Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in Calw, a small town on the Nagold river at the edge of the Black Forest in the German kingdom of Württemberg ^[1]. His family lived and breathed Protestant missionary work. His father, Johannes Hesse, was a Baltic German who had served as a missionary in India before poor health forced his return to Europe, and his mother, Marie Gundert, had been born in India to the missionary and scholar Hermann Gundert, whose Malayalam dictionary remains a landmark of nineteenth century linguistics ^[2]. The Gundert house in Calw held a large library and a steady traffic of visitors from Asia, so the boy grew up surrounded by both Swabian Pietism and artifacts of Indian culture, a combination that shaped his imagination for the rest of his life ^[1].

Any biography of Hermann Hesse has to reckon with the crisis of his adolescence. In 1891 he entered the Protestant seminary at Maulbronn, a former Cistercian monastery, after passing the demanding Württemberg state examination. Within months he ran away, later writing to his parents that he wanted to be a poet or nothing at all ^[2]. There followed a turbulent period of expulsions, a suicide attempt in 1892, and a stay at an institution in Stetten for troubled youth, experiences he would transform decades later into the novel Beneath the Wheel ^[1]. Formal schooling ended for good in 1893.

Instead of a university, Hesse got a workbench. He spent time as an apprentice in a Calw tower clock factory, filing gears, before beginning a bookseller's apprenticeship in Tübingen in 1895 ^[2]. The bookshop suited him. He read voraciously in the evenings, above all Goethe, the German Romantics, and Nietzsche, and began publishing poems and small prose pieces at his own expense, including the collection Romantic Songs in 1899 ^[1].

Who was Hermann Hesse before fame arrived? At the turn of the century he was a bookseller's assistant in Basel, writing at night and sending work to small journals. The breakthrough came in 1904 with Peter Camenzind, a lyrical novel about a Swiss village boy who tries the literary life of the cities and returns home disillusioned ^[1]. Published by Samuel Fischer in Berlin, the book found a wide audience among readers weary of industrial modernity, and its success allowed Hesse to live entirely from his pen at the age of twenty-seven ^[3].

That same year he married Maria Bernoulli, a photographer from the famous Basel family of mathematicians, and the couple settled in the fishing village of Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, where three sons were born ^[2]. Hesse produced steadily: Beneath the Wheel in 1906 drew on his Maulbronn misery to indict a school system that crushed sensitive children, while Gertrude (1910) and a stream of stories, poems, and reviews kept his name before the public ^[1]. He also co-edited the liberal journal März, which positioned itself against the authoritarian style of Kaiser Wilhelm II ^[3].

In 1911 Hesse traveled to Ceylon, Malaya, and Sumatra, a journey undertaken partly to escape a strained marriage and partly to see the Asia of his family's stories. The trip disappointed him in some ways (he never reached the Indian mainland), yet it fed directly into his later writing about the East ^[2]. After returning, the family moved to Bern in 1912, and Hesse never again made his home in Germany ^[1].

The First World War split Hesse's life in two. Living in Switzerland, he volunteered for the German consular service and spent the war years organizing reading material for German prisoners of war, editing a newspaper and a series of small books for the camps ^[3]. In November 1914 he published an essay in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, titled after Beethoven's setting of Schiller with the plea 'O Friends, Not These Tones', urging intellectuals on all sides to reject nationalist hatred. German newspapers denounced him as a traitor, old friends broke with him, and hate mail followed ^[1].

Personal catastrophe piled onto public attack. His father died in 1916, his youngest son Martin fell seriously ill, and his wife Maria descended into psychosis that required institutional care ^[2]. Hesse himself broke down and entered psychotherapy with Josef Bernhard Lang, a student of Carl Jung, undergoing dozens of sessions at a sanatorium near Lucerne. The encounter with Jungian analysis changed his writing permanently ^[4]. Demian, written in a few weeks and published in 1919 under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair, traced a young man's discovery of an inner world beyond conventional morality. The novel electrified a generation of German veterans, and Thomas Mann later compared its impact to that of Goethe's Werther ^[3].

In 1919 Hesse left his family and moved alone to Montagnola, a village above Lake Lugano in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, renting rooms in the Casa Camuzzi ^[1]. There he also began to paint seriously, producing hundreds of small watercolors of the Ticino hills; painting became both a source of income and a daily discipline he maintained into old age ^[5].

The Montagnola decades produced the books on which Hermann Hesse's achievements chiefly rest. Siddhartha, published in 1922, followed a Brahmin's son in the India of the Buddha through asceticism, sensuality, and commerce to a hard-won peace beside a river. Written in a spare, almost liturgical prose, it distilled Hesse's lifelong engagement with Indian and Chinese thought ^[4]. An English translation appeared in 1951 and eventually sold millions of copies in the United States alone ^[3].

