Hermann Hesse: Life and Art

By Joseph Mileck

"A critical biography far surpassing the previous ones." --Times Higher Education Supplement   "There are to be sure many writers whose biographies are more interesting than their fiction but Hesse is not one of these. He led a long and sometimes eventful life with marital tensions, traveL controversy, crises, even some thoughts of suicide and a period of time as a student in a home for retarded and unmanageable. In addition, there was his search which led him through the culture and arts of West and East, his views of politics and society, of psychology and philosophy. The difference between Hesse and other writers is that virtually every shred and patch of his life was brought into his writing, his fiction particularly. 'He had to write about himself and there is little of what he wrote that is not confessional in form and therapeutic in function.' Autobiography is the very matter of his work. Mileck's contribution is to extend and fill out the evidence of his life, his psychoanalysis, his drive toward self-realization which was the very engine of his being, to show the raw material and thus to invite readers to see how it was transmuted, transfigured, fantasized, poeticized, symbolized." --Los Angeles Times   "Hesse was a prolific author for some 60 years, and his mind drew everything it contemplated into his private wars between flesh and spirit. objectivity and subjectivity, the longings for society and isolation. No one is better qualified to disentangle this abundance than Mileck, compiler of the huge two-volume Hesse bibliography. For completeness, then, no biography in English compares."  --Kirkus Reviews   "Mileck provides his own translations of the German quotations from Hesse's works, and the eight interpretive chapters are thoroughly indexed, making the work readily accessible to researchers and students concerned with specific Hesse questions and themes. This very readable book also contains a number of exceptional photographs, which, together with Mileck's fervor and understanding of the author, help create a living image of Hesse the man and the artist." --Choice   "Professor Mileck . .. brings to his task an acquaintanceship with Hesse's published and unpublished writings .. . which borders on omniscience. This is a literary biography which concentrates on the works and looks at the life of its subject briefly and always in relation to its involvement with the works . . . [This] is true scholarship, which does not make the book less readable and accessible to the general public. . . . a solid and valuable book which should make it easier . . . to bring [Hesse] back into the orbit of serious appreciation in the English-speaking world."  --Books and Bookmen

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.
"A critical biography far surpassing the previous ones." --Times Higher Education Supplement   "There are to be sure many writers whose biographies are more interesting than their fiction but Hesse is not one of these. He led a long and sometimes eventful

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520342620

Joseph Mileck

Joseph Mileck is Professor Emeritus, Department of German, University of California Berkeley

Book preview

HERMANN HESSE: LIFE AND ART

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse

LIFE AND ART

JOSEPH MILECK

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley I Los Angeles I London

The photographs (many by Grete Widmann and Martin Hesse) came from the Hermann HesseNachlass and the Marbach-Hesse-Collection in Marbach am Neckar. They were included with the kind permission of the Hermann Hesse-Stiftung and Dr. Bernhard Zeller, the director of the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach am Neckar, Germany.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1978 by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 0-520-03351-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-48020 Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Contents

Contents

Preface

Note

1 Background, Childhood, and Youth CALW/BASEL 1877-1895 FAMILY

SCHOOLING

LITERARY BEGINNINGS

2 Apprentice Bookdealer TÜBINGEN 1895-1899 A QUIET RETREAT

ROMANTISCHE LIEDER AND EINE STUNDE HINTER MITTERNACHT: REFUGE IN FANTASY

KIRCHHEIM UNTER TECK

3 A Retreat from Aestheticism BASEL 1899-1904 SOCIAL DEBUT AND LITERARY SUCCESS

NATURALISM

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, JACOB BURCKHARDT, AND ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

HERMANN LAUSCHER: AN AESTHETE'S WORLD

POETRY

PETER CAMENZIND: A BITTER TASTE OF REALITY

UNTERM RAD: A PURGING OF PAINFUL MEMORIES

OTHER PROSE WORKS AND DRAMA

4 Domesticity GAIENHOFEN 1904-1912 A ROUSSEAUESQUE EXPERIMENT

SWABIAN TALES

ITALIANATE TALES

LEGENDS

THE MIDDLE AGES

GERTRUD: AN EXERCISE IN SELF-JUSTIFICATION

OTHER PROSE WORKS, POETRY, AND FRAGMENTS

TRANSLATIONS

HESSE AS A REVIEWER AND EDITOR

5 War and Awakening BERN 1912-1919 A PSYCHOLOGICAL CRISIS

WATERCOLORS

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND POLITICS

DEPARTURE FOR TICINO

MAJOR PUBLICATIONS

ROSSHALDE: FAILURE AND NEW POSSIBILITY

DEMIAN: EMANCIPATION AND QUEST

SIGMUND FREUD AND CARL GUSTAV JUNG

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE

ART AND DISEASE

MÀRCHEN

OTHER PROSE WORKS, DRAMA, AND POETRY

HESSE AS AN EDITOR AND REVIEWER

6 Rebel-Seeker MONTAGNOLA 1919-1931 A NEW BEGINNING

CONTINUED SOCIAL AND POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT

PRODUCTIVE AGONY

KLEIN UND WAGNER: EXISTENTIAL ANGUISH

KLINGSORS LETZTER SOMMER: THE THRUST OF DEATH

SIDDHARTHA: IDEAL POSSIBILITY

KURGAST: PENDULATION

DER STEPPENWOLF: BETWEEN SPIRITUALITY AND SENSUALITY

NARZISS UND GOLDMUND: LIFE'S DOUBLE MELODY

DIE MORGENLANDFAHRT: RENASCENT AESTHETICISM

OTHER PROSE WORKS AND POETRY

HESSE AS AN EDITOR AND REVIEWER

7 Social Commitment MONTAGNOLA 1931-1945 TROUBLED WITHDRAWAL

POLITICS AND THE NAZIS

DAS GLASPERLENSPIEL: CROWNING SYNTHESIS

OTHER PROSE WORKS, POETRY, AND REVIEWS

8 Reutimscence and Rumination MONTAGNOLA 1945-1962 REUNIONS AND FAREWELLS

RENEWED POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT

CELEBRITY AND NOTORIETY

ELDER LITERARY STATESMAN

ILLNESS AND DEATH

LAST WORKS AND LATEST PUBLICATIONS

FORTUNE'S EBB AND FLOW

Selected Bibliography

Index of Hesses Works

General Index

Preface

In reply (January 9, 1956) to a young correspondent anxious to have Kafka explained to him, Hesse reiterated what he had always pointedly insisted upon:

