The last two decades have unleashed the transformative forces of globalization and communication technologies that have brought about a growing awareness of our shared humanity and the precarious state of our shared planet. They have also seen a marked increase in culture wars and a resurgence of nationalism when encrusted structures and attitudes are called into question, reactions that the German/Swiss writer Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) was only too familiar with. It is no coincidence that current Hesse research is reflecting these mega-trends, suggesting that a re-evaluation of the author is long overdue. This volume proposes that Hesse holds important messages for the global reader in the twenty-first century: his works offer practical, psychological, and spiritual guidance to cope with our current challenges of war, disease, inequality, migration, and climate change, but also encourage a critical mindset to engage with technological and scientific “progress” (from digitalization via genetic engineering to artificial intelligence) and its socioeconomic repercussions. Because his writing focuses on the search for meaning in a system that takes little interest in individuals beyond their performative shell and profit-making potential, readers can more readily identify with his protagonists and his message. Given the pervasive sense of
permacrisis (Collins’ Dictionary’s word of the year 2022) enveloping us at the present, reading an author like Hesse seems extremely relevant.
1In the preface to the German edition of his Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis (1978), Ralph Freedman writes that this biography was intended to demonstrate to his fellow Americans that Hesse’s works transcended time and place: “At the same time, I wanted to show that his work, in contrast to most of the other German writers of his generation, was open for perspectives that went beyond Hesse’s own time and environment, that connected him to readers from all different cultures. Here as much as there, I believe that it was the element of crisis that people reacted to.” (Ralph Freedman, Hermann Hesse: Autor der Krisis [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999], 9, my translation.) We should be careful, though, not to project a twenty-first-century sense of inevitable doom onto Hesse’s experience of the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, arguably his most productive years. Cf. Rüdiger Graf, “Either-Or: The Narrative of ‘Crisis’ in Weimar Germany and Historiography,” Central European History 43, no. 4 (2010): 592–615. In German-speaking countries the reassessment of Hesse’s work has been slow, with their academic and cultural gatekeepers only reluctantly acknowledging that they may have been both the victims and the perpetrators of misinformation and prejudice.
2In German universities, this attitude has a long history: cf. Egon Schwarz, “Hermann Hesse, the American Youth Movement, and Problems of Literary Evaluation,” PMLA 85, no. 5 (1970): 977–87, who notes: “Finally, I suppose one should glance at the most immovable pillar of the literary establishment in Germany: the academic guardians of Literaturwissenschaft. There we would find a broad negative consensus on Hesse as a derivative writer, dealing in cheap dualisms and oversimplified polar opposites” (978). A telling example is his portrayal in Germany’s national newsmagazine
Der Spiegel, which published an influential demolition job as their cover story in 1958.
3Anon., “Im Gemüsegarten,” Der Spiegel, July 8, 1958, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/im-gemuesegarten-a-f058b61b-0002-0001-0000-000041761839?context=issue. Fifty years after Hesse’s death the magazine ran another cover story on him, and declared the author to be a national treasure.
4Matthias Matussek, “Ich mach mein Ding,” Der Spiegel, August 5, 2012, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ich-mach-mein-ding-a-903c762c-0002-0001-0000-000087649554?context=issue.However, with the availability of a comprehensive set of resources (including Volker Michels’s landmark publication of the twenty-volume
Sämtliche Werke [Complete Works], which contain Hesse’s essayistic writings and three thousand book reviews,
5Hermann Hesse, Sämtliche Werke in 20 Bänden und einem Registerband, ed. Volker Michels (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2001–2007) [=SW]. Jürgen Below’s comprehensive bibliography,
6Jürgen Below, Hermann Hesse Bibliographie: Sekundärliteratur 1899–2007, 4 vols. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2007). with Michael Limberg’s annual updates,
7https://www.hermann-hesse.de/gesellschaft/was-wir-tun/hermann- hesse-bibliographie/. Volker Michels’s new ten-volume edition of
Die Briefe,
8https://www.suhrkamp.de/werkausgabe/hermann-hesse-hermann-hesse- die-briefe-w-195. numerous websites,
9https://www.hermann-hesse.de/; https://hesse.projects.gss.ucsb.edu/. and the
Hermann Hesse-Handbuch edited by Andrea Bartl and Alexander Honold),
10Andrea Bartl and Alexander Honold, ed., Hermann Hesse-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, forthcoming). once widely accepted stereotypes of Hesse as an apolitical and anti-modernist neo-romantic are being jettisoned.
