What Do We Mean by “Global Impact?”

When thinking about how to explore Hesse’s impact in the twenty-first century, we should first note that the English word “impact” (with its connotations of “powerful effect,” and its use in Anglophone academia to measure the practical utility of research) can be an unfamiliar metaphor compared to the long familiar concept of “reception.”1The word “impact” is closely associated with measuring the social benefit of research, a practice that is highly problematic when it comes to the humanities. For the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK, for example, “impact” is defined in rather utilitarian terms as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.” https://www.ukri.org/about-us/research-england/research-excellence/ref-impact/. See also the 2023 “Hamburg Statement” of top British and German Universities: https://russellgroup.ac.uk/media/6152/joint-statement-u15-russell-group-reordered.pdf.

The German language does not have a direct equivalent, and uses different terms like “Wirkung,” “Auswirkung,” “Folgen,” “Einfluss,” perhaps even “Bedeutung.” However, we argue that “impact” goes beyond “reception” and is a particularly useful concept for approaching Hesse. As a first approximation, we can say that in contrast to “reception,” which, as Ika Willis has pointed out, often homes in on an “ideal” reader and surface criteria (publication and translation figures, reviews),2Cf. Ika Willis, Reception (London: Routledge, 2018), 69, 83–84. “impact,” as we understand it, is concerned with the “actual” reader, with what goes on beneath the surface, the psychological and spiritual effect. Here we build on the work of Rebecca Braun, who has theorized the concept in terms of an author’s cultural “influence”: “cultural impact refers to the whole process by which cultural products are assigned meaning in the world. […] It is a process that lies at the heart of cultural production and reception and needs to be grasped conceptually, as it ranges from an original act of transmission through multiple sites of reception to longer-term influence and resonances across the public domain.”3Rebecca Braun, “Introduction: Cultural Impact in Theory and Practice,” in Cultural Impact in the German Context: Studies in Transmission, Reception, and Influence, ed. Rebecca Braun and Lyn Marven (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 4.

For this volume, then, we define “impact” as the way readers, audiences, and viewers have engaged and continue to engage personally with Hesse’s works, in the adjacent and often overlapping fields of literature, culture, and philosophy. We do recognize, though, that it is difficult to provide empirical evidence for what are essentially private processes which may also unfold over extended periods of time. Furthermore, a critical approach must allow for mythologizations, for example, the sometimes over-hyped “Hesse-Boom,” or the possibility that an impact that may have positive elements for the individual may lead to negative outcomes for society, for example, that Hesse’s invitation to follow their “inward path” may induce his readers to political apathy. Nor must we forget that publishers are active players in this complex process; in Hesse’s case, this is evident in the country-specific marketing of the author and the production of ever new themed anthologies for different target groups.4Petra Hardt, Suhrkamp’s long-time director of global rights and licenses, emphasizes the significance of the Hesse backlist for the publisher’s financial bottom line: https://www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/article217153686/Petra-Hardt-ueber-deutsche-Dichter-und-Denker-auf-dem-Weltmarkt.html.

Crucially, Rebecca Braun acknowledges that “a discrepancy exists between the inherently positive expectation that significant cultural products ‘should have an impact’ on their world and the rather more complex manner in which the impact process actually unfolds. … This is where largely static, or synchronic, reception-based approaches to wider cultural analysis have quickly shown their limits” (10).

The reasons for these limits quickly become clear when we follow Braun’s distinction and consider impact as an evolving process, where perceptions of an author’s significance can wax and wane, and as a networked process, where different viewpoints and interests converge on an author’s work that are themselves dynamically changing over time; in Hesse’s case, on more than six decades of literary production and twelve decades of reader responses. For this project, then, the only viable approach is to offer a wide range of exploratory “impact case studies” in order to avoid a simple affirmative narrative.

Karolina Watroba helpfully reminds us that even the most “canonical” works of German literature can surprise us if we dispense with the expectation by many literary scholars that they were written for academic readers. And it is possible to read the canonical works of German literature with new eyes.5“The point, really, is that there are no best readers; there are just readers attuned to different aspects of the text, though some are listened to more than others.” Karolina Watroba, “The Anxiety of Difficulty,” The Point 27, April 26, 2022, https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-anxiety-of-difficulty/. Using Thomas Mann’s magnum opus Der Zauberberg as her example,6Karolina Watroba, Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). Watroba rehearses the advances in the field of World Literature in recent years (which itself displaced the category of national literatures as the most appropriate container for literary production and brought new emphasis on “bibliomigrancy,” the “physical and virtual migration of books”7B. Venkat Mani, Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 33.). But she also warns that such a focus does not tell us much about why certain texts are read, and by whom. She proposes a greater emphasis on the act of “closer reading,” ideally tracking the reactions of individual readers who left behind traces of their engagement with the books. Referring to the work of Rita Felski,8Cf. Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 38. Watroba suggests that these “readings” could be memoirs, works of fiction, critical essays, reflections on our own attachments, audience ethnographies, or online reviews. Engaging with the experiences of real-life readers instead of foregrounding the academic critic can mean “to study how texts move in the world, that is, what they do to their readers, and what readers do with them.”9Watroba, Mann’s Magic Mountain, 185. It is in this spirit that our contributors approach the challenge to identify Hesse’s global impact, for example by tracking online reading groups (Roberts) or identifying traces of Hesse in the works of writers in the USA and Japan (Esselborn).

The American poet and critic Adam Kirsch observes that “it is only because we have grown to think of humanity on a planetary scale that we start to demand a literature equally comprehensive.”10Adam Kirsch, The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016), 12. He warns that the “global novel” is not a unitary genre: