Siddhartha (A BookCaps Study Guide)

By BookCaps

Siddhartha was Hermann Hesse’s magnum opus. It also can be difficult to understand--it is short, but loaded with themes, imagery, and symbols. If you need a little help understanding it, let BookCaps help with this study guide.

This is a study guide and does not contain the book.

BookCap Study Guides are not meant to be purchased as alternatives to reading the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookCaps
• Release date: Nov 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301389339

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Hermann Hesse’s

Siddhartha

Study Guide

By BookCaps Study Guides/Golgotha Press

© 2011 by Golgotha Press, Inc.

Published at SmashWords

Hermann Hesse: A Short Biography

Born in Germany in 1877 to a devoutly religious family, Herman Hesse grew up amongst two parents who both served as missionaries in India. His grandparents were also missionaries in the same country, so Hesse’s attraction and familiarity with the place is understandable. He received an excellent education in Germany during his childhood, but his attendance to a seminary in Wurttemberg as a teenager started a rebellious phase of two years that included running away and attempted suicide. After quitting a days-long bookshop apprenticeship and working at a clock tower factory doing manual labor, Hesse returned to the former.

Working at the bookstore afforded Hesse access to a variety of literary works, which he spent time indulging himself in. After some failed publications, he started to find a modicum of success with poems. This eventually led to his publication of Peter Camenzind, which was a smashing success and found praise from Freud. After a few more books, his interest in India was rekindled, causing him to take a trip to the region during a particularly tense time with his wife.

During WWI, he worked taking care of POWs, writing peace poems and a newspaper for them. He eventually left his wife and his children, choosing instead to live alone and pursue writing again. It was during this time that he wrote multiple works, including Siddhartha. He remarried, received Swiss citizenship, and wrote Steppenwolf.

His work was oppressed by the Nazi regime during their reign, a group which he vocally opposed, and it wasn’t until near the end of the war that he was able to publish his last novel, The Glass Bead Game. Though he wrote during the last twenty years of his life, he also painted and responded to letters he received due to his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1962.

Historical Context

Siddhartha was written during Hesse’s mid-life. As his family- extending to his grandparents- were missionaries in India, the region’s literature and philosophy was constantly available to him through his grandfather’s book collection. While he dived into Western thought for much of his adulthood, his interest in the East was sparked anew, taking a