He who is capable of really reading a writer … will have his every question answered by the works themselves. … He [Kafka] depicts the dreams and visions of his lonely, difficult life … and it is these dreams and visions alone that should preoccupy us, and not the interpretations that sharp-witted interpreters can give these writings. This interpreting is an intellectual sport … one that is good for clever people … who can read and write books about Black sculpture or twelve-tone music but who never get to the heart of a work of art because they stand at the gate fumbling with their hundred keys, blind to the fact that the gate is really not locked.1

Hesse was obviously far more touched by a sensitive reader’s open- hearted and open-minded response to literature than impressed by a critic’s cerebrations, ingenious though they might be. The actual experiencing of literature was its absorption by readers and not its dissection by critics. A work of art was essentially its own explanation, it needed no elucidation. Hesse was clearly less than enchanted by those who wrote about literature.

Since I concur with this sentiment, though not fully and am somewhat taken aback by its hyperbolic statement, I feel obliged to account for my transgression. This book was not written in the belief that Hesse’s readers required such interpretations to grasp his dreams and visions, or that his literary spokesmen had to be improved upon. It was not this altruistic concern or conceit, nor the

1 Briefe (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1964), pp. 458-459.

seduction of intellectual sport, but psychological necessity that provided the major impetus: my longtime ready absorption of Hesse’s writings simply had to be balanced by organized afterthought. I had not only to take in but also to understand both Hesse and his work in order better to understand myself and literature. If perhaps I have not also remained standing before the open gate like Hesse’s censured critics with their hundred unavailing keys, it is probably due to this combination of ready absorption and necessary reflection. But whether or not I have succeeded in entering the inner sanctum, the book has already served my own immediate purpose, and will in some measure also serve its own purpose in the community of scholars, of those who can read and write about books about Black sculpture or twelve-tone music. It will exceed my expectations, though not my hope, should my book also manage to serve Hesse’s wider community of readers, should it manage to extend and to deepen the Hesse-experience for the lay reader.

In my undertaking I was primarily intent upon revealing Hesse the person and his world of ideas, characterizing his writings in both their substance and form, and drawing attention to the intimate relationship between his life and his art. My object was to see Hesse as he was and not to imagine what he was, to try to understand his works as he himself understood them and not as I might prefer to understand them, and to shed some light on his creative process. To avoid literary myth and to make possible the literary study I had in mind, biography had to be corrected and expanded and previous critical coverage of both Hesse’s writings and his sundry literary involvements considerably extended.

Apart from correcting and adding lesser biographical details and dates, I have given more than the usual attention to Hesse’s marriages and his children, his analyst J. B. Lang, his circle of patrons, and to the many painters, composers, and writers among his friends; to his early familiarity with English, Scandinavian, Russian, and Italian literature, his immediate attraction to romanticism and rejection of naturalism, and his particular interest in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and in St. Francis of Assisi and Boccaccio; to his preoccupation with Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Jacob Burckhardt, and with Catholicism, the Middle Ages, and the Orient; to Pietism’s impact upon Hesse’s life, and childhood’s imprint on his art; and to his watercolors and his privately marketed self-illustrated manuscript collections of poems. I have detailed Hesse’s general attitude to politics, his own political views, and his sporadic sociopolitical involvements; his quar rel both with the militarists and pacifists during the First World War, his vilification by both the Nazis and refugee German Jews during the thirties, and his altercation with an American army officer in the autumn of 1945 with the resultant banning of his books by the German press in the American sector. I have focused upon Hesse’s almost unreserved embrace of Freud and more hesitant acclaim of Jung, and upon their influence on his art; upon the role Hesse believed psychoanalysis could play in literature and should not play in literary criticism, and upon his reaction to the association of art and disease, and of genius and insanity. And I have also traced the repeated ebb and flow of Hesse’s literary popularity both in Germany and abroad.

I have extended coverage of Hesse’s literary activities as much as his biography, and my interest in his evolving life and a surmised closely corresponding evolution in both the substance and form of his art determined my chronological approach. I have drawn brief attention to generally unknown literary beginnings and first publications, have accorded each of Hesse’s major tales individual treatment more or less commensurate in length with its significance, and have, albeit collectively more often than individually, accounted for many of his shorter narratives—the legends, Italianate tales, Swabian short stories, and fairy tales—works that have to date been all but ignored. I have characterized Hesse’s poetry, scanned his sociopolitical essays, and studied his extensive work as a reviewer and editor. I have also drawn attention to Hesse’s numerous travel reports and nature sketches, recollections and reflections, literary studies and congratulatory and memorial articles, autobiographical snippets and letters, and even to his comparatively few diary fragments and translations. Nor have I ignored Hesse’s considerable corpus of unpublished material: tales, dramas, librettos, poems, fragments, literary plans, essays, letters, and diaries.

