Hermann Hesse

Origins and family

Hermann Karl Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in Calw, in Württemberg, southern Germany. He came from a family bound to Protestant missions. His maternal grandfather, Hermann Gundert, had worked in India, where he compiled a Malayalam grammar and dictionary, and his mother, Marie Gundert, had been born there in 1842. His father, Johannes Hesse, the son of a doctor, had been born in Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire, which gave the boy a double citizenship, German and Russian. The family ran a publishing house in Calw that produced theological and school texts. The home was shaped by Swabian Pietism, with a strong religious life, but also by music, poetry and a library the grandfather opened to the child.

Childhood and early conflicts

As a boy Hesse was headstrong and sensitive, and hard for his parents to handle. His mother wrote of his strong will and his unusual mind for his age. In 1881 the family moved to Basel, where they stayed six years before returning to Calw. The memories of his hometown, with its bridges, tanneries and hidden corners, later gave shape to the fictional town of Gerbersau, the setting of his youthful sketches. By about the age of ten he already wanted to be a writer, and his first model was a half-brother who broke with the family to study music.

Education and a youthful crisis

In 1891 Hesse entered the Protestant seminary at Maulbronn, where discipline was severe. There a serious personal crisis began: he ran away, attempted suicide in May 1892, and passed through psychiatric and child-care institutions. At the end of 1892 he attended a school in Cannstatt, and in 1893 he obtained the certificate that ended his formal schooling. He then tried various trades, including bookshop apprentice and mechanic in a clock factory in Calw, a monotonous job that strengthened his wish for an intellectual life. These years of rebellion and suffering later inspired his novel Beneath the Wheel.

Bookseller and first books

In October 1895 he joined a specialist bookshop in Tübingen, where he sorted and archived volumes on theology, philology and law. His working days were long, and in his free time he preferred books to friends. He read theologians, Goethe, Lessing, Schiller and Greek mythology, and from 1895 Nietzsche. In 1896 his poem "Madonna" appeared in a Viennese journal. His first books, Romantic Songs (1898) and One Hour After Midnight (1899), sold poorly, though his publisher Eugen Diederichs believed in his value. Hesse then worked in Basel, where a stimulating cultural circle helped him develop his ability to render sensory impressions in writing.

The success of Peter Camenzind and life by the lake

In 1901 he finally travelled to Italy, a long-cherished dream. The publisher Samuel Fischer took an interest in him, and the novel Peter Camenzind (1904) gave him, for the first time, a living from writing. That same year he married Maria Bernoulli and settled in Gaienhofen, on Lake Constance, where their three sons were born. There he wrote Beneath the Wheel (1906). His next novel, Gertrude (1910), cost him a painful effort, and he later judged it a failure. His interest in Buddhism and Schopenhauer revived in these years. In 1911 he set out on a journey to Ceylon and Indonesia that left a deep spiritual mark, though it did not give him the religious inspiration he sought. His marriage, meanwhile, was deteriorating.

War, psychoanalysis and family rupture

When the First World War broke out, Hesse volunteered, but was declared unfit for combat and assigned to care for prisoners of war in Bern. In November 1914 he published "O Friends, Not These Tones", an appeal to intellectuals not to be swept along by nationalism. The essay brought attacks from the German press, anonymous letters and the distancing of old friends, though Romain Rolland supported him. His father's death in 1916, a son's illness and his wife's psychosis led him to psychotherapy with a disciple of Carl Gustav Jung. This contact opened for him the world of symbols and an interest in analytical psychology, and in 1919 he published Demian under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair.

Montagnola and maturity

His marriage had broken down, and in 1919 he settled alone in Montagnola, in Swiss Ticino, where he rented the so-called Casa Camuzzi. There he began painting in watercolours, writing and living more quietly. He published Siddhartha in 1922, in which he expresses his admiration for Indian wisdom, and in 1923 he became a Swiss citizen. In 1924 he married the singer Ruth Wenger, a union that was brief. With Steppenwolf (1927) he gained wide notoriety, and in 1930 he published Narcissus and Goldmund. He moved to the Casa Hesse, built for him by his friend Hans C. Bodmer, and in 1931 he married Ninon Dolbin.

The Glass Bead Game and legacy

In 1931 he began his major work, The Glass Bead Game, which occupied him for eleven years and appeared in Switzerland in 1943. His stance toward Nazism was one of rejection, expressed with caution: he wrote against antisemitism, reviewed persecuted authors and gave shelter to exiles such as Brecht and Thomas Mann, but he was not an open militant, and by the late 1930s German journals had stopped publishing him. In 1946 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely for that final novel. In his last years he wrote short stories, poems about nature and childhood, and ironic essays about his craft. He died in Montagnola on 9 August 1962, of a brain haemorrhage. His worldwide fame came later: in the mid-1960s his books became bestsellers in the United States, partly through their association with the counterculture. Today he is one of the most widely read and translated German-language authors of the twentieth century.