HESSE, HERMANN (1877–1962)

German author.

Both during and following their initial publication, the works of Hermann Hesse have been among the most widely read literary texts of German-speaking Europe; over twenty million copies of his texts also appeared in translation by the turn of the twenty-first century. Hesse's works have been particularly popular in the United States, where his fiction became a central focus of the hippie movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and where they continue to occupy a prominent position among canonical German texts.

The popularity of Hesse's works has no doubt been due in part to their hermetically open transparency, their accessibility, which offers the reader various possibilities for identification. Nearly all of Hesse's fiction concerns the alienation of the individual within modern society, as reflected in a host of characters who experience serious psychological trauma from which they only slowly emerge through a process of often painful inner reflection—universal themes that resonate with a wide and diversified audience.

While Hesse's production includes paintings, poetry, fairy tales, essays, a large correspondence with major figures of his time, and pedagogical and editorial projects, it is primarily his novels that have formed the basis of his popularity, especially Unterm Rad (1906; Beneath the Wheel, 1958), dealing with the oppressive forces of the German educational system at the turn of the century; Demian (1919; translation, 1923); Siddhartha (1922; translation, 1951); Steppenwolf (1927; translation, 1929); Narziss und Goldmund (1930; Death and the Lover, 1932), the story of two priests in the Middle Ages, one at peace with his religion, the other in search of a more meaningful, and individual, religious system of thought; and Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; translated as Magister Ludi, 1949, as The Glass Bead Game, 1969), set in a futuristic, monk-like community devoted to the contemplative pursuit of mathematics and music. For The Glass Bead Game, Hesse received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. All of these texts demonstrate the author's familiarity with such figures as the philosophers Baruch Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche; the historians Jakob Christopher Burckhardt and Oswald Spengler; and the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (in the 1910s Hesse underwent analysis with an assistant of Jung's, Joseph Bernhard Lang), as well as with Buddhism, and ancient Hindu and Chinese religious philosophy.

Demian, Siddhartha, and Steppenwolf remain Hesse's most popular novels. The central protagonist of Demian, a young student named Emil Sinclair (identical to the nom-de-plume under which Hesse originally published the novel), searches for an escape from the strictures of religious and moral traditions, and is aided therein by a new acquaintance named Demian, a dream-like figure who leads Sinclair on a quest to find a mythic god who unites the opposing forces of good and evil, male and female, and human and animal. This unification of opposing, universal forces constitutes a major theme in all of Hesse's fiction. It reemerges in Siddhartha, which tells the story of a young man who finds redemption through an increasingly contemplative approach to the vicissitudes and contrasting forces of the quotidian world. It also forms the center of Steppenwolf, in which the main figure is portrayed as an amalgamation of a man and a wolf, the latter constituting all that cannot be accommodated within the more traditional cultural traditions of Germany in the 1920s. The novel shows how diverse aesthetic signifiers appear to clash, not owing to any intrinsic qualities they may evince, but by virtue of the values with which they come to be associated; as the protagonist undergoes self-examination, the hallowed cultural icons of Germany come to function not in opposition to their modernist counterparts, but as their equals, and this reconfiguration suggests both a liberating transformation of the individual and, potentially, of the world in which he lives.

Throughout his life, Hesse was a pacifist, and therefore, unlike many contemporary authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Thomas Mann, he vigorously opposed World War I, and in 1912 emigrated to Switzerland to join the French novelist and pacifist Romain Rolland in antiwar activities, deciding in 1923 to become a Swiss citizen. Hesse's multicultural interests continue to resonate with a worldwide audience. Indeed, some have gone so far as to suggest that Hesse's texts themselves even influenced some of the most important social concerns and movements of the later twentieth century: the ecology movement, the anti-authoritarian protests of the late 1960s, pedagogical reforms, the displacement of Eurocentrism in favor of globalization, the development of intercultural understanding through diplomatic relations that transcend the confines of individual nations and religions, and the widespread appearance of political platforms supporting nonviolence.

See alsoGermany; Modernism; Rolland, Romain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hesse, Hermann. Sämtliche Werke in 20 Bänden. Edited by Volker Michels. Frankfurt am Main, 2002. The most complete edition of Hesse's works to date.

Pfeifer, Martin. Hesse-Kommentar zu sämtlichen Werken. Munich, 1980. A dated but still useful commentary, with bibliographic and biographical information.

Solbach, Andreas, ed. Hermann Hesse und die literarische Moderne: Kulturwissenschaftliche Facetten einer literarischen Konstante im 20. Jahrhundert. Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main, 2004. A wide-ranging collection of essays intended as a corrective to the long-standing disinterest in Hesse's works within academia.

Weiner, Marc A. "Mozart, Jazz, and the Dissolution of the Bourgeois Personality: Steppenwolf. " In Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative, 101–149. Lincoln, Neb., 1993.

Marc A. Weiner