse's arrested development". The New Yorker. Retrieved 4 March 2019.
- ^ "Hermann Hesse Schriftsteller" (in German). Deutsches Historisches Museum. Retrieved 15 January 2008.
- ^ a b Zeller, p. 83
- ^ a b Mileck, Joseph (1977). Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography. Vol. 1. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-0-520-02756-5. Retrieved 11 October 2010.
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 166
- ^ Zeller, pp. 83–84
- ^ Freedman (1978) pp. 170–71.
- ^ Freedman (1978) p. 189
- ^ Zeller, p. 93
- ^ Zeller, p. 94
- ^ a b Hesse, Hermann (1946). "Biographical". The Nobel Prize. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
- ^ a b Mileck, Joseph (1978). Hermann Hesse : life and art. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 243. ISBN 0-520-03351-5. OCLC 3804203.
- ^ Mileck, Joseph (1978). Hermann Hesse : life and art. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 243, 246. ISBN 0-520-03351-5. OCLC 3804203.
- ^ Galbreath (1974) Robert. "Hermann Hesse and the Politics of Detachment", p. 63, Political Theory, vol. 2, No 1 (Feb 1974).
- ^ Galbreath (1974) Robert. "Hermann Hesse and the Politics of Detachment", p. 64, Political Theory, vol. 2, No 1 (Feb 1974)
- ^ Kirsch, Adam (12 November 2018). "Hermann Hesse's Arrested Development". The New Yorker. Retrieved 12 July 2021.
- ^ Mileck, Joseph (29 January 1981). Hermann Hesse: Life and Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 360. ISBN 978-0-520-04152-3.
- ^ "The Religious Affiliation of Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse", Adherents, archived from the original on 14 July 2007.
- ^ Hesse, Hermann (1951), Gesammelte Werke [Collected Works] (in German), Suhrkamp Verlag, p. 378,
Von ihnen bin ich erzogen, von ihnen habe ich die Bibel und Lehre vererbt bekommen, Ihr nicht gepredigtes, sondern gelebtes Christentum ist unter den Mächten, die mich erzogen und geformt haben, die stärkste gewesen [I have been educated by them; I have inherited the Bible and doctrine from them; their Christianity, not preached, but lived, has been the strongest among the powers that educated and formed me]
. Another translation: "Not the preached, but their practiced Christianity, among the powers that shaped and molded me, has been the strongest." - ^ Hilbert, Mathias (2005), Hermann Hesse und sein Elternhaus – Zwischen Rebellion und Liebe: Eine biographische Spurensuche [Hermann Hesse and his Parents’ House – Between Rebellion and Love: A biographical search] (in German), Calwer Verlag, p. 226.
- ^ Prinz, pp. 139–42
- ^ Zeller, p. 90
- ^ Zeller, p. 186
- ^ Zeller, pp. 180–81
- ^ a b Zeller, p. 185
- ^ Zeller p. 189
- ^ Zeller, p. 188
- ^ Zeller p. 186
- ^ Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. Sanskrit Translation by L. Sulochana Devi. Trivandrum, Hermann Hesse Society of India, 2008 [1]
- ^ Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. Malayalam Translation by R. Raman Nair. Trivandrum, CSIS, 1993
- ^ Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. Hindi Translation by Prabakaran, hebbar Illath. Trivandrum, Hermann Hesse Society of India, 2012 [2]
- ^ Hermann-Hesse-Preis 2003 Archived 9 March 2013 at the Wayback Machine. karlsruhe.de
- ^ "The winners of the Calw Hermann Hesse Prize". Archived from the original on 2 July 2018. Retrieved 2 July 2018.
- ^ Calw Hermann Hesse Prize Archived 24 January 2022 at the Wayback Machine. Hermann-hesse.de (18 September 2012). Retrieved 23 September 2012.
- ^ Adolf Muschg erster Preisträger des neu ausgelobten Preis der Internationalen Hermann Hesse Gesellschaft Archived 19 June 2019 at the Wayback Machine (in German)
- ^ Binder, Antje (7 October 2016). "5 bands whose names you probably didn't know were inspired by literature". dw.com. Retrieved 4 December 2021.
Sources
[edit]- Freedman, Ralph (1997). Hermann Hesse, Pilgrim of Crisis: A Biography. New York: Fromm International. ISBN 978-0-88064-172-2. OCLC 35159328.
- Prinz, Alois (2006). "Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne": die Lebensgeschichte des Hermann Hesse (in German). Frankfurt (Main): Suhrkamp. ISBN 978-3-518-45742-9. OCLC 181463174.
- Zeller, Bernhard (2005). Hermann Hesse (in German). Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN 3-499-50676-9. OCLC 61714622.
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A Genius of Self‐Regard
TO many literate Americans, Hermann Hesse is little more than an exhibit of what went wrong with America's youth in the 1960's. He appears to them as a symptom, rather than the diagnostician, of a great malaise. As
HERMANN HESS)
Pilgrim of Crisis. By Ralph Freedman. Illustrated. 43: pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $15.
Ralph Freedman, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton, demonstrates in his exhaustive and affectionate biography, this is a parochial, if understandable, reading of Hesse's celebrity. Actually, the wave of popularity that engulfed Hermann Hesse in and around American colleges a decade or more ago was the last of such waves, a posthumous discovery that he would not have enjoyed. Hesse embodied an all-too-human paradox in an extreme form: He was a writer who craved and feared success. And he secured success beyond his dreams, and beyond his merits; his gift for translating his neurosis into evocative prose and for capturing the mood of his contemporaries was nothing less than uncanny. He was a literary overachiever; the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awareded in 1946,was an al. most inescapable accolade for a fanatical scribbler who never wanted to do anything but write. One gets the uncomfortable feeling, reading Mr. Freedman's meticulous, strictly chronological record of Hesse's life and suffering, that Hesse did what he did - try to commit suicide, marry three times, cultivate passionate friendships, undergo a quirky “psychoanalysis” to accumulate raw materials for his next “fiction.”
It is Hesse's single‐minded pouring of all his energies into one lifelong endeavor that ultimately justifies Mr. Freedman's almost obsessively detailed and really very old‐fashioned life: We need the finely painted background of Hesse's family, including the pietist missionaries who served their faith in India we need to hear about Hesse's depressing childhood, his lowly employment in booksellers’ establishments, his wives and his houses, and his suffering - that above all, for with Hesse to live was to suffer - before we can unriddle his books or his hold on his public.
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Hesse's contemporaries suffered, too, but he suffered more exquisitely and more eloquently, and his oeuvre is, as Mr. Freedman rightly insists, one long
Peter Gay, Durfee Professor of History at Yale, the author, most recently, of “Freud, Jews and Other Germans.” atutobiography. And it is autobiography practically undisguised; the hand of art, which converted, say, Proust's memories and experiences into an immortal masterpiece, lay lightly on Hesse's memories and experiences. Each of his novels is not merely a roman a clef; it is hard'ometimes to decide whether it deserves the name of fiction at all. Even the names and abbreviations that Hesse employs are all too transparent. True, he was a craftsman, and a gifted one, but he mined himself with a relentless and perfectly candid concentration that remains astonishing
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The narcissism that marks most modern artists was overpowering in Hesse. When his best friend, Hugo Ball, lay near death, he found time to notice that the dying man wanted to be left alone, even by Hermann Hesse: “Most recently,” he wrote his sister, “Ball does not want to see anyone. So far he has always wanted to see me. but now he wants to be even spared by me, so for the last five days haven't been there.” Mr. Freedman calls this 'strangely self‐involved.” His comment is characteristically generous: Not wholly blind to his subject's limitations, he is never quite willing to call a narcissist a narcissist.
It should be plain by now that reading about Hermann Hesse, especially in such detail, is anything but a cheerful task. “Complaining,” Mr. Freedman notes, “was always part of Hesse's repertoire.” Hesse was a troubled, almost unmanageable child: His parents despaired of him more than once; he was ridden, all his life, by symptoms that, it would appear, were psychosomatic: headaches, insomnia, eye‐aches - the companions, and expression, of anxiety and despair. And Mr. Freedman chronicles it all, breakdown by breakdown, almost headache by headache.
This is hardly funny, but there are moments when misery in, or around, Hesse becomes so concentrated that it achieves an almost comical intensity. In 192!., Mr. Freedman reports, Mia, Hesse's former wife, who had suffered psychotic episodes before, was ready for another: “Mia's older brother had committed suicide, and her other brother took the occasion to lose his reason. Mia consequently had a breakdown too.” This catalogue, more than any similar passage, almost forced into my mind Oscar Wilde's callous remark about the death of Dickens's Little Nell: One would need a heart of stone to read it without laughing.
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This cool distance is fostered, not merely by the substance of Hesse's life, which Mr. Freedman so honestly and so expansively sets out, but also by Mr. Freedman's manner of presenting it. He contends,
Pierre LeTan
Herman Hesse
Hesse and the record supports him, that Hesse found an almost overwhelming response to his work at discrete moments of his career: after he published “Peter Camenzind” in 1904; after World War I, with “Demian”; again after a war, in 1945, when the German public discovered “The Glass Bead Game,” published in Switzerland two years before; and finally, after his death in 1962, in the United States. And Mr. Freedman explains this reiterated response with the metaphor of the mirror — a metaphor he likes to press into service: Hesse was a mirror of his day. But this is not enough. A mirror of what? Of social realities? Of cultural perplexities? Of guilty fantasies released in a
Hesse was a self‐conscious partisan of an alienated avantgarde, a Nietzschean despiser of the “philistine,” the “modern mass man.” His fiction and his reflective prose are filled with somber laments over the “sickness” of the modern world. “Steppenwolf,” certainly Hesse's most influential book in the United States, which postures as cultural criticism, uses a modern metropolis as its master image. Mr. Freedman writes: “The combination of Zurich and Basel that he used to develop his symbolic city was designed to expose the individual and collective neuroses Hesse viewed as symptomatic of his time. Its dehumanized mass culture he had already condemned in his travelogue ‘Journey to Nuremberg’ of the previous fall in which he had assailed the degradation of ancient Nuremberg by commerce and industry. ... By the time ‘Steppenwolf’ had grown in his mind, he associated cities with drinking, hallucination, and sexual abandon. ... Seeking to display man's schizophrenia openly, divided as he is into flesh and spirit, as part of the schizophrenia of the time, he produced the Symbolic City.... The city, then, was not a scene or a locale. In fact, in this novel it was mostly suggested and rarely described. Rather, it fuctioned as the showcase in which man's social and psychological entrails were displayed.”
