A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: German poet and novelist, who has explored in his work the duality of spirit and nature, body versus mind and individual's spiritual search outside the restrictions of the society. Several of Hesse's novels depict the protagonist's journey into the inner self. A spiritual guide assists the hero in his quest for self-knowledge. His novels are lyrical and confessional. Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in the Black Forest town of Calw in the German state of Württemberg, to a family of Pietist missionaries and religious publishers. Johannes Hesse, his father, was born a Russian citizen in Weissenstein, Estonia. Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born in Talatscheri, India, as the daughter of the Pietist missionary and Indologist, Hermann Gundert. The Hesse family had lived in Calw since 1873, where they operated a missionary publishing house under the direction of Hesse's grandfather, Hermann Gundert. In 1880 the family moved to Basel, Switzerland, for six years, then returned to Calw. His parents expected him to follow the family tradition in theology. After successful attendance at the Latin School in Göppingen, Hesse began to attend the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Maulbronn in 1891. Here in March 1892, Hesse showed his rebellious character: he fled from the Seminary and was found in a field a day later. During this time, Hesse began a journey through various institutions and schools, and experienced intense conflicts with his parents. In May, after an attempt at suicide, he spent time at an institution in Bad Boll under the care of theologian and minister Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. Later he was placed in a mental institution in Stetten im Remstal, and then a boys' institution in Basel. At the end of 1892, he attended the Gymnasium in Cannstatt. In 1893, he passed the One Year Examination, which concluded his schooling. After this, he began a bookshop apprenticeship in Esslingen am Neckar, but after three days he left. Then in the early summer of 1894, he began a fourteen month mechanic apprenticeship at a clock tower factory in Calw. The monotony of soldering and filing work made him resolve to turn himself toward more spiritual activities. In October 1895, he was ready to begin wholeheartedly a new apprenticeship with a bookseller in Tübingen. This experience from his youth he returns to later in his novel, Beneath the Wheel . On October 17, 1895, Hesse began working in the bookshop Heckenhauer in Tübingen, which had a collection specializing in theology, philology, and law. Hesse's assignment there consisted of organizing, packing, and archiving the books. After the end of each twelve hour workday, Hesse pursued his own work further, and he spent his long, idle Sundays with books rather than friends. Hesse studied theological writings, and later Goethe, Lessing , Schiller , and several texts on Greek mythology . By 1898, Hesse had a respectable income that enabled his financial independence from his parents. In the fall, Hesse released his first small volume of poetry, Romantic Songs and in the summer of 1899, a collection of prose, entitled One Hour After Midnight. Both works were a business failure. In two years, only 54 of the 600 printed copies of Romantic Songs were sold, and One Hour After Midnight received only one printing and sold sluggishly. Beginning in the fall of 1899, Hesse worked in a distinguished antique book shop in Basel. There through familial contacts he stayed with the intellectual families of Basel. In this environment with rich stimuli for his pursuits, he further developed spiritually and artistically. At the same time, Basel offered the solitary Hesse many opportunities for withdrawal into a private life of artistic self-exploration through journeys and wanderings. In 1900, Hesse was exempted from compulsory military service due to an eye condition. This, along with nerve disorders and persistent headaches, affected him his entire life. In 1901, Hesse undertook to fulfill a grand dream and travelled for the first time to Italy. In the same year, Hesse changed jobs and began working at the antiquarium Wattenwyl in Basel. Hesse had more opportunities to release poems and small literary texts to journals. These publications now provided honorariums. Shortly the publisher Samuel Fischer became interested in Hesse, and with the novel Peter Camenzind , which appeared first as a pre-publication in 1903 and then as a regular printing by Fischer in 1904, came a breakthrough. In the Rousseauesque 'return to nature' story the protagonist leaves the big city to live like Saint Francis of Assisi . With the literary fame, Hesse married Maria Bernoulli in 1904, settled down with her in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, and began a family, eventually having three sons. In Gaienhofen, he wrote his second novel Beneath the Wheel, which was published in 1906. In the following time he composed primarily short stories and poems. His next novel, Gertrude, published in 1910, revealed a production crisis — he had to struggle through writing it-. Gaienhofen was also the place where Hesse's interest in Buddhism was resparked. After a letter to Kapff in 1895 entitled Nirwana, Hesse's Buddhist references were no longer alluded to in his works. This was rekindled, however, in 1904 when Arthur Schopenhauer and his philosophical ideas started receiving attention again, and Hesse discovered theosophy. Schopenhauer and theosophy are what renewed Hesse's interest in India. Although 1904 was many years before the publication of Hesse's Siddhartha (1922), this masterpiece was derived from these new influences. In the story, based on the early life of Gautama Buddha, a Brahman son rebels against his father's teaching and traditions. Eventually he finds the ultimate enlightenment. During this time, there also was increased dissonance between him and Maria, and in 1911, Hesse left alone for a long trip to Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Hesse's journey give some indication of his inner restlessness. The interest in Oriental cultures which originated in his childhood now takes deeper root. Any spiritual or religious inspiration that he was looking for eluded him, but the journey made a strong impression on his literary work. Following Hesse's return, the family moved to Bern in 1912, but the change of environment could not solve the marriage problems, as he himself confessed in his novel Rosshalde from 1914. In the novel Hesse explored the question of whether the artist should marry. The author's replay was negative and reflected the author's own difficulties. During these years his wife suffered from growing mental instability and his son was seriously ill. