Background

Hermann Hesse was born on June 2, 1877, in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. His father, Johannes Hesse, worked for the publishing house directed by his maternal grandfather, Hermann Gundert, a scholarly Orientalist. Both his parents, as well as his grandfather, had seen service as missionaries with the Basel Mission in the East Indies. The atmosphere in which Hesse grew up was therefore pious, but the household was nonetheless an educated one and relatively urbane.

Education

Hesse attended the Latin School in Goppingen and entered the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Maulbronn Abbey in 1891. He also attended the Gymnasium in Cannstatt, in 1892 and in 1893 he passed the One Year Examination, to complete his schooling.

In 1893 Hesse won a scholarship to the Protestant Theological Seminary at Maulbronn; but he soon rebelled against the intellectual and clerical discipline there and ran away. This experience of flight was evidently of decisive significance in his imaginative development, and it recurs in one form or another in almost all his major works.

Career

After a short period as a machine-shop apprentice, Hesse found employment in the book trade. He read widely in German and foreign literature and began to write lyric poetry, sketches, and stories. His first published works, Romantische Lieder (1899) and Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (1899), are mannered tributes to the neoromantic conventions of the day, pseudoexotic, melancholic, and tinged with irony.

The novel Peter Camenzind (1904) made Hesse's name. An attempt to overcome decadence by portraying the cure of a melancholic outsider by means of altruistic activity and a return to nature, Peter Camenzind presents an early, half-formed version of that life pattern found in almost all Hesse's novels.

It was followed in 1905 by Unterm Rad (Beneath the Wheel), a contribution to the then fashionable subgenre of "school novels." The book portrays the miseries and sad decline of a sensitive youth crushed by the intellectual demands and unfeeling attitudes encountered in school. In this novel Hesse divides his interest, as so often in his later work, between two characters, Hans Giebenrath who regresses and dies, and Hermann Heilner who breaks out and lives, albeit by eventually finding a compromise with the bourgeois world. Hesse himself had compromised by marrying and settling down in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance. He lived there until 1912, when he moved to Berne.

He published a number of short stories and novellas: Diesseits (1907), Nachbarn (1908), and Umwege (1912) are collections of tales of small-town and country life, after the manner of Gottfried Keller. Knulp, three whimsical sketches of the vagabond existence, dates from this period, as do the full-length novels Gertrude (1910) and Rosshalde (1913). All these works show Hesse as a careful and talented writer, with a keen psychologist's eye and a supple style, but they rather mute the serious conflicts incipiently suggested by his first two novels.

Hesse's journey to the Malayan archipelago in 1911 is, however, some indication of his inner restlessness. The interest in Oriental cultures which originated in his childhood now takes deeper root.

During World War I there occurred an extremely sharp break in Hesse's life and work. His third son, Martin, fell seriously ill, his wife began to show the first signs of mental disease, and his family life disintegrated. The war, in which he was directly involved only through his relief work for German prisoners of war, shocked him terribly; he denounced it at its outset and was in his turn denounced by the German press as a pacifist traitor. He never returned to live in Germany and became a Swiss citizen in 1922. In 1916 he underwent a course of Jungian analysis in Lucerne

The product of all these diverse traumatic experiences was the novel Demian, published in 1919. Demian reestablished Hesse in the forefront of German letters and perhaps rescued him from a creeping mediocrity in his creative work. It deals with the "awakening" of a youth, Emil Sinclair, under the influence of an older boy of mysterious presence and powers, Demian. Critics have shown that the primary key to the book is the structure of a typical Jungian analysis. But the novel contains gnostic as well as overtly psychoanalytic material and works out mythical and biblical motifs, such as that of the Prodigal Son. From this point onward in Hesse's work discrimination between the psychoanalytic and the religious elements in his symbolic motifs and patterns is extremely difficult.

Siddhartha (1922) is a hagiographic legend, but it is also a very personal confession which reworks the psychological material of earlier novels in a fresh garb; and the mystical conclusion of Siddhartha proves on examination to be as much Christian as Buddhist or Hindu.

Between 1916 and 1925 Hesse composed several of his most distinguished novellas, notably Iris (1918), Klein and Wagner (1920), Klingsors letzter Sommer (1920; Klingsor's Last Summer), and Piktors Verwandlungen (1925; Pictor's Transformations).

In 1919 he had taken up residence in Montagnola near Lugano, entirely alone and impoverished, resolved to live now only for his literary work. Iris is a beautifully wrought allegory on the search for selfhood, Klein und Wagner a study of sexual conflict, loss of identity, and rediscovery of self, Klingsor's Last Summer a series of passionately colored sketches of the life of a declining artist, and Pictor's Transformations an exotic fairy tale designed to impart a vision of the ultimate androgynous unity and of eternal change and flow.

