Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

By Gunnar Decker and Peter Lewis

A deftly crafted biography of the author of Siddhartha, whose critique of consumer culture continues to inspire millions of readers.

Against the horrors of Nazi dictatorship and widespread disillusionment with the forces of mass culture and consumerism, Hermann Hesse’s stories inspired nonconformity and a yearning for universal values. Few today would doubt Hesse’s artistry or his importance to millions of devoted readers. But just who was the author of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian?

Gunnar Decker weaves together previously unavailable sources to offer a unique interpretation of the life and work of Hermann Hesse. Drawing on recently discovered correspondence between Hesse and his psychoanalyst Josef Lang, Decker shows how Hesse reversed the traditional roles of therapist and client, and rethinks the relationship between Hesse’s novels and Jungian psychoanalysis. He also explores Hesse’s correspondence with Stefan Zweig—recently unearthed—to find the source of Hesse’s profound sense of alienation from his contemporaries.

Decker’s biography brings to life this icon of spiritual searching and disenchantment who galvanized the counterculture in the 1960s and feels newly relevant today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9780674916395

Book preview

Index

INTRODUCTION

Doppelgänger in a Straw Hat

His look has its own center

somewhere between the contemplative gaze of a mystic

and the sharp eye of an American.

—Walter Benjamin

His voice had a tanned sound to it. His face was full of deep furrows and folds, the face of a gardener or a mountaineer and at the same time a modern, urban face. That was Peter Suhrkamp’s impression on meeting Hesse for the first time in August 1936. This was also the last time Hermann Hesse set foot on German soil, and then only because he wanted to visit an ophthalmologist in Bad Eilsen, whom he hoped—in vain, as it transpired—would be able to cure the unbearable pain he was suffering in his eyes. Thereafter he never left Switzerland again: not when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946; not to collect his Goethe Prize awarded by the city of Frankfurt am Main or the Peace Prize of the German book trade; not even to attend the funerals of his two sisters.

Indeed, it was only very infrequently that the bird—as he liked to style and often to caricature himself—now left its golden cage, the Casa Rossa in Montagnola. He was intently preoccupied with keeping at bay the external world that was crowding in on him. A note reading No visitors, please was affixed to his door, though he did not shirk the daily drudgery of responding to letters. In the final twenty-five years of his life, in fact, he engaged with the world with perhaps even more intensity than he had ever done, albeit in his own particular way—overwhelmingly in the form of writing. For him, devoting attention to others was inextricably bound up with withdrawal—that was the great paradox of his life, and the mainspring of his creativity.

This contradictory nature, even in his outward appearance, was what immediately struck his publisher Peter Suhrkamp at their first face-to-face meeting in Bad Eilsen: the man would fit equally well in either a café full of literati in Paris or a monastery in Tibet. That was Hesse’s Janus-like face, turned to the world and away from it at the same time. Suhrkamp’s description of Hesse went on:

He is shorter than me and much thinner, and strikes one as extremely haggard and ascetic. He has a powerful voice, with a heavy Swabian accent. His lips are thin, and the line of his mouth, which turns down sharply on the left-hand side, lends him a skeptical and embittered appearance. His cheeks are sunken and heavily shadowed. At any moment his eyes, behind thick glasses, can take on a softly radiant and very inquisitive look, while at times they seemed focused into a piercing, brooding stare, and on those occasions there is a mad determination about them. His brow is delicate and yet almost completely rounded. His complexion alternates between fresh and pallid, the transition between which is very sudden and violent; at certain moments, the paleness of his face is quite shocking.¹

Klara, the first wife of Hesse’s eldest son, Bruno, also found herself alarmed, not by the sight of her father-in-law but after browsing some of his books: If I’d known what sort of things your father writes, I would never have agreed to be your wife! She banned her children, Christine and Simon, from reading anything written by their grandfather. The same sentiment was reported by Sibylle, the daughter of Hesse’s youngest son, Martin, who was also forbidden to read these lewd books.²

Anyone who had such a drastic effect, even on his own family, required an unassuming disguise. Many a person who does not want to appear a murderer becomes a gardener.

So in the old man calmly burning bundles of cuttings and twigs in his garden there lurked a dangerous pyromaniac waiting to pounce. One never knew exactly if he would manage to keep his fascination with fire within legal bounds.

This unmistakable man in a straw hat was in no way a sociable, easygoing person; if one were expecting a carefree rambler, this would not be your man. Here was a notoriously irritable loner, who could tolerate other people—even his own wives—only at a suitable distance. Physical contact was as abhorrent to him as unannounced visits. He hardly ever found an inner harmony, though like Goethe he was constantly invoking this state of mind. His life was always in a state of flux. Phases of creative rapture were followed by periods of the blackest depression. Throughout, he always kept in mind Janus-like nature, above all his own. In the view of this sworn enemy of cities, anyone who denied this nature was in danger of becoming alienated from themselves.

Regarding the sheer multitude of personal testimonies preserved in Hesse’s writings, Siegfried Unseld has noted, with an admiration bordering on incomprehension: Here was a family that wrote a welter of letters and that documented itself in countless notes and diaries. That they kept every last communication, be it in the form of a letter, a postcard, or just a handwritten note, is truly remarkable.³

How can one begin to recount a life that ended some fifty years ago, and whose fruits were a twenty-volume Collected Works, an oeuvre that encompasses almost 15,000 pages? The task is made still more daunting by the fact that, in the course of his life, which lasted for almost eighty-five years, this man wrote more than 44,000 letters, of which only the most important have been, and continue to be, edited.

Gottfried Benn’s observation, which he wrote on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s death, applies to Hermann Hesse in a way that it does to few others: If a life ended fifty years in the past and the person’s work was completed some sixty years ago, it is perhaps permissible to switch to the method of regarding that figure as a dream.⁴

Indeed, Pedro Calderón’s play Life Is a Dream finds a late echo in the work of Hermann Hesse. Without a strong dream dimension there would not only be no Magic Theater and no Glass Bead Game, there would also be no author Hermann Hesse, period. In his writing, the constant interplay between the internal and the external brings together autobiographical accounts with reflection and a sense of enchantment through new myth making. A particular tone resonates through his work: namely, that of a biography of the soul. How could one hope to write a biography of Hermann Hesse without allowing space for this tone to reverberate?