Steppenwolf (1927) struck a completely different note. Its protagonist, Harry Haller, a middle-aged intellectual who feels himself half man and half wolf, wanders through jazz clubs, drugs, and a hallucinatory Magic Theater in a Weimar-era city. The novel's fierce attack on bourgeois complacency and its portrait of a personality splintered into many selves drew heavily on Hesse's own second crisis of the mid-1920s ^[1]. Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), set in a medieval monastery, staged the argument between the ascetic thinker and the wandering artist that ran through all his work ^[2].

His final novel was the largest. The Glass Bead Game, begun in 1931 and published in Switzerland in 1943 after Nazi authorities blocked publication in Germany, imagined a future scholarly province called Castalia whose elite play an austere game synthesizing all arts and sciences ^[3]. Its hero, Joseph Knecht, rises to the game's highest office and then resigns to serve life directly. Three years after it appeared, Hesse received the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature, cited by the Swedish Academy for inspired writings that exemplify classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style ^[6]. The Goethe Prize of Frankfurt came the same year, and the German book trade's Peace Prize followed in 1955 ^[1].

Hesse married three times. His first marriage, to Maria Bernoulli, produced sons Bruno, Heiner, and Martin, but collapsed under her mental illness and his own restlessness; they divorced in 1923 ^[2]. A brief second marriage to the much younger singer Ruth Wenger lasted formally from 1924 to 1927 but barely functioned in practice ^[1]. In 1931 he married Ninon Dolbin, born Ninon Ausländer, an art historian from Czernowitz who had first written to him as a fourteen-year-old admirer. The marriage endured until his death, and Ninon managed much of his enormous correspondence and edited volumes of his work ^[2].

Also in 1931, the Zurich patron Hans C. Bodmer built a house above Montagnola to Hesse's wishes and granted him lifelong use of it. In the Casa Hesse (often called the Casa Rossa) the writer settled into a routine of writing, gardening, and painting, tending vines and burning autumn leaves in rituals he described in essays ^[5]. He suffered throughout adulthood from severe eye pain, sciatica, headaches, and recurring depression, and took regular cures at Baden. He guarded his solitude with a famous sign at his gate asking visitors to stay away ^[1].

Hesse became a Swiss citizen in 1923, having held Swiss citizenship once before as a child when his father acquired Basel citizenship in the 1880s ^[2]. During the Nazi years he stayed publicly quiet but acted privately, helping refugees including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht on their ways into exile and reviewing books by Jewish and persecuted authors for a Swedish newspaper until attacks from both German and exile press made his position impossible ^[3]. Nazi Germany gradually starved his books of paper and finally banned new printings.

After The Glass Bead Game, Hesse wrote no further novels. He considered the book his farewell statement and devoted his last two decades to poems, essays, memoir sketches, and above all letters ^[1]. The Nobel Prize brought a flood of mail from a shattered Germany, much of it from young people asking how to live, and he answered thousands of correspondents personally; his collected letters run to many volumes ^[2].

Honors accumulated even as new fiction ceased. Along with the Goethe Prize and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, he received the Wilhelm Raabe Prize in 1950 and the pour le mérite order for arts and sciences in 1954 ^[1]. He used his position to encourage younger writers, notably supporting Peter Suhrkamp, who founded the publishing house that still issues Hesse's works ^[3].

Hesse remained in Montagnola to the end, painting watercolors and writing poems, the last of them completed the night before he died. He died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 9, 1962, at the age of eighty-five, and was buried in the cemetery of San Abbondio in nearby Gentilino, where Ninon was later buried beside him ^[1].

Among the striking Hermann Hesse facts is the shape of his posthumous fame. At his death he was widely seen in Germany as a fading classic, yet within a few years American college students adopted Siddhartha, Demian, and Steppenwolf as guidebooks for the counterculture. Timothy Leary praised him, a rock band named itself Steppenwolf, and Hesse became for a time the most read European author in the United States ^[3]. Worldwide sales of his books are estimated well above 100 million copies, with especially devoted readerships in Japan and Korea ^[7].

Critics have never fully agreed about him. Some dismiss the novels as adolescent self-help in literary dress; others, following Thomas Mann and the Nobel committee, place him in the line of German inwardness running from the Romantics through Goethe ^[6]. What is not disputed is his influence on how twentieth century readers thought about psychoanalysis, Eastern religion, pacifism, and the search for an authentic self. His insistence, repeated across fifty years of letters, that each person must find an individual path rather than obey collective slogans reads as the connecting thread of everything he wrote ^[2].

Calw preserves his birthplace and operates a Hesse museum on its market square, Montagnola maintains the Fondazione Hermann Hesse in a wing of the Casa Camuzzi, and the German Literature Archive in Marbach holds major parts of his papers ^[5]. The International Hermann Hesse Society, founded in 2002, and the biennial Calw Hesse Prize keep scholarly and public attention on a writer who turned his own crises into some of the most widely shared books of his century ^[1].