11See Ingo Cornils, “Introduction: From Outsider to Global Player: Hermann Hesse in the Twenty-First Century,” in A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, ed. Ingo Cornils (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 1–16. Together with access to several of Hesse’s important correspondences (e.g., with the writer Stefan Zweig or with his psychoanalyst Josef Bernhard Lang),
12Hermann Hesse and Stefan Zweig, Briefwechsel, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006); Die dunkle und die Wilde Seite: Hermann Hesse; Briefwechsel mit seinem Psychoanalytiker Josef Bernhard Lang 1916–1944, ed. Thomas Feitknecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006). trenchant biographies (Gunnar Decker’s
Der Wanderer und sein Schatten),
13Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow, trans. Peter Lewis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). insights into his personal life (Bärbel Reetz’s
Hesse’s Frauen),
14Bärbel Reetz, Hesses Frauen (Berlin: Insel, 2012). and a plethora of PhD theses as well as intermedial and thematic approaches,
15For example: Henriette Herwig and Florian Trabert, eds., Der Grenzgänger Hermann Hesse (Baden-Baden: Rombach, 2013); Karl-Josef Kuschel, Im Fluss der Dinge: Hermann Hesse und Bertolt Brecht im Dialog mit Buddha, Laotse und Zen (Ostfildern: Patmos, 2018). See also Ingo Cornils, ed., “Forever Young? Unschuld und Erfahrung im Werk Hermann Hesses,” special issue of literatur für leser 38, no. 1 (2015). scholars and general readers now have a much better understanding of the author and his unique contribution to world literature.
Away from the German-speaking world, Hesse research has also found new inspiration. Building on the works of Colin Wilson, Joseph Mileck, Ralph Freedman, Theodore Ziolkowski, Eugene Stelzig, and Osman Durrani, a new generation of scholars, including many of the authors gathered in this volume, has opened transcultural and interdisciplinary lines of enquiry.
16A. Jose, V. M. B. Grace, J. Jose, and D. D. Wilson, “Relevance of Hermann Hesse: A systematic review of different perspectives,” RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism 28, no. 4 (2023): 845–58. Beyond the Anglophone world, Hermann Hesse’s star continues to shine brightly, as the contributions in this volume, especially those exploring his status in India, South Korea, Japan, and China, clearly demonstrate.
17A good example for Hesse’s continuing relevance is the Siddhartha at 100 International Symposium organized by the Department of German at the University of Mumbai in December 2022. The event brought together scholars from all over India and abroad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrTXR848Oj4. A lot of this worldwide esteem has to do with the “translatability” of his prose and poetry, the clarity of his message, and his unadorned style. As translator Susan Bernofsky observes about
Siddhartha, Hesse’s most popular book:
Hesse’s novel
is a work of poetry. …
Siddhartha is suffused with a sense of harmony and measure, and Hesse’s sentences tend to fall just so, with a great deal of gravitas and a certain decadent lushness. He often repeats phrases, which has the effect of a chant or incantation. Thus, it is crucial for the sentences of the translation to have an elegant, melodious cadence, rich in assonance—this is what Hesse reads like in German. What makes the book luminous in the original is the way the quest for perfection/Nirvana is reflected in the quiet beauty of the prose.
18Susan Bernofsky, “Translator’s Preface,” in Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: The Modern Library, 2008), xxi (italics in original).Even so, Hesse is no longer regarded with uncritical eyes as he was during the “Hesse Boom” of the late 1960s and early 1970s that swept the world.
19Cf Joseph Mileck, “Trends in Literary Reception: The Hesse-Boom,” The German Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1978): 346–54; Jefford Vahlbusch, “Toward the Legend of Hermann Hesse in the USA,” in Hermann Hesse Today / Hermann Hesse Heute, ed. Ingo Cornils and Osman Durrani (Amsterdam: Brill, 2005), 133–46. Critics have pointed to his solipsism,
20M. M. Owen, “The Inward Gaze,” Aeon, July 16, 2020, https://aeon.co/essays/hermann-hesse-and-the-double-edged-sword-of-dwelling-on-ones-self. his focus on the powerful emotions of adolescence which most people tend to forget or outgrow,
21Adam Kirsch, “The Art of Failure,” The New Yorker, November 19, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/hermann-hesses- arrested-development. and—unjustly—to his reluctance to openly take sides against the Nazis.
