Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

801 Pages·2018·18.08 MB·English

by  Gunnar Decker

HESSE

H E S S E
The Wanderer
and His Shadow
Gunnar Decker
Translated by Peter Lewis
Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts
London, England
2018
Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
First published in German as Hermann Hesse: Der Wanderer und sein Schatten,
© Carl Hanser Verlag München 2012.
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International— Translation
Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of
the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society
VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers &
Booksellers Association).
Page 699 photo graph of Heiner Hesse (November 6, 2002)
© Gunnar Decker, author’s archives.
All other photo graphs © Hermann Hesse- Editionsarchiv, Volker Michels,
Offenbach am Main.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
First printing
Jacket photo: Hermann Hesse in Pisa, 1911, courtesy of Deutsches Literatur Archiv Marbach
Jacket design: Tim Jones
9780674916395 (EPUB)
9780674916401 (MOBI)
9780674916388 (PDF)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Decker, Gunnar, 1965– author. | Lewis, Peter, 1958– translator.
Title: Hesse : the wanderer and his shadow / Gunnar Decker ; translated by Peter Lewis.
Other titles: Hermann Hesse. En glish
Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2018. |
“First published as Hermann Hesse: Der Wanderer und sein Schatten,
copyright © 2012 Carl Hanser Verlag Munchen.” |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018012273 | ISBN 9780674737884 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Hesse, Hermann, 1877–1962. | Authors, German—
20th century— Biography.
Classification: LCC PT2617.E85 Z678513 2018 | DDC 833/.912 [B]— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2018012273
I think that reali ty is the last thing one need bother
oneself about, for it is, tiresomely enough, constantly
pres ent, whereas it is the more beautiful and necessary
things in life that r eally demand our attention and care.
Real ity is something that one o ught not u nder any
circumstances to be content with and which one should
not on any account worship and revere, for it is acci-
dental, the leftovers of life. And the only way in which
we can alter this shabby, consistently disappointing, and
barren reali ty is by repudiating it and thereby demon-
strating that we are stronger than it is.
Hermann Hesse, Life Story Briefly Told (1921–1924)

CONTENTS
Introduction: Doppelgänger in a Straw Hat 1
1. A Child’s Soul: Oppression and Rebellion 15
2. The Self- Proclaimed Writer 88
3. Awakening of Individuality 114
4. At Home Crossing Borders 156
5. Portrait of the Successful Artist as a Young Man
Wandering beneath Clouds 204
6. A New Beginning in Switzerland and the
First World War 293
7. Escape to Ticino: Making a Fresh Start and
Falling to Earth in the South 378
8. The Awakening of Steppenwolf 473
9. Traveling to the East 543
viii
CONTENTS
10. On the Nature of The Glass Bead Game:
The Looming Presence of the Third Reich 601
11. The Old Man of the Mountains:
Hesse’s Continuing Journey Inward 665
Chronology 725
Notes 729
Acknowl edgments 761
Index 763
INTRODUCTION
Doppelgänger in a Straw Hat
His look has its own center
somewhere between the contemplative gaze of a mystic
and the sharp eye of an American.
— Walter Benjamin
“His voice had a tanned sound to it. His face was full of deep furrows and
folds, the face of a gardener or a mountaineer and at the same time a
modern, urban face.” That was Peter Suhrkamp’s impression on meeting
Hesse for the first time in August 1936. This was also the last time Her-
mann Hesse set foot on German soil, and then only b ecause he wanted to
visit an ophthalmologist in Bad Eilsen, whom he hoped—in vain, as it
tran spired— would be able to cure the unbearable pain he was suffering in his
eyes. Thereafter he never left Switzerland again: not when he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Lit er a ture in 1946; not to collect his Goethe Prize
awarded by the city of Frankfurt am Main or the Peace Prize of the German
book trade; not even to attend the funerals of his two s isters.
Indeed, it was only very infrequently that the bird—as he liked to style
and often to caricature himself— now left its golden cage, the Casa Rossa
in Montagnola. He was intently preoccupied with keeping at bay the ex-
ternal world that was crowding in on him. A note reading “No visitors,
please” was affixed to his door, though he did not shirk the daily drudgery
of responding to letters. In the final twenty- five years of his life, in fact,
he engaged with the world with perhaps even more intensity than he had
ever done, albeit in his own par tic u lar way— overwhelmingly in the form