This is the level on which Mr. Freedman's relatively scant commentary moves, and it will not do, either as literary or, for that matter, as social criticism. The naive misuse of the clinical term “schizophrenia” in this passage is characteristic; and where we need an analysis of Hesse's conventional unconventionality, we get only exptisit ion and, with that, tacit endorsement of Hesse's shaky case. In fact, the biography as a whole suffers from a surprising insensitivity. Mr. Freedman has something of a tin ear. It is not merely that he misspells, almost consistently, the name of Jacob Burckhardt, the brooding Swiss historian who was one of Hesse's masters. It is not merely that he misreports Schiller's words. “0 Freunde, nicht these Time,” which, of course, begin the vocal section of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, as being its “final chorus.” More damaging, there is a forced journalistic informality, combined with a hunt for elegant images that only result in horrendously mixed metaphors We read, “beneath the sentimental crust of a young man's self‐important words lies a sharply focused picture of inner darkness,” and try, in vain, to visualize the scene Mr. Freedman has conjured up. Equally acrobatic is Mr. Freedman's attempt to “provide a sense of the tapestry of his mind from which, in his usual way of ultimately curing himself through his writing, the novel ‘Steppenwolf’ was to emerge.” We are monotonously confronted with masks (not merely Hesse himself, but his mother, it seems, lives behind a mask) and with mirrors. But we are also told of flesse's “life‐style,” or that, when he was a young man, “friendship developed,” but “Eros still had a long way to go,” or that, during World War I, Hesse “firmed up his relationship with the German embassy,” or that, attending a riotous artists’ ball, “Outwardly he seemed to have a great time.” This is curiously clumsy language to employ about a writer who made the sensitive use of language into a fetish
Ultimately, though, it is Hesse himself who leaves the reader with the greatest uneasiness, and it is a tribute to Mr. Freedman's diligence and candor that he supplies evidence for that uneasiness. The modern public is all too ready to grant the artist a measure of extravagance, of selfishness, of rowdiness; we have been taught, since the Romantics, that this is the price that genius exacts, and the tribute the creative art ist levies on the full, envious bourgeoisie. This defensive attitude of the bourgeois is absurd and a little pat het It deserves a review of its own. But to the extent that we accept it, Hesse's claim on us is simply too tenuous to permit him to be himself without criticism.
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His self‐indulgence was unmitigated and incurable. The course of Jungian treatments that Mr. Freedman, a little uncritically, calls a psychoanalysis, did not change that ; if anything, these treatments justified that self‐indulgence. Hesse, “after hard thoughts,” refused to come to his beloved dying mother and did not even attend her funeral: “Joining his family at that time,” Mr. Freedman comments, In his usual generous mode, “would have drawn Hesse into he feared most, that palpable awareness of loss from which he tried protect himself all his life.”
Again, when the Nazis expropriited the Jewish publishing house, the Fischer Verlag, Hesse had a choice of publishing Bermann Fischer house in exile or staying with the “Aryaniz.ed” firm in Germany, he chose the latter. After all, he was not above a certain conventional anti‐Semitism which Mr. Freedman conscientiously documents - and, sides, he had to protect sales.
In his frantic quest for dom from involvement, Hesse, though thoroughly opposed the Nazis, kept aloof from deadly struggle in the 1930's 40's and took his stand - if is the right word - right tween the Nazi barbarians the one hand and the hapless exiled writers on the Even though Ninon, his wife, was Jewish, he could bring himself to take much of interest in the plight of Rumanian family, who were it seems, exterminated.
Hesse puts the case against Hesse more devastatingly than I ever coul.Early in 1939,after Kristsllnacht and other Nazi horrors,he wrote to his sister: “The world looks a bit dim. Nothing surprises me,of course,not even the incresing signs of greater crudity in ger- man political life”-hardly a precise or adequate description of events in germany by a writer who prided himself on getting things right-“As long as one dosen't suffer from it one observes it quietly.but now we all feel the nonsense of what's loose in the world(by no means only in Germany)on our own skins.”
“As long as one dosen't suffer from it one observes it quietly”. the words shed a lurid light on Hesse's claim to represent his time.He did,but not in the sense that Hesse thought;they docu- ment his complicity in what was worst in those years when he only wanted to speak for the best.How a writer so disen- gaged could engage the passion- ate admiration of so many read- ers,how a writer so self-ab- sorbed could reach out to so wide a public,how a writer so self-protective could appear as a preacher of the highest civi- lized values-these are mys- teries for which Mr.Freed- man's biography supplies much essential and much little-known material.But it does not solve them
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