This insight into a divine reality and unity which may be glimpsed for a moment when the usual order of the mind is momentarily shaken or dissolved, in some trauma (such as Klein's suicide) or in sexual or artistic experience, is the positive vision which Hesse seeks increasingly to convey. Thus Der Steppenwolf (1927) should not be mistaken, as it often is, for a pessimistic and desperate work; on the contrary, this account of a psychopathic outcast, close to suicide, who finds remission and self-insight through friendship with a prostitute, dancing, and drugs is a reassertion of the omnipresence of the higher reality for those sensitive to it. The "golden thread" of this reality is often discernible, especially in the music of Mozart or, indeed, the life and art of any of the "Immortals" - Goethe, Leonardo, Rembrandt, among others. Steppenwolf is formally the most consummate of all Hesse's books, an extremely intricate experimental novel. It reflects something of its author's experiences in the 1920s, after the failure of his second marriage.

In 1930 Hesse published Narziss und Goldmund, a long picaresque work in a medieval setting, which is his most overt treatment of the relentless struggle between the mind and the senses. By no means his best novel, Narziss und Goldmund has been one of his most popular; sometimes trite, it has, however, an undercurrent of pain, failure, and bitterness which is often overlooked.

In 1932 appeared Die Morgenlandfahrt (The Journey to the East), an ironic allegory on the subject of the inner pilgrimage, full of secret allusion and whimsical onomastic games; extremely elusive, The Journey to the East subsumes with anecdotal brevity the spiritual experience of several decades.

"The Glass Bead Game" Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; The Glass Bead Game), Hesse's longest and perhaps his most famous novel, took 11 years to write. It is concerned with a futuristic society in which a scholars' utopia, Castalia, exists as a separate province with the task of preserving the austere ideals of the Spirit and the unsullied service of Truth, as well as training teachers to work in the schools of the outside world. The protagonist, Joseph Knecht, is followed through his years of training until he is eventually elected Master of the Glass Bead Game, a game "with all the contents and all the values of our culture," which is Castalia's supreme cult. Through the game an element of art, and of numinous experience, infiltrates a sphere which has become too much the province of the intellect. The Glass Bead Game depicts Knecht's gradual insight into the decadence which has overtaken Castalia and his apostasy as he resolves to leave for the outside world and to become a simple teacher. The ambivalence of this delicately written and elaborate novel lies in the question whether Knecht's act is a true breakthrough to ethical action or the expression of an unrepentant individualism, or both. Ethical and esthetical, saintly and artistic elements blend and separate deceptively again and again in this novel as throughout Hesse's work.

Hermann Hesse's poetry has been published in several collections, for example, Gesammelte Gedichte (1942), and has been widely anthologized. There is also the remarkable collection of "Steppenwolf" poems, Krisis (1928). In his verse he is generally more derivative and less searching than in his prose works.

Having married for the third time in 1931, he continued to live in Montagnola, devoting a good deal of his time to a voluminous correspondence, particularly with young people interested in his work and philosophy of life.

Achievements

• Hesse's novel "Steppenwolf" became an international success, and the novel "Siddhartha" took the author's fame to great heights and became an international hit, as well. It was translated into many languages and it is one of the most popular Western novels set in India.
  
  The novel Demian, published pseudonymously in 1919, won the Fontane Prize for first novels (Hesse returned the prize and later admitted his authorship).
  
  In 1946, he received Nobel Prize in Literature after he published his last major novel "The Glass Bead Game."
  
  Hesse is still one of the best-selling German writers throughout the world.

Works

More photos

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  • Poems

    (Few American readers seem to be aware that Hermann Hesse,...)

  • If the War Goes On

    (One of the most astonishing aspects of Hesse's career is ...)

    1949
  • Steppenwolf

    (With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, ...)

    1927
  • The Seasons of the Soul

    (These vivid, probing short works reflect deeply on the ch...)

  • The Journey to the East

    (The Journey to the East is Hesse's tale of inner pilgrima...)

    1932
  • Fairy Tales

    (Hermann Hesse's Fairy Tales (Märchen) is a collection of ...)

    1919
  • Knulp: Three Tales from the Life of Knulp

    (With profound understanding and sympathy, but also with s...)

    1915
  • Klingsor's Last Summer

    (Klingsor's Last Summer tells the story of a famous painte...)

    1919
  • Peter Camenzind

    (Peter Camenzind, a young man from a Swiss mountain villag...)

    1904
  • Siddhartha

    (In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family ...)

    1922
  • In the old Sun

    (One of Herman Hesse's earliest novels, In the Old Sun (In...)

    1914
  • Demian: The Story of a Youth

    (The novel refers to the idea of Gnosticism, particularly ...)