At the extremes of storytelling there are those writers who spin their yarns and those who document their lives. Hesse belongs to the latter. He had to write and he had to write about himself and there is little of the much he wrote that is not confessional in form and therapeutic in function. With rare exception, each of Hesse’s major tales begins where the immediately preceding tale breaks off, scrutinizes and finds wanting its predecessor’s concluding promise of better possibility, and then itself terminates abruptly on its own upbeat of new hope. These were Hesse’s own serial appraisals of the self and assessments of life, milestones along his own erratic course of self-realization, and the different theories of art and various philosophies argued in these works mirror Hesse’s efforts to lend approbation to his own different adjustments to himself and to life and to make existence more bearable. But autobiography is not just confined to narrative substance, it permeates the very narrative fabric of Hesse’s art, no less in his minor than in his major works. Hesse’s protagonists are self-projections not only in their concerns, thoughts, and feelings, but even in their persons and experiences and, with rare exception, in the worlds in which they live and the circles in which they move. It is upon this autobiographical core that my study focuses. Concentration upon evolving self-realization, the foremost of Hesse’s concerns, and upon life and art, the real and the ideal, erotic and social love, sensuality and spirituality, time and timelessness, multiplicity and oneness, aestheticism and social commitment, and middle-class Western culture—related and accompanying themes that evolve similarly from tale to tale—will, I hope, silhouette Hesse’s variegated world of thought more sharply and make possible a better understanding of his works, singly and as an unbroken continuum; disclosure of the unusually personal texture of these works should provide a revealing glimpse into Hesse’s workshop; and together these two foci may add something to our still limited understanding of the artistic personality and of the creative process.

But Hesse’s tales are clearly not just a raw annotation of the self. Autobiography is only matrix and not product. Life transfigured— fantasized, poeticized, dramatized, and symbolized—becomes art with universal implications, and the art of Hesse’s writings, like their concerns, evolved with his own evolving life in an upward and outward spiral. I have paid as much attention to this evolution of narrative manner as to evolving narrative matter. A young aesthete given to his dream world and purple prose becomes an artist-burgher intent upon adjustment and traditional poetic realism, and then a rebel-seeker determined to come to grips and to terms with himself and life at large and to push back the horizons of literary possibility. In my delineation of this progression, apart from genesis, biography, and substance, I have examined each of the major tales in terms of structure, mode of narration, description, and characterization; vocabulary, syntax, flow, and rhythm of sentences; symbolism, names, double self-projections, and various other of Hesse’s literary devices and special features of form. I have accorded the earlier, more traditional, and less involved works much less attention than the novel and more demanding literary ventures beginning with Demian, and have treated Das Glasperlenspiel in a manner commensurate with its length, complexity, and significance. From all this I hope there emerges a telling portrait of Hesse the man and the artist, an informative characterization of his work, and a revealing exposure of the life and art relationship at its most intimate.

Since the number of Hesse enthusiasts and Hesse scholars to whom I am indebted in one way or another for this study is legion, I shall have to express my thanks without the usual mention of names. Besides these persons, I am particularly obliged to Hesse’s sons Bruno and Heiner for biographical information, to Dr. Bernard Zeller for giving me free access to the Hesse-Nachlass in the SchillerNationalmuseum, and to the American Philosophical Society for a travel grant.

Berkeley, California JOSEPH MILECK

Spring 1976

Note

Such references in the footnotes as Books and Pamphlets II:37; Prose IV:478; Poetry V-C:2; Reviews VI-A:2i; Hesse as an Editor VIII-A:2O; Letters VIII-C:32; and Manuscripts X:429, refer to Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977).

Unless otherwise indicated, parenthetical dates of Hesse’s collected works are those of first publication, and parenthetical dates of his individual works are those of completion.

The English translations of quoted passages of German are my own. To preclude doubt or confusion I have also chosen to refer to Hesse’s works by their German titles. English equivalents are added parenthetically in the Index of Hesse’s Works.

1

Background,

Childhood,

and Youth

CALW/BASEL 1877-1895

FAMILY

Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in the little town of Calw on the Nagold River at the edge of the Black Forest. His family background was unusually varied. Johannes Hesse (1847-1916), his father, was born a Russian citizen in Weissenstein, Estonia. Here his grandfather, Karl Hermann Hesse (1802-1896), had established a flourishing medical practice after leaving his native Dorpat in Livonia. His great-grandfather, Barthold Joachim Hesse (1765-1818), a musician and enterprising businessman, had left Lübeck for Reval, then for Dorpat, while still a young man. Hesse’s mother, Marie Gundert (1842-1902), was born in Talatscheri, India, the daughter of the Pietist missionary and Indologist, Hermann Gundert (1814-1893), whose family had its roots in Stuttgart. To this North and South German family stock Hesse’s maternal grandmother, Julie Dubois (1809-1885), added a French-Swiss element, and his paternal grandmother, Jenny Agnes Lass (1807-1851), a Slavic strain.

