Hermann Hesse

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Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) was a German-Swiss novelist and poet whose books follow a single figure breaking from an inherited faith to find an authentic life, and who became, after his death, one of the most widely read German authors of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 — the citation honoring writing that, growing in boldness and penetration, held to the classical humanitarian ideals and a high quality of style. The honor arrived late, after the work that earned it; the readers who would make him a household name in two more languages had not yet been born.

Hermann Hesse in 1927, the year Steppenwolf appeared — photograph by Gret Widmann, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

He was born in Calw, in the kingdom of Württemberg in southwestern Germany, into a family of Pietist missionaries. His father, Johannes Hesse, was a Baltic-German missionary; his maternal grandfather, Hermann Gundert, was a distinguished Indologist and lexicographer who had spent decades in South India and compiled a Malayalam dictionary that is still consulted. Both men had served in India under the Basel Mission, and the household at Calw held two things at once — an intense Protestant inwardness, the Pietism of the Swabian church that prized conversion of the heart over doctrinal conformity, and a working acquaintance with Indian languages, scriptures, and images that most German children of the period never encountered. The South Asian world entered Hesse’s imagination first as the family business of salvation, books and prints and grandfather’s stories, long before it became the material of his own seeking.

The market square of Calw in the northern Black Forest, Hesse’s birthplace; the half-timbered ensemble includes the Hermann Hesse Museum. — photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The Swabian Pietism of his upbringing was no ordinary low-church piety. The same Württemberg current had produced, in the previous century, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger and Johann Albrecht Bengel — a theology that read Scripture and the book of nature together, expected a restoration of all things, and kept alive a speculative, almost theosophical strain inside the state church. Hesse inherited the temperature of that world without its creed. He passed the fiercely competitive Württemberg state examination and was sent in 1891 toward the seminary track that ran through the Maulbronn monastery school, the same elite pipeline that had carried Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling out of the same church into philosophy and poetry. He fled Maulbronn in March 1892, within months of arriving, in a breakdown that included a suicide attempt and stays in an institution at Stetten and a home for the disturbed; he never resumed the formal education his family had planned, and the failure to be turned into a pastor became, paradoxically, the making of the writer. The crisis became the permanent subject. Every later book returns to the boy who could not be made into the thing his fathers intended, and to the question of what, if anything, a person may be made into instead. He made his way out through apprenticeship in the book trade — in Tübingen and then Basel — and into writing, supporting himself by his pen after the success of the novel Peter Camenzind in 1904. He took Swiss citizenship in 1923, having settled across the border, and lived his last four decades in Montagnola, in the Ticino, the Italian-speaking south of Switzerland, where he wrote, painted watercolors, and tended a garden while two world wars passed over Europe.

Hermann Hesse around 1905, soon after the success of Peter Camenzind; portrait by Ernst Würtenberger, on display in the Hermann Hesse house at Gaienhofen. — photo via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Casa Camuzzi in Montagnola, Ticino, where Hesse rented rooms from 1919 to 1931 and wrote Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. — photo by Hannes Röst, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The arc of the novels

The recurring shape of Hesse’s fiction is a single figure breaking from convention to find an authentic inner life, usually by way of a guide and a descent into confusion before any clarity is won. The books are stations on one road rather than separate inventions, and they grow harder and stranger as he ages.

Demian (1919) framed that passage in the imagery of the gnostic god Abraxas, who unites light and dark. Published in the raw aftermath of the First World War under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair — the name of its narrator — the short novel struck a generation of returning German youth with such force that it was awarded a prize for first novels, which Hesse, having confessed the authorship, returned. Its central emblem is a god beyond the Christian division of good and evil: the bird fighting its way out of the egg, the world that must be broken to be born, the deity named Abraxas who contains both the bright order and its shadow. The figure is drawn from the second-century Gnostic teaching of Basilides as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had reconstructed it — a recovery in which Theosophical scholarship and, soon, Carl Jung played the decisive part. In Hesse’s hands the gnosis at issue is not a cosmological system to be believed but a permission: that the disowned, the dark, the forbidden half of the self belongs to wholeness and must be admitted before a person can be whole.

Siddhartha (1922) set the same search in the India of the Buddha’s lifetime, following a young Brahmin who rejects every received doctrine — the Buddha’s included — to win his understanding instead from a river and a ferryman. Hesse dedicated the first part to the French pacifist Romain Rolland and the second to his cousin Wilhelm Gundert, a scholar of Japanese Buddhism; the book had cost him a long block between its two halves, broken only when he stopped trying to write enlightenment from the outside. Siddhartha draws on the Indian scriptures Hesse had been reading — the world of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita — but it is pointedly not a Buddhist tract. Its hero declines to become the Buddha’s disciple precisely because liberation, on the book’s own logic, cannot be received from another; the most reverent thing the novel does to the tradition it loves is to refuse it as doctrine. This is reception, not exposition: the India of Siddhartha is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literary India, mediated through translation and through the German Romantic and Schopenhauerian appetite for Vedanta, and the novel knows itself to be a Western book about an Eastern longing.

Steppenwolf (1927) turned the struggle inward and modern, splitting its middle-aged protagonist, Harry Haller, between bourgeois respectability and a wolfish, suicidal solitude — and then dissolving even that binary in the hallucinatory “Magic Theater,” where the self is revealed as not two but many. Written in the wreckage of a marriage and a depression, it is the bleakest and most formally experimental of the major novels, and the one whose title became, against its author’s intent, a brand. His last and longest book, The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943), reversed the direction entirely. Begun around 1931 and written across the rise and war of National Socialism — published in Switzerland after it was effectively shut out of Germany — it imagined a future order of contemplative scholars in the province of Castalia, devoted to a refined “glass bead game” that draws music, mathematics, and all knowledge into a single contemplative synthesis. Its hero, the game-master Joseph Knecht, attains the summit of that serene order and then walks away from it, judging that a contemplation sealed off from the suffering world has betrayed the world it was meant to serve. The book is at once a defense of the life of the mind against barbarism and a verdict on its sufficiency; it won Hesse the Nobel three years later.

