Hermann Hesse, the great German writer of self-discovery, died 50 years ago this year – By Lutz Lichtenberger
His books have been translated into 60 languages, with 120 million copies sold worldwide, and he is the most widely read German writer of the 20th century.
His work espoused ecological awareness and the idea of progressive education, advanced the anti-authoritarian movement and opposed eurocentrism. The Swiss writer Hermann Burger once called him “a global power.”
In 1946, only one year after the downfall of Nazi Germany, this representative of the “other Germany” received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Over the course of decades and generations, Hermann Hesse has always been the classic writer for those seeking the meaning of life, for lonesome Steppenwolfs, Siddhartas on a pilgrimage to India or lyrical Goldmunds.
Aug. 9 will be the 50th anniversary of Hesse’s death. His oeuvre, comprising almost 15,000 pages, has been published in a two-volume edition as well as numerous paperbacks. Two new comprehensive biographies have been released in Germany, and a whole series of commemorative events are scheduled throughout the year. Hesse appears to be back in literary fashion.
Yet in 1962, the year he died, he was regarded as outdated and of little literary value. “Quite frankly, with Hesse you won’t get anywhere these days,” wrote one critic in the German weekly Die Zeit. Unworldly apostle of introspection, apolitical navel-gazer, late-Romantic escapist – these are all labels Hesse was given during those years.
It is ironic that the great Hesse renaissance, beginning in 1968, started in the USA of all places, a country for which Hesse had little regard and which he believed to be the nation with the least understanding of his work. The anti-Vietnam-war movement in the US chose not Karl Marx or Mao Tse Tung, but Hermann Hesse as its intellectual authority. “The rebellious sons of the bourgeoisie read Hesse and felt reassured in their search for an alternative lifestyle,” wrote Gunnar Decker in his biography “Der Wanderer und sein Schatten” (The Wanderer and his Shadow). The legendary Harvard professor Timothy Leary recommended reading “Steppenwolf” before embarking on an LSD trip. By 1973, eight million copies of Hesse’s books had been sold in the United States.
For decades, though, German universities treated Hesse as a marginal figure. The Azeri writer Sharia Sinaria has aptly summarized the irony in the perception of the novelist: “Hesse is a stranger in German literature and a German in world literature.” But the arts sections of German newspapers have since dropped their disapproval.
Volker Weidermann, literary critic of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, observed that it is only the “cynically enlightened reading habits” of some critics that prevent them from seeing Hesse as “the writer of the moment.” Like no other, Hesse was able to defend the individual against the demands of modernism – especially against its false promises of happiness. In Hesse’s words this sounds quite simple: “The best weapons against the infamy of life are: courage, obstinacy and patience. Courage gives strength, obstinacy is fun, and patience brings tranquility.”
Even today, almost 50,000 of Hesse’s books are sold in Germany per year, and in anniversary years this figure can rise to more than one million. Demographically, his readership can now be defined quite accurately: Around half is between 14 and 35 years old. The second large group is retirees. The amount of readers in between is comparatively small.
That has prompted Volker Michels, editor of Hesse’s Collected Works, to comment that Hesse obviously interfered with making money: “As long as we’re still young and full of ideals we read this writer, while many lose interest as soon as they start working, as soon as ideals could turn into career killers – only to return to writers like Hesse and the good intentions of their youth as pensioners, when they’ve left behind the mimicry of competition.”
The contemporary quality of Hermann Hesse could precisely be that he never cared much about the fashions of his time, never tried to follow them, but instead cherished his unconventional ideas, hopes and dreams. Towards the end of his life, which had not been free of trials and tribulations, Hesse professed to be proud that he still found his way back to the naive, infantile way of seeing the world.
Hesse once said about the main character of his first great novel, “Peter Camenzind”: “He refuses to walk the much-trodden path and stubbornly follows his own, he doesn’t want to be a hanger-on and conformist but to reflect nature and the world in his own soul and experience them in new images. He is not made for collective life; he is a lonely king in a realm of his own making.”