Legends and the fairy-tale form came to play an ever more important role for Hesse than science, whose self-avowedly objective methods he viewed with distrust. To him, the confessor, such methods always seemed to be masking a fundamental indifference and an inner lack of involvement (according to Hesse, this was the cardinal sin in all utterances concerning poetry and art in general).

When faced with the contention that poetry was not a realm that could stand up to serious scrutiny when subjected to the dispassionate parameters of scientific knowledge, Hesse would counter by pointing to the fact that there were other cultures and other ages in which everything that was vital to human existence had been treated in the form of verse.

A biographer should not start from the premise that he or she is conducting a type of police investigation and is expected to produce a series of new pieces of evidence revealing things that the author wished to keep hidden. Anyone writing about the life and work of another person treads a path of convergence with one’s subject that is all too readily labeled with the epithet romantic. Yet in the majority of cases, it is fair to say that the subject of a biography is not some delinquent whom one is seeking to find guilty of misconduct. Errors are legion and certainly form part and parcel of the substance of a person’s life and work, but what is guilt in this context, and who decides on it? Biography should be neither an act of willful exposure nor an act of simple homage. Virginia Woolf saw the task of biographers as being the ongoing endeavor to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow, since they are always writing at one and the same time about a decidedly earthly existence and the mystery of creativity itself. A biographer’s integrity thus resides in not neglecting one side of this duality entirely or highlighting it to the detriment of the other.

Early on, Hesse himself attempted to write two biographical monographs: on Saint Francis of Assisi, and one on Boccaccio, both of whom he greatly admired. In both cases he found in retrospect that he had made things unacceptably easy for himself when writing. Nevertheless, today if one reads these texts, both of them relatively short, what was special about these two lives still comes across, and one can feel their charisma across the centuries.

Subsequently, then, Hesse came to take a very skeptical view of the monograph as a literary form; indeed, in his essay Dealing with Books (Der Umgang mit Büchern) he expressly warns people off it: Extensive consumption of monographs and biographies can easily spoil the magical pleasure a person may take in building up an impression of great writers from their works alone. And in addition to an author’s works, one should also not pass up the opportunity to read his letters, diaries, and conversations—Goethe is a case in point here! Where such sources are so close at hand and readily accessible, one should not let oneself be spoon-fed secondhand.⁵

Only direct access to the sources can forestall the danger of relying upon derivative, secondhand material. In the case of Hesse, there are few diaries, and even these few are not very extensive—as compared, say, to those of Thomas Mann. By contrast, his exchange of correspondence is a rich lode revealing his troubles and hopes, a labyrinth of his fears and aspirations, as well as being a chronicle of his humdrum, everyday concerns. In the process, dreams define those themes that form the basis and the hidden depths of his texts. From a reading of these—principally private—communications, Hesse emerges as a man grappling with his inner turmoil. He seemed a neurotic figure to those who had dealings with him, a figure often on the verge of psychopathology. What a robust and rugged artist—one whose stock-in-trade was the shunning of reality—to be able to tap into his own inner contradictions!

No idyll can survive in such circumstances, and things in Hesse show us their light and dark side simultaneously. Nothing here is edifying that does not at the same time immediately destroy every hint of edification. This is also the meaning of the subtitle of this book—The Wanderer and His Shadow—an image that derives from Nietzsche’s work Human, All Too Human. Hesse was a person who constantly carried his doppelgänger within him. In any creative act the spirit of destruction, self-destruction too, must first be overcome. This was a lifelong struggle for Hesse.

Hesse’s writings were translated into thirty-four languages during his lifetime. The Japanese understand me best, he said, and the Americans the least. But then, theirs is not my world. I shall never go there.⁶ He had good reasons for this assumption, for after his works had appeared in several different editions worldwide after the awarding of the Nobel Prize, sales nonetheless proved highly unresponsive in the United States. In the mid-1950s, Siegfried Unseld bought back the American rights to Hesse’s works for just $2,000; at dinner later that day, the American publisher even gave Unseld the opportunity to withdraw from this unfair deal. He did not take it, though he could scarcely have imagined what would happen just a decade later.

For the great Hesse Renaissance of the 1960s came from the United States, of all places. The psychedelic Flower Power movement generated the illusion of a happy antibourgeois rapture. The rebellious sons of the American middle classes read Hesse and felt themselves vindicated in their quest for alternative ways of living. And so Hermann Hesse became an eternal gardener in the last eco-commune, a spiritual guru of Buddhist meditation groups, and the secret leader of the anti–Vietnam War movement. Elsewhere, he had long since been the figurehead of an antiauthoritarian educational ideal.

Indeed, the generation of 1968 in Germany had already discovered Hesse’s contrariness for themselves. They celebrated him for the fact that he was patently unsuitable for co-opting as any kind of patriotic cheerleader and for his disaffection for a nation that was characterized by its rigid adherence to diligence, order, self-righteousness, and tidiness. And because many of them had parents who had hailed Hitler’s accession to power and who still took that the view that he had done a lot of good things, the rediscovery of Hesse by hippies also took on a political dimension. This, then, represented an expansion of the private garden idyll to a utopia of a future life where people would no longer feel alienated.

The fact that, soon enough, there grew from this movement a new set of ideologues who were destined to make people unfree once more does nothing to change the sense of freedom that people experienced through reading Hesse, or the liberation of Hesse’s image brought about by his adoption by this new youthful and antibourgeois readership. The quintessential symbol of this new awakening under the aegis of Hesse was the American rock group Steppenwolf, with their 1969 single Born to Be Wild: in other words, born to live life without limits. It is a beautiful and necessary dream, at the root of which a dark romanticism shimmers.

In 1968 the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported, not without a certain condescending astonishment, that it was the hippies who dragged Hesse out of the doldrums.

For it is true that, up until that revival, Hesse’s reputation had been really very poor in the western part of Germany—with the proviso that it is not readers but critics and competing literary figures who are primarily responsible for a writer’s reputation.