This ancestry was as spirited and versatile as it was diversified. Karl Hermann Hesse, district doctor, state councillor, and beloved patriarch of pioneer Weissenstein, was a jolly Pietist who was still

Background, Childhood, and Youth I 3 fond of skating at fifty and continued to tend to his garden at eighty.1 Johannes Hesse, although a more sensitive and retiring person than his father, dedicated himself to the practical service of Christ at the age of eighteen, and, following his studies at the Basel Mission Society (Basler Missionsanstalt) and his ordination in Heilbronn (August 1869), served almost four years as a missionary in Malabar, India (1869-1873). Brought back to Europe by ill-health, he settled in Calw to assist Hermann Gundert, then director of the Calw Publishing House of the Basel Mission Society (Calwer Verlagsverein). Here he met and a year later married Gundert’s daughter Marie. From 1881 to 1886 he edited the Mission’s periodical in Basel and also taught language and literature at the Mission House. On his return to Calw he continued to assist his father-in-law until he assumed the latter’s position in 1893. Staunch Pietist though he was, severe in his demands upon himself and upon others, Johannes Hesse was no avid, limited sectarian.2 A cultivated literary taste and intellectual curiosity had taken him far afield. His thought and religion evidenced the broadening and tempering effect of Latin literature, Greek philosophies, and Oriental religions.3

Hermann Gundert was perhaps the most colorful of Hesse’s immediate forebears. After more than twenty years as a pioneer missionary in India (1836-1859), he returned to Europe and was assigned by the Basel Mission Society to assist the director of its publishing house in Calw. He assumed the directorship in 1862 and continued in this capacity until his death in 1893. Like Johannes Hesse, Gundert was no ordinary Pietist missionary. Not only was he completely at home in English, German, French, and Italian, but just as capable of preaching in Hindustani, Malajalam, and Bengali. He was almost as fluent in Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil, and had some competence in at least ten other languages. A scholar at heart, Gundert’s world in Calw soon became one of books. Much of his time was devoted to Indological studies, to a Malajalam translation of the Bible, a Malajalam grammar, and the completion of his Malajalam lexicon. His home was

Background, Childhood, and Youth I 5 long a meeting place for scholars, theologians, and exotic visitors from the Orient.4

Marie Gundert Hesse was just as exceptional as her husband. She was born in Malabar and educated in Switzerland and Germany. Until 1870 she continually shuttled between Europe and India. Although the mother of nine children, of whom six survived her, she found time not only to assist her father and her husband in the publishing house, but also managed, despite her many daily tasks and endless prayer meetings, to master four or five languages, to dash off verse, and to write biographies of Bishop James Hannington and David Livingstone.5

The heart of Calw, with its narrow cobblestone streets, its closely set houses with their pointed gables and little gardens, is still much as it must have been in Hesse’s childhood. The house in which Hesse was born still stands inconspicuously in the marketplace opposite the old city hall, marked by only a modest plaque. In Bischofstrasse across the river, the once imposing Calw Publishing House (Haus des Calwer Verlagsvereins) is now a textile shop. It was to this house that Hermann Gundert brought his family in 1860, and in which he remained until his death. And it was into this house that the Hesse family moved in 1886, after five years in Basel, and where, but for a brief period in Ledergasse (1889-1893), the family remained until shortly after Marie Hesse’s death in 1902. Down Bischofstrasse a little way, the Perrot machine shop, in which Hesse worked from June 1894 to September 1895, is still in operation. A small stone fountain commemorates his apprenticeship.

1 For more information about Dr. Karl Hermann Hesse, see Monika Hunnius, Mein Onkel Hermann: Erinnerungen an Alt-Estland (Heilbronn: Eugen Salzer, 1921), 126 PP-

2 His broader interests are evidenced by such of his many books as: Guter Rat für Leidende aus dem altisraelitischen Psalter (Basler Missionsbuchhandlung, 1909), 128 pp.; Lao-tzse, ein vorchristlicher Wahrheitszeuge (Basler Missions-Studien, 1914), 64 pp.

3 For more information about Johannes Hesse, see: Hermann und Adele Hesse, Zum Gedächtnis unseres Vaters (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1930), 85 pp.; Ida Frohnmeyer, In Erinnerung, Die Ernte (Basel, 1941), pp. 65-72.

4 For more information about Dr. Hermann Gundert, see Johannes Hesse, Aus Dr. Gunderts Leben (Calw und Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung, 1894), 368 pp.

5 Jakob Hannington: Ein Märtyrer für Uganda (Calwer Familienbibliothek, 1891), 272 pp.; David Livingstone, der Freund Afrikas (Calwer Familienbibliothek, 1892), 248 pp. For more information about Marie Hesse, see Adele Gundert, Marie Hesse: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern (Stuttgart: Gundert, 1934), 283 pp.

SCHOOLING

A hypersensitive, lively, and extremely headstrong child, Hesse proved to be a constant source of annoyance and despair to his parents and teachers. As early as 1881, Marie Hesse sensed that her son would have no ordinary future:

[Johannes] pray with me for little Hermann, and pray that I find enough strength to bring him up. It appears to me that physical

The Gothic chapel of St. Nicholas on the old bridge over the Nagold River.

Calw, Hermann Hesse’s birthplace.

Background, Childhood, and Youth I 7

strength is not enough. The little fellow is unusually lively, extremely strong, very willful, and really astonishingly bright for a four-year-old. … This inner struggling against his tyrannical spirit, ranting and raging, leaves me quite limp. … God must take this proud spirit in hand; something noble and splendid will then come of it. But I shudder to think of what could become of this passionate human if subjected to a wrong or weak upbring- ing.1

By 1883, Johannes Hesse was seriously wondering whether it might not be better to farm out his intractable, precocious child:

Humiliating though it would be to us, I am nevertheless seriously wondering if we should not put him into an institution or farm him out to strangers. We are too nervous and too weak for him. … He seems to have a gift for everything: he observes the moon and the clouds, improvises on the harmonium, makes quite amazing pencil and pen drawings, sings very ably when he has a mind to, and he is never at a loss for rhymes.2

By 1886, however, when his family returned to Calw from Basel, Hesse had become quite manageable. Although school held little attraction for him, and his teachers even less, he was able with almost no effort to stand near the top of his class. It began to appear likely that he would follow in the footsteps of his father and his Gundert grandfather. From February 1890 to July 1891, Hesse attended Rector Otto Bauer’s Latin School in Göppingen in preparation for the notorious Swabian state examination, which he had to pass for admission into one of the four exclusive protestant church schools of Württemberg.3 Hesse passed the required entrance examination in the middle of July, and on September 15 began his studies in Maulbronn.