22Cf Volker Michels, “Zwischen Duldung und Sabotage. Hermann Hesse im Nationalsozialismus,” in Zwischen den Fronten: Der Glasperlenspieler Hermann Hesse, Lutz Dittrich (Berlin: Literaturhaus Berlin, 2017), 36–45. This source is excerpted from Volker Michels’s afterword to Hermann Hesse, “In den Niederungen des Aktuellen”: Die Briefe 1933–1939, ed. Volker Michels (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), 719–40; see also Tobias Wenzel, “Das Schweigen von Hermann Hesse,” Deutschlandfunk Kultur, December 13, 2017, https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/vereinnahmung-durch-die-nationalsozialisten-das-schweigen-100.html. We may even feel uncomfortable with his displays of self-righteousness in some of his reflective essays, an attitude which he redefined and justified as “self-will.” In short, we now see him as a human being: contradictory, occasionally cantankerous, hypochondriac, self-centered, and struggling to escape the mores of his time. As to Hesse’s psychological hang-ups, Andreas Solbach rightly interprets his lifelong struggle for recognition as the result of a deep-seated childhood trauma.
23Andreas Solbach, Hermann Hesse: Ein Schriftsteller auf der Suche nach sich selbst (Darmstadt: WBG/Theiss, 2022), 8–9. That does not mean that Hesse did not have moments of sublime illumination (Karl-Josef Kuschel used the very apt term
Spitzeneinsichten, or “key insights,” in the German version of his chapter), which he is able to share with his readers in his trademark style of no-holds-barred self-examination. Obviously, like all epiphanies and breakthroughs, these never last long and require a sustained effort to comprehend, maintain, and capture, even for a moment.
24See Ingo Cornils, “Zwischen Mythos und Utopie: Hermann Hesse auf der Suche zum Endpunkt des Seins,” German Life and Letters 66, no. 2 (2013): 156–72. But their impact on the lives of his readers, from subtle to sustained, from unconscious to openly acknowledged, can be profound.
The present volume contributes to the fields of Hesse Research, German Studies, World Literatures, and Celebrity Studies by exploring Hesse’s literary, cultural, and philosophical impact in the past, present, and future. It aims to go beyond the well-worn narratives and often stereotypical interpretations of Hermann Hesse as the “outsider” (Colin Wilson), the “wanderer” (Gunnar Decker), the natural counterpart to Thomas Mann (Eva Knöferl), the guru on the mountain (Ron Dart), or the originator of the internet (Timothy Leary).
25Colin Wilson, The Outsider (London: Gollancz, 1956); Gunnar Decker, The Wanderer and his Shadow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Eva Knöferl, Mythisches Erzählen bei Hermann Hesse und Thomas Mann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Ron Dart, Hermann Hesse: Phoenix Arising (independently published, 2020); Timothy Leary, “Artificial Intelligence: Hermann Hesse’s Prophetic Glass Bead Game,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 19, no. 4 (1986): 195–207. It seeks to understand, through case studies from around the world, what Hesse meant and continues to mean to readers who often encounter his works in translation and may know little of their cultural, political, historical, and private context, yet somehow find an almost intuitive connection. It seeks to determine what impact his works and his words had, and continue to have, on general readers, educators, literary theorists, writers, film makers, philosophers, ecologists, managers, scientists, and musicians around the world.
As Volker Michels asserts in his foreword, Hermann Hesse remains one of the great figures of world literature. He is currently listed on UNESCO’s
Index Translationum as the world’s thirty-fifth most translated author, with more than 1,500 translations of his works into 80 languages, and about 150 million of his books sold worldwide. We should acknowledge, though, that the number of translations and book sales tell us little about how his works have fared in the world. Indeed, our understanding of “world literature” and its transnational and transcultural reception has been radically transformed in the last two decades. David Damrosch,
What Is World Literature? (2003), Pascale Casanova,
The World Republic of Letters (2004), and Emily Apter,
The Translation Zone (2006), have laid the groundwork for rethinking and re-examining the world literature system, thereby igniting lively debates, for example about the “global novel.”
26Cf. Tim Parks, “The Dull New Global Novel,” The New York Review, February 9, 2010; Karolina Watroba, “World Literature and Literary Value: Is ‘Global’ The New ‘Low Brow?,’” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5, no. 1 (2018): 53–68. For German literature and its position in the global arena, several recent studies have contributed to further theoretical advances in the field.