Let us begin with the critics. Shortly before his death in 1948, in an interview with Willy Haas, Alfred Kerr was the progenitor of an anecdote that even Hesse could not help but laugh at when it was recounted to him. Haas explained:

At one point in our talk, he wanted to tell me something about Hermann Hesse, whom he didn’t much care for, but couldn’t remember his name. He tried prompting me: You know, that old Swabian who’s always claiming he’s Swiss! I couldn’t think who he meant. Yes, you know—that harmless writer! That incredibly harmless writer! That disgustingly harmless writer! He kept groping around for the name. That scandalously harmless writer! he almost yelled at me. Do you mean Hermann Hesse? I asked dubiously. Yes, Hermann Hesse! he shouted in great relief, his eyes flashing.⁷

And in an essay written for the journal Merkur to mark the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ernst Robert Curtius wrote: Likewise, his use of language is like meticulous painting by numbers, sometimes childish, and on other occasions schoolboyish. His prose never sparkles.⁸

So much for the scintillating opinions of the critics. Those of his fellow authors and rival writers are scarcely less strident. On August 28, 1910, Erich Mühsam noted in his diary on Hermann Hesse: Even his style I find unbearable. He attempts to pull off some bold strokes. He fawns. He spouts. And I really loathe the way he suddenly breaks into the middle of a story and starts announcing his own personal opinions on the problems that have been raised. How unappealing! How unartistic!—And in general it’s true to say that, throughout, his prose has that suspicious whiff of the soil, or rather that earthy stench of the parochial regional writer.⁹ Robert Musil expanded on this criticism in the late 1930s: He tolerates no noise in the house, no irregularity in the strict division of his day into periods for working, reading, walking, mealtimes, and sleep. That’s all very understandable; the only funny thing about it is that he displays the foibles of a greater writer than he actually is. Nowadays, it seems, you can be a great writer without evincing any greatness in your writing. And Gottfried Benn provided a postwar perspective: Hesse. A little man. A German inward-looking nature, which regards it as an earth-shattering event if someone somewhere suffers or commits an act of adultery. He wrote some lovely, lucid poems in his youth. A pal of Thomas Mann. Hence his Nobel Prize, a very appropriate and fitting award in the murky swamp that is Europe right now. Moreover, hadn’t Hesse irresponsibly gone off and a found a comfortable bolt-hole in Switzerland (the disparaging term sybarite was doing the rounds at the time) while everyone else was having to suffer the privations of the war?

Indeed, Hans Habe, the Hungarian American editor whom U.S. forces appointed to found and run newspapers in their postwar occupation zone, doubted that Hesse even had the right to speak in Germany ever again.¹⁰

An opportunist, a curious old bird, a naive nature freak, and a writer of kitsch scarcely any better than the romantic potboiler author Hedwig Courths-Mahler were some of the epithets attached to him. In his obituary of Hesse for the newspaper Die Zeit on August 17, 1962, Rudolf Walter Leonhardt concluded, with good cause: It has to be said, there are no points to be won from liking Hesse nowadays.¹¹ But that was precisely the root of the great misunderstanding about Hesse: popularity wasn’t really what he was all about.

And why was Hesse viewed with the same degree of skepticism by regional writers as he was by the urban avant-garde? This is where things begin to get interesting.

For his entire life, Hesse was intent on demonstrating that he was his own person. That made for a lonely existence, but also made him robust. And it is this strength, which made him independent and self-reliant yet also highly neurotic, that many people cannot forgive him for, even to this day. Hesse never managed to keep his own personality out of his writing. He remained a confessing writer, yet one who increasingly hid behind masks—something that not every reader recognized.

There was something about Hesse that antagonized his critics, and still continues to do so. Robert Jungk saw in him a political visionary who transcended day-to-day politics.¹² The Glass Bead Game is precisely not some elitist gentlemanly parlor game, but an attempt—which in the process assimilated Plato’s Republic—to imagine the future in the light of current catastrophes. In Hesse, any utopia he posits is at any time fully cognizant of the anti-utopia inherent within it. This is what makes him a modern author, because he constantly endeavored to express this inner turmoil and never aligned himself while doing so with any majority or minority.

By contrast, the work of writers from the famous Gruppe 47 postwar literary movement in Germany—Hesse haters, to a man—was engaged, critical, dialectic, linguistically experimental, political, and sociological—all the things that Hesse’s writing emphatically was not, nor did it aspire to be.

In the 1960s it was the outsiders who still took Hesse seriously. People like Peter Handke, who attacked West German literature after the war for its descriptive impotence and who promoted Hesse’s rejection of reality to oppose the cult of social realism and engaged literature, positing the inner rather than the external world, and slowness rather than acceleration.

In any case, beyond Germany the picture had long since changed, shaped precisely by Hesse’s ambivalent relationship to German tradition. His attitude of attraction and repulsion produces an intensity of language that does not admit of any indifference. As André Gide noted in 1947: Although Hesse is quintessentially German, he only achieves this by turning his back on Germany. There are very few of his compatriots who have not been influenced by circumstances and who have managed to remain true to themselves. It is to them that Hesse addresses himself, with the message: ‘However few of you there are, the future of Germany depends upon you, and you alone.’

Even before the Beat Generation, admiring voices came first from outside Germany, as Joachim Kaiser recalled. When Henry Miller told him in 1960 that he valued Hesse, Kaiser saw it as a sign of the American’s incipient senility and took a grim pleasure in recounting it back in Hamburg—everyone laughed up their sleeves about old Miller.

The late 1960s saw the publication of a selection of the correspondence between Hesse and Thomas Mann. The initial reaction was irritation. Wasn’t this a case of two men talking to one another as if they were equals? This irritation did not last long before being supplanted by prejudices once more. But what West Germany patronizingly mocked, in a cool Anglo-Saxon manner, for being old-fashioned and romantic was exactly what Hesse’s readers in East Germany, cut off from the rest of the world and condemned to provinciality, admired about him: his tenacious defense of the spiritual dimension. Hesse was a cosmopolitan figure from the provinces. What a spark of hope this ignited in his readers behind the Iron Curtain! Whereas his books were seen there as an antidote to a world governed by ideologies, a majority in the Federal Republic of Germany, at least a majority of critics, shared Karlheinz Deschner’s verdict of 1957—that most of Hesse’s works did not even rank as second-rate.¹³

In the light of this, Gottfried Benn’s casual dismissal of Hesse, citing by contrast the much-invoked modernity of German literature, should be seen merely as playing around with labels. The clear implication was that above all a younger German readership was now turning to the prose of writers like Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Martin Walser, or Peter Weiss¹⁴ and had no further interest in Hesse’s epics in search of the meaning of life. Furthermore, there was speculation that the American Hesse renaissance could not last much longer, given that several foreign critics already thought they detected a faint whiff of metaphysical Lederhosen about Hesse.