The reading, and the analysis

Hesse read very widely in translation, and the sources he drew on are visible in the grain of the work. From the East came the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching and the Chinese thought of Daoism and Confucius; the polarity of yin and yang, of contemplation and action, runs through Narcissus and Goldmund and the Glass Bead Game as plainly as it does through any of his Indian material. From the West came the Christian mystics and the medieval inwardness he had absorbed at home — the via interna that the Swabian Pietists had kept warm — and the German Romantics, Novalis above all, whose conviction that the path inward is the path to the infinite he made his own. He did not hold these traditions apart as a comparativist might. The distinctive move of his maturity was to read them as one continuous mysticism, an Eastern and Western testimony to a single inner task — the kind of synthesis the Glass Bead Game finally tried to stage as an institution, and which the same novel then judged for its remoteness from the suffering it had risen above. The reform-minded Hindu reception that carried Vedanta to Europe and America in the nineteenth century — the world of the Brahmo Samaj and its Western admirers — was part of the same broad current that put the Indian scriptures into a Calw missionary’s library and, a generation later, onto a novelist’s desk.

From around 1916, a string of personal catastrophes — his father’s death, his wife’s mental illness, the breakdown of his own health under the strain of the war, which he had publicly refused to celebrate — drove Hesse into psychoanalysis. He went that April to the Sonnmatt clinic near Lucerne and was treated by Josef Bernhard Lang, a physician who had trained under Carl Jung; some sixty sessions followed into 1917, and in 1921 Hesse had a further, brief period of analysis with Jung himself. The encounter left deep marks. Demian, written in a few weeks in 1917, is saturated with the imagery of the depth psychology Lang was opening to him, and Jung’s account of individuation — the self assembled by integrating its disowned, darker parts, the shadow taken up rather than denied — runs strikingly close to the arc of the novels. Hesse and Jung shared, moreover, the same private library of Gnostic and alchemical and Eastern materials; the Abraxas of Demian and the Abraxas of Jung’s privately printed Septem Sermones ad Mortuos of 1916 rise from one pool of late-Theosophical Gnostic reading. The proximity is real and was real to Hesse. But scholars caution against reading the fiction as illustration of the psychology: Hesse’s relationship with Jung cooled, he kept his distance from any school, and the novels were the work of an artist mining analysis for images, not a disciple dramatizing a system. What Hesse drew from all these sources — Indian, Chinese, Christian, psychoanalytic — he treated less as a doctrine to be adopted than as material for one demand, made over and over in different costumes: that a person must find their own way and refuse the borrowed one.

That demand connects him, across a century and an ocean, to the New England seekers who had reached for the same Eastern scriptures before him. Like Henry David Thoreau bathing his intellect in the Bhagavad Gita at Walden, and like Ralph Waldo Emerson before him, Hesse read the world’s scriptures as so many testimonies to a single inner light and a single inward task — a habit of reading, more than a settled doctrine, and one his books treat as the reader’s own work rather than the author’s gift.

Reception and afterlife

That insistence is also why his reputation has swung so widely. Long honored in Germany — celebrated as a successor to the Romantics, then attacked there in his later years as adolescent, sentimental, a writer for the young — he was taken up after his death by an Anglophone and especially American readership, and again, overwhelmingly, by the counterculture of the 1960s, which read Siddhartha and Steppenwolf as charters for spiritual self-discovery, psychedelic exploration, and refusal of the bourgeois order. For a stretch he was among the best-selling foreign authors in the United States, his name attached to a rock band and his slogans to posters. The books carry that weight unevenly: Siddhartha’s quiet counsel and Steppenwolf’s shattering of the self proved easy to flatten into a single message of permission, and the Glass Bead Game’s severe questioning of exactly that permission went comparatively unread. Hesse himself, who lived long enough to receive the first wave of the cult, was wary of disciples and said so. He had written, after all, against the very idea of following.

Research note

The standard English-language biographies are Ralph Freedman, Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis (Pantheon, 1978), and Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art (University of California Press, 1978), the latter doubling as the authoritative descriptive bibliography of the work and its translations. The 1946 Nobel award, with its official citation, fixed Hesse’s international standing at the moment his German reputation was at its lowest. His major novels are widely available in the public domain in the original German and in early translations: Siddhartha exists in a collectively volunteered English public-domain translation and in the German original, Siddhartha: eine indische Dichtung, both through Project Gutenberg. The scholarship on Hesse and depth psychology — the Lang analysis of 1916–17, the brief 1921 work with Jung, and the published 1916–1944 Hesse–Lang correspondence (Thomas Feitknecht, ed., Die dunkle und wilde Seite der Seele, Suhrkamp, 2006) — is the field where the most care is needed: it documents a genuine and formative contact while resisting the temptation, common in popular treatments, to read the fiction as a key to the psychology or the psychology as a key to the fiction. The University of California, Santa Barbara, maintains a long-running scholarly Hermann Hesse project gathering biographical material, critical essays, and bibliography.

→ In the library: The Song Celestial — Bhagavad-Gîtâ (Arnold, 1885) · The Tao Teh King (Legge, 1891)

→ Related: Gnosis · Henry David Thoreau · Abraxas · Gnosticism · Carl Jung · Bhagavad Gita · Tao Te Ching · Taoism · Pietism · Mysticism · Christian Mysticism · Brahmo Samaj · Ralph Waldo Emerson