27Thomas Beebee, German Literature as World Literature (2014); B. Venkat Mani, Recoding World Literature (2017); Sandra Richter, Eine Weltgeschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur (2019); James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield, ed., German in the World (2020); and Rebecca Braun and Benedict Schofield, ed., Transnational German Studies (2020).As Laurie Ruth Johnson notes, scholars have become alert to the fact that there is a mismatch between the realization that texts are crossing cultural and linguistic borders and the expectation that they are read in the context of their original gestation:
The notion that the German cultural canon is limited to the borders of a German nation-state has long been challenged; nevertheless, our language, literature, and culture departments also have been based on the nation-state model for a long time. The nation-state is largely a European invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the case of the German nation in particular, this invention was tied closely to the idea of a homogeneous German culture with a strong normative function. Consequently, histories of German culture and literature often are told from the “inside”—as the unfolding of a canon of works representing certain core values, with which every person who considers him- or herself “German” necessarily must identify.
28Laurie Ruth Johnson, “Introduction,” in Germany from the Outside: Rethinking German Cultural History in an Age of Displacement, ed. Laurie Ruth Johnson (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 2.Attempts to look at a German author “from the outside” may be rare but are nothing new in the case of Hesse. Some thirty years have passed since the third volume of Martin Pfeifer’s critical anthology
Hermann Hesses weltweite Wirkung: Internationale Rezeptionsgeschichte (Hermann Hesse’s Worldwide Impact: International Reception History) was published.
29Martin Pfeifer, ed., Hermann Hesse’s weltweite Wirkung: Internationale Rezeptionsgeschichte, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, 1979, and 1991). However, when Pfeifer compiled the first two volumes in the late 1970s, his focus was on the international reception history (the second part of the title), but not necessarily on Hesse’s global impact. That does not mean that his work is not extremely valuable, for it established beyond doubt that Hesse’s writings had successfully escaped the constrictions of the German language and cultural space. The first two volumes also evidenced the consequences of the “Hesse-Boom” that began in the United States and encouraged publishers around the world to commission translations and (where conditions allowed, see chapter 8) to introduce the writer in their respective markets, while the third volume summed up the situation when that wave of popularity had run its course.
30Vol. 1 contains chapters on: West and East Germany; France; Italy; Sweden; Finland; Yugoslavia; the Soviet Union; the USA; Canada; Great Britain; India; Japan; China; and Korea. Vol. 2 contains chapters on: the Netherlands; Norway; Czechoslovakia; Poland; Hungary; Romania; Bulgaria; Montenegro; Spain; Arabia; Iran; Pakistan; Australia; New Zealand; Argentina; and Israel. Volume 3 contains chapters on: Belgium; Denmark; Greece; Brazil, South Africa; as well as updates on Montenegro and Spain, the USA, China, Korea, and France. Each volume contains a list of translations and a bibliography.Most contributors suggested, but rarely managed to substantiate, some form of affinity between certain themes or messages in Hesse’s works and the social, cultural, and psychological dispositions of the audiences in their respective countries, be that the faith-based “sense of community” in Arabic countries (vol. 2: 129), the “fatalism” and “patience” of Brazilians (vol. 3: 100), or the “appreciation of red wine” in France (vol. 3: 153). In his introductions, Pfeifer endeavored to go beyond listing the numbers of translations and editions in different languages. For the first part of his title, namely the “weltweite Wirkung,” contained more than just the convenience of alliteration: it was the germ of an argument that the act of reading Hermann Hesse’s works had an “effect” on his global audience.
In the introduction to Volume 3, Pfeifer acknowledged the role of the Suhrkamp marketing strategy in spreading Hesse’s works, but also expressed his hope that readers might gain “insight into the forces that shaped the reception in each individual, that is, it should become clear how an individual or a multitude of individuals first encountered Hesse, and what motivated these readers to continue to engage with his work” (13, my translation).
In an attempt to come to grips with this more elusive “Wirkung,”
31Pfeifer, Hermann Hesses weltweite Wirkung, vol. 3, 14–28. Pfeifer speculated how Hesse intended to have an impact “as an expression of the echo in the individual” (14) and suggested that the main reason for the phenomenal worldwide Hesse reception was the author’s commitment to the “emancipation of the individual” (18), the “sublimation not of experiences per se, but of one’s own behavior” (19), and a “childlike enthusiasm for new experiences” whilst all the time exploring the “limits of what can be depicted” (27). Unfortunately, the rest of the volume, published more than a decade after the first two, did not reflect this new line of enquiry. In a rare exception, Marie Luisa Esteve Montenegro, in her chapter on Spain, wryly observed that Hesse’s success in that country was more a publishing than a literary one (162), but she also suggested that his reception had shifted. While in the 60s and 70s Hesse was read because of his “Problemfühligkeit” (sensitivity to problems, 166) for the individual, by the 80s he had become relevant for the social changes the country was going through.