Yet it was precisely not the critics—neither the Germans nor the Americans—who had triggered this Hesse renaissance or even wanted it to happen, but the influential youth culture, which found that Timothy Leary’s visions of LSD and beat had something of a flavor of Steppenwolf about them, and Steppenwolf remained inextricably bound up with the name of Hermann Hesse.

Destroy what is destroying you! That was the message that gained currency among readers of Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A rapturous mood prevailed in leftist, alternative communes and discussion circles of this period. Reading Hesse became a way of stimulating one’s own feeling about life, a kind of mystical union of the collectivist, blissful awakening of the new generation, almost a drug.

A late victory for the author of Steppenwolf, one might think—yet even that interpretation is ultimately a misunderstanding as well.

On the one hand, if reading leads a person to live life intensely, then that is thoroughly in the spirit of Hesse. On the other hand, Hesse could scarcely have imagined that, among the endlessly debating gatherings of this period, the spiritual dimension would become something that was openly scorned.

Certainly, this headstrong antidogmatist had a highly equivocal relationship with the authorities of Western history. However, his attitude could not simply be summed up as a simple shunning of tradition—otherwise he would never have begun writing The Glass Bead Game.

At some stage, the hippies believed that they had pegged this Hermann Hesse as being so fundamentally a fellow traveler of their own attitude of laid-back lethargy that they found it increasingly inconvenient to bother reading him anymore. The most fatal form of fame for authors is when their readership decides it is enough simply to know the titles of their works. Thus began the end of this revival, too.

Then a remarkable phenomenon occurred: in the interim, Hesse’s readers, or rather his erstwhile fans, had become for the most part solid bourgeois types, many of them schoolteachers or professors who were nearing or were just post retirement. For them, the folkloric side of their own life story (free love; pacifism; experimentation with mind-expanding substances; an antiauthoritarian, ecological, and communalist lifestyle), which most of them had consigned firmly to the past, was so firmly associated with the name of Hermann Hesse that they came to look upon him as a somewhat embarrassing psychedelic brother to their own, now long-faded, spaced-out former selves.

Many members of this I-read-Hesse-once-but-don’t-anymore brigade maintained that he was purely an author one read in one’s youth, an ideal companion for boys going through puberty. Is that the case? What we were witness to here was, instead, a public display of intellectualizing self-reflection testifying to recurrent identity crises that prompted fresh starts.

No, one does not leave Hesse behind after going through puberty, for his theme remains the new beginning confronted anew on a daily basis. But what had to perish in these beginnings? What had to be destroyed in order that something else might arise?

His invocation of the child’s soul had nothing sentimental about it and was anything but harmless. Rather, a melancholy of Proustian dimensions runs through Hesse’s own very individual search for lost time.

He was and remains an author of crisis. He was never simply apolitical but instead for the most part found himself compelled to stand above the political fray, and was always keen to demonstrate his willfulness, a trait that could sometimes sound like sarcasm yet that is first and foremost a manifestation of the exuberance that is an essential part of anyone who has made playing with words their lifelong profession.

For example, when asked in an interview with Die Welt on June 10, 1962, why he wrote, he gave the succinct answer: because one can’t spend the whole day painting.¹⁵ This exhaustive disclosure was made shortly before his eighty-fifth birthday and less than two months before his death.

What should one read, and most importantly, how should one read? Could there ever be an elite that doesn’t read anymore? In that event, what would become of all the dreams of humanity that are contained in libraries? This question becomes even more acute when we consider Hesse’s 1929 essay A Library of World Literature: The modern world tends somewhat to undervalue books. Nowadays, one encounters many young people who find it risible and undignified to love books rather than real life. They consider that life is too short and far too precious for that, and yet still find the time to spend several hours a week listening to palm-court music and dancing.¹⁶

He wrote this essay in 1929. Anyone who considers Hesse antiquated must already have ceased to think about the problem of education, at least in the form that seemed so urgent to him: For education requires something to educate: namely, a character, a personality. If they are absent, and if education without substance occurs, so to speak, in a vacuum, knowledge will result, to be sure, but there will be no love or life about it. Reading without love, knowledge without reverence, education without any heart is one of the worst sins against the human spirit.¹⁷

Hesse praised idleness and the Romantic ideal of art, yet always remained the son of Pietist parents subjecting himself to an enormous workload each day. Did precisely this paradox conceal a vision relating to the future of our educational institutions?

The first-person tone that Hesse adopted in everything he wrote, in all its many different resonances, comes across as highly cultivated; for this reason it is never strident, but instead manages to retain its fundamental air of openness and listening to the external world.

Hesse was a reader with an instinct for the new—for Franz Kafka, whom he helped popularize, or Peter Weiss, whom he suggested should be awarded the prize that bore his name. In 1927 Kurt Tucholsky wrote: His book reviews have no peer in Germany at present. One can learn something—indeed, a lot—from every one of Hesse’s book reviews.¹⁸

Only very occasionally did this instinct desert him—for instance, where the urban avant-garde and Expressionism were the subjects in question. In 1960 he said of the diaries of the Berlin Expressionist poet Georg Heym: He was fortunate in meeting an early death. He was predestined to become a Nazi, his fantasies revolved around officer’s uniforms, war, and barricades, and all he can say about Goethe is to call him ‘that pig Goethe.’ ¹⁹ But even here, in the midst of his incomprehension, his curiosity did not leave him, and he conceded: Even so, there are some winning aspects to Heym.

Hesse renaissances come and go. But setting aside all fads and fashions, one would hope that any reader cheerfully and aimlessly working his or her way through the twenty volumes of Hesse’s Collected Works might frequently stray into hitherto unfamiliar territory. For that is when the expedition begins to get perilous, as the author reveals himself to be a visionary author in his precise descriptions of the erosion of an entire era.