    1919
  • The Glass Bead Game

    (The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexi...)

    1943
  • Narcissus and Goldmund

    (Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of a passionate yet u...)

    1930
  • The Prodigy

    (The Prodigy, originally dating from 1905, is Hermann Hess...)

    1905
  • Gertrude

    (In this novel about music, love, and creativity, Hermann ...)

    1910
  • Beneath the Wheel

    (Hans Giebernath lives among the dull and respectable town...)

    1906

Religion

In the course of his lifelong investigation of the phenomenon of religion, Hesse developed the notion of a synthesis between the religions on the basis of a universal mysticism. According to his words, "Christianity, one not preached but lived, was the strongest of the powers that shaped and moulded me." Or "You should let yourself be carried away, like the clouds in the sky. You shouldn’t resist. God exists in your destiny just as much as he does in these mountains and in that lake. It is very difficult to understand this, because man is moving further and further away from Nature, and also from himself."

Moreover, he said that, "The road to piety may be a different one for everyone. For me, it led through many blunders and great suffering, through a great deal of self-torment, through tremendous foolishness, jungles full of foolishness. I was a liberal spirit and knew that sanctimonious piety was an illness of the soul. I was an ascetic and drove nails into my flesh. I didn't know that being religious meant health and cheerfulness."

Politics

Hesse was an advocate of peace and a writer committed to humanity and humanitarianism. At the beginning of the First World War, Hesse was one of the few German intellectuals not to be swept up by the general enthusiasm for the war. Between 1914 and 1918, he published two dozen essays criticizing the war in German-language newspapers. From 1915 on, he helped to establish a centre for the welfare of prisoners of war in Berne. He was an early critic of National Socialism. Many political émigrés from the Third Reich, among them Thomas Mann, were given political sanctuary by Hesse, and he also gave financial assistance to many of those in need.

Views

Hesse was interested in psychoanalysis, the influence of which appears in Demian, as well as in Jungian concepts of introversion and extraversion, the collective unconscious, idealism, and symbols. Hesse also came to be preoccupied with what he saw as the duality of human nature.

The peculiar features of Herman Hesse’s style are: blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy; reality as a function of metaphysical cause and effect; the oneness of the protagonist; the dissonance between the protagonist and society; the duality of human nature.

Quotations: "If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."

"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."

"Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it."

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."

"I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me."

"We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being."

"Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go."

"If I know what love is, it is because of you."

"Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity."

"We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement."

"It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone."

"I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference."

"To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do."

"That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony."

Personality

Hermann Hesse is seen as being the "author of crisis," as an author who, in his writings, subjected himself to the torment of self-analysis, constantly searching for his own, true identity. Twice in the course of his life, Hesse experienced a dramatic escalation of his mental and psychological state.

Hesse is a source of great fascination for each new generation, who takes up his books as an instruction for the examining of their own identity. His books help to analyze the eternal question of the meaning of life.

Connections

In 1904 Hesse got married to Maria Bernoulli and the couple had three sons. In 1924, he married singer Ruth Wenger, but the marriage was quite unstable and they soon got separated. He married historian Ninon Dolbin in 1927.

Father:

Johannes Hesse

Mother:

Marie Gundert

ex-wife:

Maria Bernoulli

Maria Bernoulli was nine years senior than Hesse. She was a freelance photographer - the first woman, incidentally, to have done so in Switzerland - with her own studio in the old quarter of the town. She was also a talented musician.

ex-wife:

Ruth Wenger

Claudia Ruth Wenger (31 October 1897 in Basel - 30 May 1994 in Weimar)

Wife:

Ninon Auslander

Ninon Hesse (née Ausländer, 18 September 1895 in Czernowitz - 22 September 1966 in Montagnola) was an art historian.

Son:

Martin Hesse

(26 July 1911 in Gaienhofen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany - 14 October 1968 in Bern, Switzerland)

Son:

Heiner Hesse

died on 7 April 2003

Son:

Bruno Hesse

9 December 1905 in Gaienhofen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany - 20 July 1999 in Ochlenberg, Switzerland)

Grandfather:

Hermann Gundert

Hermann Gundert was a scholarly Orientalist.

Friend:

Carl Jung

References

• Hermann Hesse and his critics
  1958
• Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art
• Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis Explores Hesse's life to discover what led to his absorption in certain themes and traces the author's impassioned quest for meaning in a fragmented era filled with crises that posed philosophical contradictions for the artist
  1997
• Hermann Hesse: A Biography
  2012
• C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse - A Record of Two Friendships Miguel Serrano, a Chilean diplomat and writer who has travelled widely in India studying Yoga, had a close friendship with Jung and Hesse at the end of their lives. This book is the outcome of his meetings and correspondence with them.
  2012