Hesse’s stay was unexpectedly brief and ended most unhappily. His correspondence with his parents suggests that all began auspiciously in Maulbronn. He was impressed by the school, interested in his studies, and generally pleased with both his teachers and his fellow students. His French leave of March 7, 1892, was therefore a distinct surprise to family and school. Following this twenty-three-hour impulsive escapade, Hesse began to suffer from headaches and insomnia. He became progressively more listless and his behavior more

Elementary school in Calw in 1886. Hermann Hesse, third from the right in the back row.

Secondary school in Bad Cannstatt in 1893. Hermann Hesse, in the middle of the back row.

erratic. On May 7, much to the relief of the school authorities who had begun to doubt his sanity, he was withdrawn from Maulbronn by his parents and taken directly to Pastor Christoph Blumhardt of Bad Boll for a cure. Although he continued to suffer from severe headaches and insomnia, the patient was actually content in his new surroundings until his unrequited love for Eugenie Kolb, seven years his senior, threw him into deep depression. He borrowed money, bought a revolver, and on June 20 disappeared, leaving a suicide note. He reappeared that same day, morose and defiant. Two days later, since Blumhardt was anxious to rid himself of his unpredictable ward, Hesse was placed in the care of Pastor Gottlob Schall of nearby Stetten. Because of his exemplary behavior in Schall’s school for mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed children, Hesse was allowed to return to Calw on August 5. At home he quickly became agitated and unmanageable again and had to be sent back to Stetten on August 22. His long pent-up resentment and anger now erupted. Infuriated and deeply hurt by what to him was unmistakable parental rejection, fifteen-year-old Hesse began to inveigh against the establishment, his father, adult authority, and religion in the same vitriolic manner in which, thirty-three years later, an equally distraught Steppenwolf was to rail against sham Western culture and its establishment. Letters to his parents, albeit hyperbolic, signed H. Hesse Nihilist (haha!), H. Hesse, Exsulans (In exile), and H. Hesse, Gefangener im Zuchthaus zu Stetten (Prisoner in the penitentiary in Stetten), attest to the intensity of his agitation:

There is probably little chance that I can be sent elsewhere. In any case, you are rid of me. … If you write and tell me that I am insane or weak-minded, I'll believe it just to please you, and laugh doubly hard. (August 30)

What I would not give for death. … A miserable 1892! It began dismally in the seminary, a few blissful weeks in Boll, then disappointed love, and a sudden end! And now—I have lost everything: home, parents, love, belief, hope, and myself. … Stetten is hell for me. … I am going to be cold, ice-cold to everyone, everyone! … Farewell, farewell, I want to be alone. … Let me, the mad dog, die here, or be my parents! (September 1)

The Inspector took Turgenev’s Smoke away from me. … I want to have something more than the trite, even if only in my reading material. Of course you would like to put me off with Pietism. … Here I am lectured to: Turn to God, to Christ, etc. etc.! But to me God is simply an insanity, and Christ only a man, hundred times though you may curse me for the thought. (September 4)

I was forcibly put on the train, brought here to Stetten. Here I am, no longer any trouble to the world. … I do not deserve this. I love myself, just as everyone loves himself, but it is not for that reason that I cannot live here, rather because I need a different atmosphere to be able and to want to fulfill myself as a human being. … What good does it do me when papa goes on repeating: Do believe that we have your good at heart. This remark is not worth a damn. … Here there is no hope and belief, no one loves or is loved here; the place is quite void of any ideal, of anything beautiful, anything aesthetic; there is no art here, no feeling … no spirit. … I am a human being and before nature I insist earnestly and solemnly upon the universal right of man. … I also learned something in Stetten: to curse. … I can curse myself and particularly Stetten, then my relatives, and then the odious dream and insanity that happiness and unhappiness are. If you want to write to me, please do not mention your Christ. Enough fuss is made about him here. Christ and love, God and bliss etc., etc., can be read absolutely everywhere, and in the midst of all this, hatred and hostility prevail. I think that if the ghost of Christ could see what he has caused, he would weep. I am a human being, no less than Jesus; I see the difference between the ideal and actuality as well as he did, but I, I am not as tough as the Jew! (September u)4

When the storm abated, Hesse, at his own request, was sent to Pastor Jakob Pfisterer in Basel on October 5. By November 7, a contrite though despondent young rebel was ready to resume his studies, now at a secondary school in Cannstatt. That he would be no more successful here than in Maulbronn quickly became obvious. His nerves were still frayed, his headaches continued, and his studies soon became a meaningless torture. On January 20, 1893, overwhelmed by painful memories and by his hopeless situation, Hesse rushed off to Stuttgart, sold some of his books, again managed to buy a revolver, and again flirted with suicide. The Bad Boll-Stetten syndrome repeated itself. Things gradually went from bad to worse. Complaints about sundry physical ailments became more insistent and contrition yielded to truculence. In his resentful self-assertion, Hesse now began to frequent taverns, to consort with questionable characters, to smoke heavily, and to incur debts. His depression increased correspondingly. Acceding to his pleas, Hesse’s parents finally permitted him to return to Calw on October 18, 1893. His for-

Background, Childhood, and Youth I 13 mal education ended with his withdrawal from the school in Cannstatt.