His doppelgänger motif, which mirrors his inner conflict, is also a response to the great fault lines in the history of the twentieth century.

Steps, which he chose to symbolize his life—expressing the metamorphosis that he experienced—always lead both up and down at the same time.

Steps

Just as every blossom fades

and all youth yields to old age,

so every stage of life, each flower of wisdom

and every virtue reaches its prime and cannot last forever.

Whenever life calls, the heart must be ready to leave

and make a fresh start and to enter bravely

into different and new liaisons.

And a magic inhabits every new beginning,

protecting us and helping us to live.

We should joyfully traverse realm after realm,

cleaving to none as to a home,

the world spirit does not seek to fetter us and hem us in

but to raise us up, step by step.

No sooner have we made ourselves at home and comfortable

in some sphere of life than we grow lax.

Only those who are prepared to venture forth

can cast off familiar, paralyzing old habits.

Maybe death’s hour too will send us out newborn

toward new realms,

Life’s call to us will never end …

Come then, my heart, take your leave and fare you well!

1

A CHILD’S SOUL

Oppression and Rebellion

Places of Origin and Yearning

Childhood always had two faces for Hermann Hesse: a precisely identifiable sequence of events from birth to puberty, and the subsequent picture of it in his mind’s eye. These reminiscences colored everything he wrote with that familiar background atmosphere, which always comes across as very close at hand and often deeply intimate, and yet at the same time as extremely remote, as if it were part of a legend, almost like an episode from mythology.

Interrupted idylls in Calw and Basel, ominous feelings of security, painful aborting of all-too-emphatic fresh starts, and obstinate forlorn unruliness. That all combined to make him, in his decided outmodedness—he always seemed to have more of the past or of the future about him, but was never wholly in the here and now—a meticulous fabricator of dreams.

Pipe dreams and nightmares interweave in this poetic realm, which can sometimes be very bright and sometimes utterly dark, to form a play of light comprising both the promising and destructive potentials that inhabit individuals and entire cultures alike.

When Hermann Hesse was born, on July 2, 1877, in Calw, his onward path in life already seemed to have been laid out for him. That unconditional trust in God, which had guided all the Hesses and the Gunderts (his mother’s side of the family) safely through all of life’s unpredictabilities and kept them from the temptation to plow their own furrow, was also expected of him as a matter of course. Hitherto, in this family there had been no dissenters from the rigidly devout world of Swabian Pietism.

Certainly there had been some attempts to break free, but each had been followed by remorse, repentance, and submission: After all, what am I? Nothing but an instrument of the Lord, for it is He who according to his unfathomable will has assigned me my station in life, in which I am bound to humbly serve Him. Everything else is pride, and hence a sin. For the Hesses and the Gunderts, the family was always the smallest unit in a single, great undertaking: the mission to evangelize heathens. And in this, they were successful; they were forced to admit defeat only in the case of one heathen, that new Hermann in the family, whom his maternal grandfather Dr. Hermann Gundert baptized on August 3, 1877.

Family background and tradition—and if those were not enough, God’s Commandments—had up until now proved strong enough to ward off any revolt. Up until now. But this latest of the many Hermanns in the family would turn out to be different from its two powerful heads, his grandfathers Dr. Carl Hermann Hesse and Dr. Hermann Gundert. Learned patriarchs both, who left behind vast amounts of correspondence (all diligently archived as if for eternity) and missionary texts. Two guardians of the truth, scholarly men who had even taken doctorates. And then there was the third Hermann, the one who had just been born, and who left school at sixteen. By then, though, he had already gone on an odyssey to Bad Boll to meet Johann Blumhardt, a faith healer and socialist but above all a guru of Pietist revivalism. He had also attempted to take his own life and spent time in the mental asylum at Stetten. His stay there could so easily have become permanent had he not—just in the nick of time—donned the mask of penitence and humility. Breathing a sigh of relief, his family thought they identified glimmers of rationality. A narrow escape once more.

Until he purchased a revolver, that is. His stubborn nature, which did not shy away from self-endangerment, exploited every conceivable loophole in the protection offered by the corpus of metaphysical belief and triumphantly crossed the boundary of what his parents could tolerate.

This Hermann conveyed to his family an outrageous message from Nietzsche: God is dead! And yet, as a legacy of his Pietist background, he too was inhabited by a restless searching for God and an unquestioning certainty in the insufficiency of all worldly fulfillment: The fact that people see their life as something held in fee from God and seek to live it not through egotistical urges but instead in service and sacrifice to God—this greatest experience from my childhood has had a powerful influence on my life.¹

The Grandfathers

When I look at my grandchildren, it increasingly strikes me that God never repeats himself, but constantly serves up something totally without precedent.

—Hermann Gundert (June 8, 1877)

For Hermann Hesse, before the world of fathers, against which he would rebel, there was the world of his grandfathers. This stretched so far back in time that history opened out into legend. And yet even the biographies of his great-grandparents are scrupulously well documented. All the Hesses and the Gunderts lived in the certainty of their Protestant faith, which they interpreted with especial rigor, and felt a vocation to perform their duty as missionaries. Two grandfathers called Hermann, and the grandson too—what did that say about the power of names?

The grandson did not become like either of his grandfathers, and broke with the long Pietist tradition established by the Hesses and the Gunderts—yet he still retained something of this ethos, primarily his awareness of the magical act that is inherent within every naming of a child. He knew when he entrusted his fortunes to a readership and the written word that he was drawing on a broad family hinterland. He would take this knowledge—an empirical knowledge of metamorphoses and of self-realization—over that frontier, beyond which lay the realm of art, governed by different but equally strict rules than that which held sway among the Pietist brotherhoods.

So now once again a new Hermann enters the family, the great-grandson, the grandson, and the son. In later life Hesse would constantly look back on his forbears, on the one hand with trepidation but on the other with great admiration, as unwavering champions of the divine. His own father, Johannes Hesse, however, whom even his mother, Marie, came to see principally as the assistant of her much-revered father Hermann Gundert, was too much of an obstacle to be given his proper due. So for a long time Hermann found it impossible to accord him the same admiration that he had shown to both his grandfathers. Only in old age would he recognize how like his father he really was.

