HERMANN HESSE

Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, poet, and critic who enjoyed a cultlike readership among young people during the 1960s, was born in the quiet Black Forest town of Calw, Germany, on July 2, 1877. He was the son and grandson of Protestant clergymen who had served as missionaries in India. Hesse attended the parochial mission school where his father taught and later the Latin school in Göppingen. Having vowed “to be a poet or nothing at all,” the headstrong youth fled the seminary in Maulbronn at the age of fourteen. Thereafter Hesse rebelled against all attempts at formal schooling. Instead he pursued a rigorous program of self-study that focused on literature, philosophy, and history and eventually found employment at the Heckenhauer Bookshop in the university town of Tübingen.

In 1899 Hesse published Romantische Lieder (Romantic Songs), his first book of poetry, and Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (An Hour After Midnight), a series of prose poems hailed by Rainer Maria Rilke as standing “on the periphery of art.” Hesse spent the next several years working as a clerk at bookstores in cosmopolitan Basel, where he studied art history and the writings of the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt.

Hesse brought out his first novel, Peter Camenzind, in 1904. Translated into English in 1969, this story of a failed writer who embarks on a journey to discover the world became the prototype for much of his fiction. Its success enabled him to marry and start a family in the idyllic German village of Gaienhofen. His second novel, Unterm Rad (1906; translated as Beneath the Wheel m 1968), proved equally popular. The tale of a gifted adolescent crushed by the brutal expectations of his father and teachers, it was proclaimed a “Black Forest Catcher in the Rye” by The National Observer. Hesse next pondered the sources of creativity in Gertrud (1910; translated as Gertrude in 1955), a novel of self-appraisal that strongly resembles early works by Thomas Mann. Chronic wanderlust coupled with growing discontent over his bucolic Rousseau-like existence took him on a formative trip to the East Indies in 1911. Hesse’s troubled domestic life provided the basis for Rosshalde (1914; translated as Rosshalde 1970), the classic tale of a man torn between obligations to his family and the longing for a spiritual fulfillment that exists outside the confines of conventional society. The Christian Science Monitor called it “a kind of disguised biography, an account of Hesse’s quite private turmoil on the eve of war.”

The outbreak of World War I brought a sharp change in Hesse’s fortunes. An outspoken pacifist, he volunteered for service at the German consulate in Bern and devoted himself to relief work for German internees and prisoners of war. “The protest against the war, against the raw, bloodthirsty stupidity of mankind, the protest against the ‘intellectuals,’ especially those who preached war, constituted for me a bitter necessity and duty,” Hesse later observed. Yet a series of articles on war and politics written at the time alienated the generally conservative and nationalistic public that had bought his books up until then.

During this same period Hesse endured two personal tragedies, the death of his father and the collapse of his marriage. In 1916 he suffered a complete nervous breakdown and entered a sanatorium near Lucerne to undergo psychoanalysis with a disciple of Carl Jung’s. Seeking isolation, Hesse settled by himself in Montagnola, a remote mountain village on the outskirts of Lugano in southeastern Switzerland, in the spring of 1919.

The publication of Demian that same year (it appeared in English in 1923) brought Hesse immediate acclaim throughout Europe. Based on his experience with Jungian analysis, this breakthrough novel launched a series of works chronicling the Weg nach Innen (inward journey) that he hoped would lead to self-knowledge. In the existential tradition of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Hesse portrays the turmoil of a docile young man who is forced to question traditional bourgeois beliefs regarding family, society, and faith. “The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian… is unforgettable,” recalled Thomas Mann. “With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst.” “The autobiographical undercurrent gives Demian an Existentialist intensity and a depth of understanding rare in contemporary fiction,” said the Saturday Review. “Hesse is not a traditional teller of tales but a novelist of ideas and a moralist of