A subsequent apprenticeship in a bookshop in Esslingen terminated abruptly on October 30,1893, only four days after it had begun. Truant Hesse was located in Stuttgart by his father on November 2, was promptly taken for a mental examination to a Dr. Zeller of Winnenden, and then brought back to Calw on November 3. Here he spent the next six months gardening, assisting his father in the Calw Publishing House, and reading avidly in his grandfather’s library. In early June 1894, after his father had denied him permission to leave home to independently prepare himself for a literary career, Hesse became an apprentice machinist in the Perrot tower-clock factory in Calw. This was a trade that would afford him a livelihood, that he could some day ply abroad, in the United States, Russia, or Brazil, and that would permit him ample time for his literary interests. Fifteen months of grimy manual labor were enough to disabuse the young dreamer of his romantic notions. He left Perrot’s in the middle of September, and on October 17, 1895, he began a more appropriate apprenticeship in the Heckenhauer bookshop in Tübingen. The storm had finally subsided.

1 Adele Gundert, Marie Hesse (1934), p. 208.

2 Adele Gundert, Marie Hesse (1934), p. 231.

3 Together with his parents, Hesse had become a citizen of Basel in 1882. He became a subject of Württemberg in November or December of 1890.

4 Kindheit und Jugend vor Neunzehnhundert: Hermann Hesse in Briefen und Lebenszeugnissen 1887-1895 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1966), pp. 250, 251, 252, 261-266.

LITERARY BEGINNINGS

According to his mother’s letters and diaries, Hesse began to compose ditties before he was able to wield a pencil.1 Of the many poems he wrote before his determined decision, at the age of thirteen, to become a poet or nothing at all, only three have survived the years: a simple quatrain, probably written in March 1882; a three-sentence prose poem, dated November 17, 1884; and an untitled poem of May and June 1886.2 Of the considerably more poetry Hesse wrote after his decision and before his departure for Tübingen in the autumn of 1895, at least ninety-eight poems have been preserved; none of these has ever been published and all are now housed in the SchillerNationalmuseum in Marbach am Neckar.3

In late April or early May 1892, just before his withdrawal from Maulbronn, Hesse sent two untitled poems (Ich kannte ein Blümlein am frischen Quell and "O Vöglein, kannst du mir sagen") to Quellwasser (Leipzig) and another, recalling his punishment following his truancy and with the appropriate title, Der Karzer, to Fliegende Blatter (Munich). These were his first attempts to appear in print. The three poems were promptly returned with polite rejection slips.4

For Christmas 1950, Hesse received a little story from a ten-year- old grandson. It reminded him of a tale that he had written for his sister Manilla in November 1887, when he, too, was only ten years old. After a good deal of searching, he found the tale in question, and on January 6 Die beiden Brüder appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. This was one of Hesse’s earliest attempts, if not his first, at prose fiction. Spielmannsfahrt zum Rhein, the oldest of his extant unpublished tales, was probably written in the spring or summer of 1893, while he was still in Cannstatt.5 On March 4, 1895, Hesse mentioned to Theodor Rümelin that a Novelle he was writing was progressing very favorably. In May, he informed his mentor, Dr. E. Kapff, of plans for a novel. A remark to Rümelin in a letter of July 1 implies that the Novelle, now titled Barthy, was finished.6 The novel, however, probably remained a plan. In any case, neither work is extant, and Die beiden Brüder and Spielmannsfahrt zum Rhein remain our only samples of Hesse’s earliest prose fiction.

1 E.g.: Hermann writes poetry all day long, often quite good, often pelimeli. He is very quick at putting together whatever rhymes (in a letter of May 15, 1882). Adele Gundert, Marie Hesse (1934), pp. 219-220.

2 The first of these poems (Das Vöglein im Wald) was published in Adele Gundert, Marie Hesse (1934), p. 217. Autographs of the other two poems (Das wilde Meer; Dürfen wir denn an den Ort) are in the Hesse-Nachlass, Marbach am Neckar.

3 These poems are listed in Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977). See Poetry V-D- III.

4 Autographs of the three poems are in the Hesse-Nachlass, Marbach a.N.

5 This thirty-three-page autograph is the prose portion of Erfrorener Frühling II. Dez. 1893. In the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach a.N.

6 Kindheit und Jugend vor Neunzehnhundert (1966), pp. 439, 466, 499.

2

Apprentice

Bookdealer

TÜBINGEN 1895-1899

A QUIET RETREAT

Hesse’s four years at the Heckenhauer bookshop in Tübingen were relatively tranquil. Though he had his circle of student friends and upon occasion was not averse to carousing with them, he remained a lonely outsider, applying himself diligently to his job, and otherwise preoccupied with his writing and self-education. During his preceding two years in Calw he had steeped himself in German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and had become well acquainted with many of the major English, French, Scandinavian, and Russian authors of the same period. In Tubingen, he continued his prodigious reading but narrowed its scope drastically. For a time he devoted himself almost exclusively to Goethe. Then he fell under the spell of the German romantics and of Novalis in particular. As late as May 1895, Hesse had discounted romanticism in no uncertain terms: Moreover one cannot long feel comfortable in the confined garden of the romantics, in this tinsel conjured forth from mold, this haze of incense.¹ Now, under the influence of this same romanticism and of late nineteenth-century aestheticism, he created his own confining incense-shrouded garden, a beauty-worshipping realm of the imagination, a retreat from and a substitute for the crass

1 Kindheit und Jugend vor Neunzehnhundert (1966), p. 472.

Apprentice Bookdealer I 17 outer world in which he had become an unappreciated misfit. Hesse was tolerably content. He had found a niche and a way of life.

