Foreword: Hermann Hesse: Going Global before Globalization

External factors are almost as influential as these internal ones, ones which can spur a writer on, but may also hamper, delay, or prevent the impact a writer could have. Factors belonging to this category include unforeseeable political events, the whims of fashionable trends as well as the zeitgeist, which—as far as prominent authors are concerned—have of course only a temporary effect on public interest. Well-known literary prizes, screen adaptations, media attention, and adept publishing all affect the impact of an author’s work. If, moreover, an author has their own brand of charisma, eloquence, and showmanship at their disposal, or at the very least a sensationally tragic fate, then success is guaranteed.

On the other hand, a lack of suitable tidbits to feed the media is counterproductive, as is envy and resentment on the part of influential colleagues, which can, from time to time, have considerable consequences in media coverage.

Such factors as these need to be taken into consideration when taking an author’s impact into account. Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) is a good example here, not least because the response to him during his lifetime contrasts starkly with his worldwide impact after his death.

While almost all the positive internal factors listed above apply to him, only a few of the positive external ones do. Of the external factors, the tides of history caused difficulty, whilst the awards and prizes he began garnering towards the end of his life proved beneficial. This prize-giving started relatively late, beginning in 1946 when Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, the prizes could only have a limited effect as, unlike almost all other authors, Hesse made no use of them as he did not attend any of the ceremonies. Similarly, he declined all offers of screen adaptations and mass circulation of his works;1See chapter 10 for a discussion of Hesse’s aversion to filmic adaptations of his works. this, compounded by his shyness around public and media appearances, did not exactly aid their dissemination, even if circulation levels were nevertheless above average.

The reasons for this become understandable if you consider the consequences which his writing had for him, even without these ways of sharing his work more widely. Many of his readers were able to identify with his works to such a degree that they either wrote to him or attempted to seek him out. Consequently, Hesse had to deal with a relentless, snowballing avalanche of readers’ letters totaling more than forty-five thousand. Letters arrived from all around the world and answering them often felt like a bothersome obligation but one which he didn’t decline because he felt responsible for the impact of his publications. Any increase in popularity, be it through affordable paperbacks, screen adaptations, or public appearances, would have only increased the burden of this outreach work to the extent that he did everything in his power to ensure that any remaining time for his own, creative work, was protected.

Between the turn of the twentieth century and his death on August 9, 1962, Hermann Hesse published a total of fifty-five books; this figure does not, however, include the many smaller editions, private prints, and offprints. The total sales of books by Hesse in the original German during this period reached around four million. The total sales of his works in the overseas market during his lifetime is estimated to be around double that figure, with Japan at the top of the list. In the more than sixty years since his death, without his restricting influence on the Suhrkamp Verlag not to publish his works in paperback, sales of the German editions of his works have increased more than tenfold. This is because the obstacles that had stood in Hesse’s way during his lifetime, as well as those caused by his own reticence, have fallen by the wayside. Hesse’s disassociation from German politics, up to and following the outbreak of the First World War, proved beneficial after 1945. Hesse’s critical standpoint can explain the tremendous surge in interest in Hesse and his works just a few years after his death, with the onset of the Vietnam War. It also led to “German literature playing a role” in the USA during the 1960s and 1970s, “more than at any time since, thanks most of all to Hermann Hesse, whose novels swamped the American market like a tsunami,”2Ruth Klüger, Unterwegs verloren (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2008), 95. leaving critics such as Jeffrey L. Sammons apprehensive of a “Germanization of American Youth.”3Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Notes on the Germanization of American Youth,” The Yale Review 59 (1969–70): 342–56.

When it comes to the international distribution of his works, it can generally be said that two external factors have played a prominent role: the awarding of the Nobel Prize during his lifetime, which motivated foreign publishing houses to show a stronger interest in Hesse than before, and then posthumously, the Vietnam War, during the course of which Hesse’s pacifist standpoint led to an unprecedented level of interest in the now attractively designed editions of his works; even foreign publishers hoped to emulate the kind of success his works had in their own respective countries. So, it came to be that Hesse’s books, which émigré publisher Kurt Wolff had considered “untranslatable” in the USA in 1946, are nowadays available in over sixty languages. Moreover, Hesse is, according to UNESCO’s Index Translationum, the most often translated of all German writers after the Brothers Grimm, with global sales of over 150 million books.

When it comes to a writer’s success abroad, the quality of the translation is at least as important as having a wide range of attractive titles. We only need to look at the USA’s example to see that, without the replacement of the earlier, inadequate translations by ones more faithful to the original, the Hesse phenomenon of the 60s and 70s would likely not have happened. In contrast to music or painting, when it comes to poetry and prose, their ability to cross linguistic borders is dependent on the availability of a different yet fitting idiom in that language, on different linguistic and conceptual structures, on grammar and phonics, which usually deviate significantly from that of the original. Therefore, literary works are the most dependent of all art forms on their mediators, on their understanding of the text, their skill and accuracy in rendering analogies, but also on their flair for adapting the musicality of their language.