Hermann Hesse’s father, Johannes Hesse (1847–1916)

Hesse’s friend and biographer Hugo Ball has highlighted the special role of the grandfather in Pietism: In Pietist circles, which have a close affinity with the early Christian Church, although the saints in a Catholic sense do not play a role, grandfathers certainly do, and what is more a role that actually surpasses that of the saints.² Why was this?

Pietism, a Protestant sect, opposed the established Church. This is also the reason personal role models played such a leading role in the brotherhoods. The wise elder who devoted his whole life to God embodied the highest authority. Because in Pietism the only thing that stands between God and man is Holy Scripture, and not the institution of the Church, nor any sacraments, dogmas, or other external matters, all that man is required to do is to follow the Bible’s commandments. But this places Pietism, which in truth has scant regard for the individual in his or her earthly body, in a paradoxical situation that impacts on the image of man. For a person’s ability to live their life according to God’s commandments depends entirely on the strength of their faith, asceticism, and forbearance. But above and beyond this, in his or her corporeal existence, a person counts for nothing. In Pietism, individuals were expected to strive to fulfill themselves and through their best efforts and moral purity to try to please God—however, only in order thereby to secure for themselves a promising starting position in the race to paradise. For this reason, on the one hand Pietism was open to the modern spirit (technology!) and even revealed itself to be an ideology of achievement—doing one’s duty was paramount!—yet on the other hand, it fundamentally rejected modernity on moral grounds. It regarded as the devil’s work everything that did not serve the ultimate purpose of preparing one for the kingdom of God in the hereafter. Freed from the mantle of the Christian faith, Hermann Hesse, the grandson, would attempt time and again to reformulate this contradiction. It is just one of the insoluble questions of modern existence that impelled him to become a writer.

His grandfather Dr. Carl Hermann Hesse did not neglect to leave behind an autobiography in two volumes, an endeavor he spent two years on: his sole aim in this was to give an account of himself before God. Indeed, there were several writers among Hermann Hesse’s forebears—but they always wrote with a higher purpose in mind; to do otherwise would have been pure sinful vanity.

Carl Hermann Hesse was born in 1802 in Livonia. His mother also hailed from this region; his father came from Lübeck. Carl Hermann’s elder brother studied theology, and he too intended to become a pastor after attending high school. However, low marks in ancient Greek meant that he could not enroll to study theology. His headmaster suggested he study medicine instead, and on the spur of the moment he agreed. And so, just as enthusiastically as always and without dwelling ruefully on his thwarted life plan, he embarked on a course in medicine. This demonstrates the character of the Hesses: they took what happened to them as God’s will. They even thanked God for adverse twists of fate, on the grounds that He would surely have His reasons for testing them in this way.

The family’s trust in God was complete—and Carl Hermann Hesse was a happy man.

He had ten children with his first wife, Jenny; the first child was Johannes Hesse, the writer’s father.

Hermann Hesse’s third wife, Ninon, in the epilogue to Childhood and Youth before 1900, a volume she edited documenting the writer’s early years, attempted a succinct summary of this baroque family history of the Hesses and the Gunderts. Even so, it turned out to be a lengthy essay, because both families had documented in minute detail every step taken by their members and had exchanged hundreds, even thousands, of letters with one another. I will have more to say on this idea of the letter as a form in its own right (somewhere between a compulsion to communicate and an art form). The papers Hermann Hesse left behind after his death were found to contain countless letters that people had written to him, all of which he had kept. We may assume that he also replied to most of them, because a file came to light with commentaries and notes by Hesse on his correspondents, including such remarks as Don’t respond; he’s trying to convert me. And in his novella Klingsor’s Last Summer, we read the following sentence, which sounds like an ironic commentary on the writer’s daily exercise of letter-writing: Are people who write so many letters happy?

Carl Hermann Hesse’s unshakable and firm faith was demonstrated by one of the episodes he noted. His young daughter Agathe was suffering from a bout of severe bronchitis. She began slowly to suffocate and there was no chance of her being cured. Grandfather Hesse reported on this for his readers’ edification: In the evening, while sitting on my lap, and in the presence of her mother and a friend, Agathe said to me: ‘Father dear, I know I must die, but if you were to ask God, He could make me well again!’ ‘Yes, dear child, that is true; but I can’t ask this of him, because he told me that he wishes to take you, so you must be obedient and go!’ So died the little girl, whose father had refused to offer up a prayer for her salvation because his own death also was God’s will, to which one was duty-bound to joyfully assent. Time and again his grandson Hermann Hesse found himself outraged by this kind of blind faith. If he were a Pietist rather than a human being, then maybe he would understand, the fifteen-year-old Hermann spit hatefully at his father.

Yet Carl Hermann Hesse also possessed something that in the eyes of the young Hermann was lacking in his father, Johann Hesse: stature. The man appeared unshakable, was a ladies’ man into the bargain, and had the advantage, where his grandson was concerned, of living—unlike Grandpa Gundert—far away. Hermann never met him in person. Carl Hermann remained a dazzling archetype of his own descent, at the same time attractive and repulsive.

While Carl Hermann Hesse’s competence as a doctor has often been called into question—on one occasion, he extracted a healthy tooth instead of a diseased one—his competence as a champion of the faith has never been doubted. Yet he was something extremely rare among Pietists: an Epicurean standing before the Lord. A circle of brothers in the Pietist spirit soon began to form around Doctor Hesse in Weissenstein. Everyone from a baron to a craftsman’s apprentice attended his Bible classes. He also founded an orphanage. In fact, the founding of orphanages was something of a specialty of Pietists, with the Francke institutions in Halle acting as a model: children, too, had the capacity to work, which should be exploited for the glory of God. But Grandfather Hesse’s favorite activity remained listening to hymns being sung while enjoying a bowl of punch—or conversely singing himself while others imbibed. His unorthodox rhyming motto ran: Gott lieben macht selig, Weintrinken macht fröhlich, drum liebe Gott und trinke Wein, dann wirst du fröhlich und selig sein (Loving God makes you blissful, drinking wine makes you happy, so love God and drink wine, then you’ll be happy and blissful). Carl Hermann Hesse’s passion for wine was one thing at least that his grandson Hermann came to share with him without reserve. When Hermann sent him a long letter from Maulbronn with a poem attached, his grandfather answered enthusiastically—with a poem of his own. And on October 11, 1891, the by-then almost ninety-year-old grandfather responded to Hermann’s description of the daily stresses and strains of life in Maulbronn in the following terms: "I can still work and I can still sleep, six to eight hours every night, plus an hour’s nap in the afternoon, that’s a great blessing to me and holds body and soul together and makes me a whole person, so I never need to go to the pharmacy and I am a happy man. Be sure to allow yourself plenty of rest at night, and stay healthy."³