ROMANTISCHE LIEDER AND EINE STUNDE HINTER MITTERNACHT: REFUGE IN FANTASY

In Tübingen, Hesse proved to himself that he was indeed a writer. No longer in the shadow of home or school, he was finally able to pursue his literary interests more or less as he pleased. In late 1895, he wrote Meine Kindheit, eventually to become part of Hinterlassene Schriften und Gedichte von Hermann Lauscher (1901).1 In 1896 or 1897, he submitted an essay to Christoph Schrempf, editor of the periodical, Die Wahrheit (Stuttgart). His exercise in ornate style was returned with copious corrections and red slashes. A presumptuous aspirant had looked forward to his first prose publication; a duly chastened novice sheepishly destroyed the work soon after its rejection.2

Hesse’s early poetry found more ready reception than his early prose. Madonna, the first of his poems published, appeared in Das deutsche Dichterheim (Vienna) on March 1, 1896; seven others were published by the same periodical during the next two and a half years.3 Romantische Lieder was submitted to a publisher in the autumn of 1898 and appeared at the beginning of 1899;4 this was Hesse’s first collection of poems to be published5 and also his first published book. All but two of the fifty-six poems of Romantische Lieder were written from February 1897 to June 1898. Some sixty-six other poems written in Tübingen are still extant and have yet to be published.6

Most of this early poetry is heavy with pathos. Its atmosphere is scented, its sounds muted, its colors brilliant, and it abounds with exclamation marks and restive dashes. A lonely and aristocratic outsider indulges in melodramatic fantasies and melodic lament. He is morbidly preoccupied with love and death, strikes a suffering pose, and is fascinated by a romantic retreat of stormy seas and battlefields, temples and castles, and solitary kings and pale queens. Hesse could hardly have given his Romantische Lieder a more appropriate title.

In letters of November and December 1890, Hesse informed his parents enthusiastically and proudly of Ein Weihnachtsabend. Trauerspiel in l Aufzug, that he had just written.7 By May 1895, he was prepared to concede to Dr. E. Kapff: I do not feel that I have any talent for drama, but I hope some day to become a respectable writer of prose. …8 By March 1899 he had begun to doubt the merits of the theater: "As art it is second class, and furthermore its enormous apparatus that lays one’s impressions open to hundreds of contingencies is against my taste."9 This sentiment notwithstanding, Hesse was preoccupied with drama intermittently from 1900 to 1919. The resultant anaemic, romantic verse playlets, flimsy derivative librettos, and a one-act fragment in prose10 —only two of these abortive efforts have been published—confirm what he himself had suspected in 1895. Drama was definitely not Hesse’s medium, and the theater, but for opera, never held any real appeal for him.

Plauderabende, a fifty-page autograph medley of literary essays, vignettes, diary notes, and poems, was dedicated to his mother upon the occasion of her birthday, on October 18,1897. Zum 14. Juni 1898, a similar fifty-page autograph medley of prose and poetry, was assembled for his father’s birthday.11 Neither of these collections was intended for publication. On April 14,1899, Hesse informed his parents that he was writing a book-length study of German romanticism and that it was progressing very slowly.12 A third potpourri, Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht, comprising reveries, monologues, and vignettes written from 1897 to 1899 and sent to a publisher in February 1899, appeared in June; it was Hesse’s first prose publication.13

In this maiden venture a languid narrator depicts his exotic island and mysterious forest retreats, his lonely castles, enchanting parks, and ornate chambers. He communes with his muse, consorts with ethereal maidens, and burns his incense on the altar of beauty. Sporadic renewed contact with the profane world is followed by despair and regret, and in turn, by an urgent reaffirmation of aestheticism. All is removed in time and space, a dream world pervaded by melancholy and enveloped in a perfumed atmosphere. Colors are rich, sounds soft, and choice language flows facile. This was the ideal world that Hesse espoused, and the aestheticism that he cultivated while in Tübingen.

Hesse had written his mother on February 20, 1899, to say that a publisher was interested in Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht. He had added disparagingly: However the manuscript does not appear to me to have any business possibilities; it is something for very few readers, and will undoubtedly never have much of a market.14 Hesse proved right. Of the 600 copies printed only 53 were sold the first year. R. M. Rilke’s sympathetic review was the only heartening public response: In its best spots it is something necessary and very personal. His awe is honest and deep, his love grand and its feelings are pious. The work stands at the edge of art.15 The public’s indifference piqued Hesse. His mother’s outspoken moral aversion hurt him deeply and infuriated him.16 But neither was able to discourage or to dissuade him. He only became more determined than ever to become a writer.

1 Unless otherwise indicated, parenthetical dates of collected works are those of first publication, and parenthetical dates of individual works are those of completion.

2 Hesse recalls this incident in Nachruf auf Christoph Schrempf (1944), Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1957), Vol. 4, pp. 769-770.

3 See Poetry V-D: 753, 708, 4,165, 784, 38, 39.

4 (Dresden: E. Pierson, 1899), 44 pp.

5 At least eight autograph collections of poetry (ranging from three to thirty-nine poems) predate Roman tische Lieder (see Poetry V-C: la-ih).

6 See Poetry V-D-III.

7 Kindheit und Jugend vor Neunzehnhundert (1966), pp. 73-74.

8 Kindheit und Jugend vor Neunzehnhundert (1966), p. 466. Dr. Ernst Kapff (1864—1944) was the only instructor at the school in Cannstatt to impress Hesse favorably.

9 From an unpublished letter (March 8, 1899) to his parents. In the HesseNachlass, Marbach a.N.

10 See Manuscripts X: 429.

11 Both of these autographs are in the Hesse-Nachlass, Marbach a.N. (see Manuscripts X: 2, 4).

12 Unpublished letter in the Hesse-Nachlass, Marbach a.N. Deutsche Romantik probably remained a fragment. Novalis (Allgemeine Schweizer Zeitung, 5 [1900], 12), Romantisch (Allgemeine Schweizer Zeitung, 5 [1900], 96), Romantik und Neuromantik (Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung [Essen], December 14, 1902, No. 991), and Neuromantik (written in November 1899, published in Eugen Diederichs. Selbstzeugnisse und Briefe von Zeitgenossen [Düsseldorf, Köln: Diederichs, 1967], pp. 107-109) were either remnants or offshoots of this intended book.