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Hesse registered himself as a volunteer with the German government, saying that he could not sit inactively by a warm fireplace while other young authors were dying on the front. He was found unfit for combat duty, but was assigned to service involving the care of war prisoners. On November 3, 1914, in the Neuen Züricher Zeitung, Hesse's essay O Friends, Not These Tones appeared, in which he appealed to German intellectuals not to fall for nationalism. What followed from this, Hesse later indicated, was a great turning point in his life: For the first time he found himself in the middle of a serious political conflict, attacked by the German press, the recipient of hate mail, and distanced from old friends. This public controversy was not yet resolved, when a deeper life crisis befell Hesse with the death of his father on March 8, 1916, the difficult sickness of his son Martin, and his wife's schizophrenia. He was forced to leave his military service and begin receiving psychotherapy. In 1916 he underwent a course of Jungian analysis in Lucerne. The product of all these diverse traumatic experiences was the novel Demian, published following the armistice in 1919 under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair. (Emil Sinclair was a friend of the German Romantic poet Novalis , who was an influence on Hesse). Demian won the Fontane Prize for first novels (Hesse returned the prize and later admitted his authorship). 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. Hesse later admitted that Demian was a story of "individuation" in the Jungian manner. The author also praised unreservedly Jung's study Psychological Types , but in 1921 he suddenly canceled his analysis with Jung and started to consider him merely one of Freud's most gifted pupils. 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. Demian was highly praised by Thomas Mann, who compared its importance to James Joyce's Ulysses and André Gide's The Counterfeiters. When Hesse returned to civilian life in 1919, his marriage was shattered. His wife had a severe outbreak of psychosis, but even after her recovery, Hesse saw no possible future with her. Their home in Bern was divided, and Hesse resettled alone in the middle of April in Ticino, where he occupied a small farm house near Minusio bei Locarno, and later lived from April 25 until May 11 in Sorengo. On May 11, he moved to the town Montagnola and rented four small rooms in a strange castle-like building, the 'Casa Camuzzi'. Here he explored his writing projects further; he began to paint, an activity which is reflected in his next major story Klingsor's Last Summer, published in 1920. In 1922, Hesse's novel Siddhartha appeared, which showed the love for Indian culture and Buddhist philosophy, which had already developed at his parents' house. Its English translation in the 1950s became a spiritual guide to a number of American Beat poets. Siddhartha 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. In 1924, Hesse married the singer Ruth Wenger, the daughter of the Swiss writer Lisa Wenger and aunt of Meret Oppenheim. He had met her in 1919 and wrote in 1922 the fairy tale Pictor's Metamorphoses for Ruth. In the story a spirit, Pictor, becomes an old tree and finds his youth again from the love of a young girl. This marriage never attained any true stability, however. In 1923, Hesse received Swiss citizenship. His next major works, Kurgast from 1925 and The Nuremberg Trip from 1927, were autobiographical narratives with ironic undertones, and foreshadowed Hesse's following novel, Steppenwolf, which was published in 1927. In the year of his 50th birthday, the first biography of Hesse appeared, written by his friend Hugo Ball. Shortly after his new successful novel he married a Jewish woman, Ninon Dolbin Ausländer (1895-1966). She had sent Hesse a letter in 1909 when she was 14, and the correspondence had continued. In 1926 they met accientally. At that time Ninon was separated - she had married the painter B.F. Doldin and planned a career as an art historian. Hesse moved with her to Casa Bodmer, and his restless life became more calm. This change to companionship was reflected in the novel Narcissus and Goldmund, appearing in 1930. Narcissus and Goldmund is a long picaresque work in a medieval setitbusng, which is his most overt treatment of the relentless struggle between the mind and the senses. By no means his best novel, Narcissus and 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 1931, Hesse began planning what would become his last major work, The Glass Bead Game. In 1932 appeared 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. Hesse observed the rise to power of Nazism in Germany with concern. In 1933, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann made their travels in exile, and in both cases, were aided by Hesse. In this way, Hesse attempted to work against Hitler's suppression of art and literature that protested Nazi ideology. Since the 1910s, he had published book reviews in the German press, and now he spoke publicly in support of Jewish artists and others pursued by the Nazis. Hesse's books continued to be published in Germany during the Nazi regime, and were defended in a secret circular in 1937 by Joseph Goebbels. When he wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung, he was accused of supporting the Nazis, whom Hesse did not openly oppose. From the end of the 1930s, German journals stopped publishing Hesse's work, and his work was eventually banned. As spiritual refuge from these political conflicts and later from the horror of the Second World War, he worked on the novel The Glass Bead Game, the 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. - In 1942 Hesse sent the manuscript to Berlin for publication. It was not accepted by the Nazis and the work appeared in Zürich, Switzerland in 1943. For this work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. Hermann Hesse also received the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt in 1946 and the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers in 1955. A complete edition of his works in six volumes appeared in 1952; a seventh volume (1957) contains essays and miscellaneous writings. Evocations (1955), a volume of late prose, and his correspondence with Romain Rolland (1954) were published separately. After receiving the Nobel Prize Hesse published no major works. Between the years 1945 and 1962 he wrote some 50 poems and about 32 reviews mostly for Swiss newspapers, but no more novels. He occupied himself with the steady stream of letters he received as a result of the prize and as a new generation of German readers explored his 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. Hesse died of cerebral hemorrhage in his sleep on August 9, 1962 at the age of eighty-five, and was buried in the cemetery at San Abbondio in Montagnola, Switzerland. |
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