In 1921 one of Doctor Hesse’s nieces, the singer Monika Hunnius, wrote his biography—this kind of written documentation of a person’s life was simply inevitable, among both the Hesses and the Gunderts. Carl Hermann Hesse died at the age of ninety-four in 1896 in the Estonian town of Weissenstein (now Paide). In 1960, in A Few Reminiscences about Doctors, Hermann Hesse also included a few observations of his own about his eccentric grandfather:

This fiery youth, who was enthusiastic and boyish in equal measure, whose lust for life and optimism also embraced a childishly trusting piety, had become the doctor, benefactor, and occasionally also tyrant of a small town in Estonia and a substantial part of the surrounding area with its landed estates. And he remained young, fiery, amusing, pious, and boyish into extreme old age. Aged 83, he still saw fit to clamber up a tree in order to saw off one of its branches, and plummeted to the ground along with the branch but did not sustain any injuries. He was known as the doctor who gives everything away—and on several occasions, much to his family’s dismay, brought poor patients back home with him and cared for them for weeks or even months on end in his own house. As a doctor, he wasn’t in the least bit squeamish, and would use the wrench to pull out decayed teeth, or go right ahead and operate without an assistant or using any anesthetics. He had been obliged to work his way up in life from tough beginnings in very primitive circumstances. He had had three wives in all, and buried them all, and in his capacity as a Russian imperial physician and state councillor had raised hell about the government’s regulations and warnings, if they struck him as being useless or injurious.⁴

By contrast, his other grandfather, Hermann Gundert, head of the Calw Publishing Union, which produced all manner of religious literature for missions to enlighten the heathens, was very much in evidence when the young Hermann was growing up. Even so, they never spoke with one another to any great extent, Hesse noted when his maternal grandfather passed away in 1893, yet he was still shaken by his death.

This grandfather was not one of those missionaries who tried to convince others of the simple truth of religious faith. He was neither ascetic nor sanctimonious, let alone fanatical. He was himself a searcher after truth his whole life and so did not hide his insecurities and doubts, and this gave him even greater stature in the eyes of his grandson. Likewise, something that Hermann Gundert found much more important than any Christian missionary work—about which he had some misgivings anyhow—was his personal passion: his interest in a multitude of foreign languages, especially the dialects of India. Hermann Hesse recalled his grandfather in his 1923 autobiographical essay The Childhood of the Magician: This man, my mother’s father, was hidden in a forest of mysteries, just as his face was hidden in the white forest of his beard; from his eyes there flowed sorrow for the world and blithe wisdom, depending on the circumstances, and likewise lonely wisdom and divine roguishness; people from many lands knew him, visited and revered him, talked to him in English, French, Indian, Italian, Malayalam and vanished into thin air once more after long conversations.… From him, this unfathomable one, I knew, came the secret that surrounded my mother, the secret age-old mystery.⁵

When Hesse later came to write about travelers to the East, he had Hermann Gundert and his mysterious envoys in mind.

Hermann Gundert was born in Stuttgart in 1814. His father was a businessman and from 1820 on was secretary of the Württemberg Bible Society; he subsequently became known throughout Swabia as simply Bible Gundert. By that time he was already involved in publishing, and for two decades, beginning in 1823, he was chief editor of the magazine News from Heathen Lands. Hesse’s great-grandmother Christine Louise (née Ensslin) had fallen under the influence of the preacher Jeremias Flatt and become a religious fanatic. Hermann Gundert was sent to a grammar school at the tender age of five; it was said that he could then already speak better Latin than many of his fellow students ever managed to. From the age of thirteen, he studied at the monastery school in Maulbronn, which served as the preparatory school for the Evangelical-Lutheran College in Tübingen, where officials of the state of Württemberg were traditionally trained; the highly educated civil servants produced by this institution could look forward to lifelong employment.

Yet this Grandfather Hermann also rebelled—like his grandson more than six decades later—initially against his parents, when he refused point-blank to become a pastor, announcing instead that he wanted to be a soldier. David Friedrich Strauss, later the author of The Life of Jesus, and an exponent of a form of theology based on the work of Hegel, was at that time teaching in Maulbronn. Hermann Gundert was deeply impressed by his teaching; Swabian Pietism was already starting to appear extremely outmoded to him.

Indeed, Hermann Gundert even found himself enthused by political revolution, with the Paris July Revolution of 1830 stimulating in him dreams of a new, liberated Germany. He agitated for this cause in political essays.

After passing the entrance examination, Gundert went to Tübingen. Strauss had in the meantime begun teaching there, and his seminars afforded his students insights into the history of philosophy. Gundert was enthralled; by now he found himself between two stools, espousing a new enlightened doctrine of reason while retaining his former religious beliefs. He vacillated, trying to square the one with the other, yet sensed all the while that these were compromise positions that would not be able to withstand a true test of loyalty.

Such a test duly arrived in 1833 when a series of suicides occurred at the Tübingen college and he succeeded in persuading one of his fellow students not to take his own life. He then fell seriously ill himself—with an ailment that, in the spirit of the age, was designated a nervous fever, and that confined him to bed for weeks. This was the period he later came to describe as his conversion, his return to the old faith. Seen in another light, he could be said to have surrendered to the spirit of his forefathers and to the power of tradition. All these were motifs that Hermann Hesse would include as archetypal and fundamental topoi in his texts, up to and including the great recapitulation of his own life in The Glass Bead Game.