13 (Leipzig: E. Diederichs, 1899), 84 pp.

14 Unpublished letter in the Hesse-Nachlass, Marbach a.N.

15 Der Bote für deutsche Literatur (Leipzig), 2 (September 1899), pp. 388-389.

16 Hesse’s parents, his father in particular, were severely moralistic. Both looked askance at belles-lettres; literature was too much of this world. Appalled by Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht, Marie Hesse made an immediate and fervent appeal to her son: Shun your fever muse as you would a snake; she it is who crept into paradise and who to-day would still like to poison thoroughly every paradise of love and of poetry. … O my child flee from her, hate her, she is impure and has no claim to you, for you belong to God. … Pray for grand thoughts and a pure heart. … Remain chaste!… There is a world of falsehood where the base, the animalistic, the impure is considered beautiful. … My dear child, God help you and bless you and save you from this! (unpublished letter, June 15,1899, in the Hesse-Nachlass, Marbach a.N.). Hesse never forgot

KIRCHHEIM UNTER TECK

Hesse began his apprenticeship at Heckenhauer’s in Tübingen on October 17,1895. He became an assistant in the shop on October 2, 1898, and continued in that capacity until July 31,1899. Before leaving

for Basel in September to assume a similar position in the R. Reich bookshop, he spent ten memorable days in little Kirchheim unter Teck. Here he rejoined his close friend and fellow budding writer, Ludwig Finckh, and the remaining members of the petit cenacle of students that he had joined in Tübingen.1 2 The setting was idyllic, the weather was fine, and all were in holiday spirits. Hesse had hardly settled in the Inn at the Sign of the Crown before he and his company of young romantics, all in love with love, began to pay court to the innkeeper’s two charming nieces. Hesse quickly fell under the spell of Julie Hellmann, the younger of the two nieces. He wooed her chivalrously with flowers and verse, won her heart but not her hand, and then left for Calw and Basel. Hesse immediately began an ardent correspondence with her, but he never returned to Kirchheim. And although the two continued to correspond intermittently until the late 1950s,3 they did not meet again, and for the last time, until 1928 when Hesse chanced to give a reading in Heilbronn. Their brief encounter in Kirchheim did, however, have its lasting literary consequences. It was this idyllic interlude that found poetic expression in Hesse’s fantasia, Lulu (1900) of Hermann Lauscher, and that Ludwig Finckh recalled fifty years later in his Verzauberung.4

1 this painful letter, and he was never quite able to forgive his parents for their perpetual prudish moralizing (see unpublished letters to his sisters in the Hesse-Nachlass, Marbach a.N.: to Manilla, July 4,1920; to Adele, spring 1926, February 1934).

2 Otto Erich Faber, Carlo Hammelehle, Oskar Rupp, and Wilhelm Schöning.

3 Their unpublished correspondence is in the Schiller-Nationalmuseum. Marbach a.N.

4 (Ulm: Gerhard Hess, 1950), 136 pp.

3

A Retreat from

Aestheticism

BASEL 1899-1904

SOCIAL DEBUT AND LITERARY SUCCESS

Hesse spent almost five years in Basel. It was a busy and fruitful period. He began his job as an assistant bookseller at R. Reich’s bookshop on September 15, 1899. His profession was satisfying enough, but long hours in the shop and few holidays left him with neither enough time nor energy for his literary career, and no opportunity for travel. By the end of 1900 he was anxious for a respite. With enough savings to tide him over for some months, and assured of a new position in late summer, Hesse left Reich’s at the beginning of February 1901. He returned to Calw at the end of February, delighted that he was finally able to relax and to write as he pleased. Hesse wrote the first four of his many brief recollections of childhood in Calw during these weeks immediately preceding his first trip to Italy.¹

Hesse left for Milan from Stuttgart on March 25, visited Genoa, Spezia, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Ravenna, Padua, and Venice, then returned to Calw on May 19, and to Basel later in the summer. His diary notes, rewritten soon after his return from Italy and published by the Basler Anzeiger that autumn, were the first of his many travel

1 Der Kavalier auf dem Eis, Der kleine Mohr, Hotte Hotte Putzpulver, and Der Sammetwedel (see Prose IV: 13a, 13b, 18b, 34).

A Retreat front Aestheticism I 23 reports (Reisebilder).1 On September 1, 1901, back from Basel following a brief August vacation in Vitznau, Hesse began to work for the antiquarian E. von Wattenwyl.

In Tübingen Hesse had lived in relative seclusion. In Basel he began to seek more human contact. He now made a determined effort to learn the art of living with and not apart from his fellow humans in order to escape the ever more painful loneliness of prolonged uninvolvement. Soon after his arrival he became a frequent guest of some of Basel’s culturally prominent families. He was a regular visitor in the home of Dr. Rudolf Wackernagel, state archivist and historian, where he became acquainted with a number of historians, philosophers, theologians, and architects.2 He was also a welcome visitor in the home of the philologist Dr. Jakob Wackernagel, enjoyed a standing invitation to Pastor La Roche’s musical evenings, and appreciated the hospitality of the mathematically prominent Bernoulli family.

Nor was it long before Hesse again became romantically involved. In the spring of 1900, while still writing Lulu (February to June), his paean to Julie Hellmann, he fell in love with Elisabeth La Roche, the daughter of Pastor La Roche and the Elisabeth of his love