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Nature lover, romanticist, and sometimes sentimentalist, he was born on the edge of the Black Forest, known for its legends. At the behest of his father, who had been a missionary in the Orient, he entered the Maulbronn seminary. Though a model student, he ran away after a half year. He was returned by a constable, but his dejection was so suicidal that his father removed him from the seminary. Equally unable to adapt to secular schools, he was apprenticed in a Calw tower- clock factory and later in a Tubingen bookstore. His disgust with the constrictions of conventional schooling was expressed in Un- term Rad (1906; Eng. trans., Beneath the Wheel, 1958), in which an overly diligent student is driven to self-destruction.
Though cut off from the academic world, Hesse read widely and was active in literary circles. He remained in the bookselling business until 1904, when he became a free-lance writer, collaborated on various journals, and brought out his first novel, Peter Camenzind (Eng. trans., 1961), about a failed and dissipated writer. The inward and outward search of the artist is further explored in Gertrud (1910; Eng. trans., 1915), Rosshalde (1914; Eng. trans., 1970), and the short story “Knulp” (1915; Eng. trans., 1971). A visit to India in these years was later reflected in Siddharta (1922; Eng. trans., 1951), a lyric novel based on the early life of Buddha.
During World War I, Hesse lived in neutral Switzerland, wrote denunciations of militarism and nationalism, and edited a journal for German war prisoners and internees. He became a permanent resident of Switzerland in 1919 and a citizen in 1923, settling in the little town of Montagnola.
The shock of a war-dismantled Europe, the lingering sickness of his youngest son (a theme in Rosshalde) and of his first wife, the death of his father, and his own torments led him to a sanatorium near Lucerne and to 72 psychoanalytic sessions with Dr.
J.B. Lang, a disciple of Jung, whom he also came to know. The influence of analysis appears in Demian (1919; Eng. trans., 1923), in which the self-assured Demian, who exists partly in dreams, is the alter ego of the troubled young Sinclair. This novel had pervasive impact on a troubled Germany and made its author famous throughout Europe. With it, his “biographies of the soul” began to deepen in meaning and nuance. Interest in Jung’s concern with introversion and extroversion, the collective unconscious, idealism, and symbols is ever apparent; the duality of man’s nature is a preoccupation of Hesse throughout his work. In Der Steppenwolf (1927; Eng. trans., 1929), one of his most inventive novels, the conflict is between bourgeois acceptance and instinctive rebelliousness. In Narziss und Goldmund (1930; Eng. trans., Death and the Lover, 1932), an intellectual ascetic, content with established faith, is contrasted with an artistic sensualist pursuing his own form of salvation. Die Morgenlandfahrt (1932; Eng. trans., Journey to the East, 1956) is a story of pilgrimage and myth, themes dear to the Jung canon. In Hesse’s last and longest novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; Eng. trans., Magister Ludi, 1949), which prompted the Nobel award, duality is again explored; Josef Knecht masters the “bead game” of reason but ventures forth in search of an active humanism. Some of Hesse’s pensive poems, which he wrote until the last week of his life, appear in this novel. More information about Hesse can be found in G.W. Field’s Hermann Hesse (1970), J. Mileck’s Hermann Hesse and His Critics (1958), and M. Serrano’s C.G. Jung and Herman Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships (1966).
(born. July 2, 1877, Calw, Wtirttemberg, Ger.—d. Aug. 9, 1962, Montagnola, Switz.)