After taking his doctorate, Hermann Gundert received an offer to travel to India as part of a missionary expedition to the subcontinent. An Englishman, Anton Norris Groves, a manufacturer of false teeth with an amateur passion for missionary work, asked him to come with him to India as the private tutor to his children. A fellow member of the entourage accompanying the missionary-manufacturer was Julie Dubois, the daughter of Calvinist wine growers from French-speaking Switzerland. To the very end of her life, she barely mastered German.

On their first encounter, Hermann Gundert felt a strong aversion to his woman, whom he took to be a diligent, bigoted Calvinist. Nevertheless, it was put to him that he might like to marry the young missionary assistant. He vehemently turned the suggestion down. Yet it was not up to him to decide whom he should marry, but rather his coreligionists, a body of people whom Gundert’s grandson in Calw would later disparage as an omnipresent committee. Hermann Gundert swallowed his pride, backed down, and married Julie Dubois. The only thing they had in common was the missionary work they were both engaged in. But there was no question of only: this was the be-all and end-all of both their lives on the subcontinent.

Gundert wrote to his parents about the bride he had been ordered to marry: She isn’t attractive, and doesn’t sing, or play games, or draw, but on the other hand she does have an open, natural spirit, and is a keen judge of character. Later Hermann Hesse would affirm the passionate sobriety of his maternal grandmother, and her asceticism, upright and true, sometimes to the point of utter rigidity.⁶ At least the assignment of roles was clear, with the wife from her humble background and with her limited intellectual horizons serving her husband in the same way as she served God: conscientiously.

And the marriage did indeed appear to have functioned perfectly well, even though in later years their son-in-law Johannes Hesse noted that Julie possessed a choleric temperament and was always dissatisfied with herself and in this was the antithesis of her husband, who constantly had a placid and generous demeanor. This was undoubtedly an exaggeration, for at one stage Hermann Gundert had shown himself to be an implacable opponent of all of his daughter Marie’s attempts at self-determination. When Marie traveled to India at the age of fifteen to join her parents, she met a young Englishman on the ship. They fell in love and the young man wrote a letter to her father asking for her hand in marriage. In her Autobiography, Marie Gundert later remarked: Papa wrote back to him, refusing in the firmest and most serious of terms to ever grant him my hand, since he regarded him as an impulsive fellow and a man of the world. No more disparaging a term could be used of another by a Pietist. And yet who could seriously blame any father—regardless of whether he was a Pietist or not—for forbidding his fifteen-year-old daughter from marrying a chance acquaintance for love? This was surely less a gesture of patriarchal omnipotence than fatherly concern for his daughter.

Marie was unhappy but did not dare to revolt openly. The young man waited for years for her and was then shocked when she married someone else—a missionary, of course—this time with her parents’ blessing.

Hermann Gundert himself encountered difficulties in getting his marriage, which had been conducted in India, recognized back in Swabia. For although the union with Julie Dubois had been decided upon by his religious superiors, it had not been authorized by the Württemberg authorities. Fortunately for him, however, his marriage was—supposedly as an exceptional case—retrospectively legalized by the authorities in Württemberg, otherwise, in the worst case, his citizenship could have been revoked and he could have been required to pay back the tuition fees for his free education at the college in Tübingen. For it was a legal requirement in Württemberg that all marriages should be officially approved.

Gundert, who during his time in Chirakal, India, had already begun to translate the Bible into Malayalam and to compile a Malayalam–English dictionary—a task that would occupy him for another thirty years—was afflicted for three years in India by an inflammation of the throat and lungs, which at times rendered him completely incapable of speech. This was not exactly a favorable position for a missionary.

Ultimately he and his family quit India. There was a position waiting for him at the Calw Publishing Union, as the deputy to Christian Gottlob Barth, the founder of this citadel of devotional literature. Accordingly, Gundert resided in Calw from 1860 right up to his death in 1893. When his boss Barth died in 1862, Gundert took over control of the Calw Publishing Union.

Hermann Gundert’s sons (Marie was the only daughter among his eight offspring) painstakingly collected all of their father’s letters, more than 8,000 in all. Most of these letters and chronicles were then published in the proceedings of the Calw Missionary Society, so that their coreligionists might share in the affairs of the family.

Inevitably, one is tempted to say, there is also a biography of Hermann Gundert. His son-in-law—and successor in the post of head of the Calw Publishing Union—Johannes Hesse, Hermann Hesse’s father, wrote this work, which was published in 1907 as volume 34 of the Calw Family Library.

Pietism as an Evangelical Revivalist Movement and a Way of Life

It is easy to imagine that the devotional images disseminated by the Calw Publishing Union must have embarrassed Hermann Gundert to the depths of his soul. For this religious propaganda was of an alarming simplicity. One of the posters for missionary work within Germany that was produced by the Union depicted the Pietist dualistic image of the world as consisting of a narrow and a broad path. The world belongs to the devil, and heaven belongs to God. Here below, therefore, people were threatened with punishment, and told that their rewards would be in heaven. The poster showed a signpost with two arms. One pointed to the world, and hence to death and damnation, while the other pointed to God—in other words, to life and blessedness. Broad and comfortable roads lead to the world, whereas the road to God is a narrow and arduous path. The first road tempts a person with the theater, wine, masked balls (a singular attraction in Hesse’s Steppenwolf!), lotteries, and other questionable entertainments. The second path is the only true one. The stations on its route are the Church, Sunday School, performing humble daily chores, and the deaconess house, and the route leads directly to paradise.

It was as simple as that: Renounce the temptations of the world, and do not let yourself be deflected from the true path! Vital elements in achieving that goal were strict discipline and a multitude of rules. In his rulebook of Pietism, Pia desideria, Philipp Jakob Spener promoted the idea that individuals’ moral free will should be incapacitated in the name of promoting a higher morality. Thus, every aspect of a person’s life was to be regulated, down to the smallest detail, and the individual was to be left no latitude for decision making. The philosopher of religion Ernst Troeltsch counts Pietism, in terms of its fundamental structure, as being a sect, somewhere between an established church and mysticism. And yet precisely this fixation on commandments and literal faith harbors a duality. On the one hand, it is a dogmatism that leaves no room for the individual to maneuver, because everything has already been interpreted, and pleasing God therefore resides solely in adhering to the rules to the letter. On the other hand, however, a faith of this kind increases people’s distance from the world, and their view grows more critical as a result. Secure in the knowledge that God is behind