The volume offers original essays on Hermann Hesse’s global impact in three adjacent fields: literature, culture, and philosophy. While these fields are obviously overlapping, they provide a convenient shorthand to illustrate the sheer reach of Hesse’s impact, and the myriad different ways in which his writings have influenced his readers.
1. Literary Impact
John Pizer opens this section with a reflection on Hesse’s 1929 essay “A Library of World Literature.” Only recently translated into English by B. Venkat Mani, this text provides a fascinating insight into Hesse’s belief that “true education” can only be achieved by an individual’s sustained and unprejudiced exploration of the literatures of the world. Hesse understood this process as an “enrichment of our possibilities for life and happiness” and, in an almost utopian vision, as “eternal travel in the endless, an implication in the universe, a living within the timeless.”
1Hermann Hesse, “A Library of World Literature,” trans. B. Venkat Mani, Journal of World Literature 3, no. 4 (2018): 417–41. Pizer identifies this text as a vital link between the Goethean concept of “World Literature” and current academic discourses, but, more significantly, demonstrates the potential of Hesse’s decidedly “democratic” approach towards sharing our literary heritage.
Adam Roberts continues this thread, showing the extent to which the democratization of access in the digital age has enabled individuals and groups around the world to engage with Hesse’s works. These online communities can be understood as modern manifestations of the “Morgenlandfahrer,” Hesse’s seekers in The Journey to the East who travel through space and time, in this case united in spirit in synchronous and asynchronous communication. Roberts argues that to fully understand an author’s role on today’s world stage, one must examine that author’s refraction through digital media and their presence in the digital space.
Helga Esselborn-Krumbiegel provides us with another vector of Hesse’s literary impact, showing how writers in the USA, Japan, and Germany have creatively engaged with Hesse’s works, incorporating his themes and ideas into their own texts. By following the intertextual traces of Hesse within works by, inter alia, Thomas Pynchon, Haruki Murakami, and Maren Bohm, she discerns both a “culture of remembrance” and a continuing inspiration.
A key reason for Hermann Hesse’s global impact is that his work has been eagerly translated into eighty languages. Yoichi Yamamoto focuses on Hesse’s 1931 re-write of his short story “Das Nachtpfauenauge” (The Emperor Moth, 1911) as Jugendgedenken (Memories of Youth). This variant, virtually unknown to German or English readers today, has been translated into Japanese and has been a set text for pupils in Japanese Schools for more than seventy years. Yamamoto explores the significant changes in the text that reflect Hesse’s mastery of perspective and demonstrates how an almost forgotten short story from one culture can have an unexpected impact in another culture.
Staying with the translation of Hesse’s works, Christopher Newton tells the story of Hesse’s most important translator into English, Hilde Rosner. Given that many global readers will have encountered Hesse through her mediation, it is intriguing to discover the circumstances surrounding her 1951 translation of
Siddhartha. While criticized later for not meeting “high standards of accuracy, completeness, fidelity to the tone of the original, or even proper English,”
2Stanley Appelbaum, “Introduction,” in Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha: A Dual Language Book, ed. and trans. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), x. her version keeps ambiguity to a minimum and reflects her (for the time) radical approach: the prioritization of her target audience.
3For a comparison of different English translations of the book see Adrian Hsia, “Siddhartha,” in A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, ed. Ingo Cornils (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 149–70. Along the way, Newton debunks a few of the myths about Rosner’s translation that have been perpetuated in several biographies.
2. Cultural Impact
Broadening the focus to explore Hermann Hesse’s cultural impact, Oscar von Seth asks a question that Hesse scholars have rarely dared to ask: to what extent does the bond between men that lies at the center of so many of Hesse’s prose works (e.g., Emil and Demian, Siddhartha and Govinda, Knecht and Designori) challenge heteronormative conceptions of sexuality, relationality, and desire?
4Cf. Kamakshi P. Murti, “‘Ob die Weiber Menschen seyn?’: Hesse, Women, and Homoeroticism,” in A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, ed. Ingo Cornils (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 263–99. Building on the latest queer theory and using Hesse’s
Unterm Rad (Beneath the Wheel) as his example, von Seth argues that Hesse’s “diverse and complex portrayals” encourage queer communities to resist pressures of conformity.
Jennifer Walker cites the example of the (South) Korean pop phenomenon BTS, whose 2016 album Wings draws heavily on Hesse’s novel Demian. While the novel was already well known in the country, the group, initially a rather conventional “K-Pop” band, used a mixture of music and short videos to extract deeper meanings from the novel for their young audiences, questioning a culture perceived by them as claustrophobic and anti-individualistic. Walker demonstrates that BTS’s creative multimedia re-interpretations make Hesse’s (Jungian) message of individuation relevant for a new generation.
In her chapter on Hesse’s impact on mainland China, Chunhua Zhan reviews the various “waves” of reception and translations there before exploring how the author is discussed in internet fora and on social media platforms. Reflecting on Hesse’s well-known affinity with the rich tradition of Chinese culture, Zhan concludes that the independent spirit of Hesse’s works is consistent with the Taoist spirit that Chinese intellectuals admire.
5Cf. Xianyun Tang and Boren Zheng, “The Opposites and Unity: A Study of Chinese Taoist Thought found in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game,” Literature & Theology 34, no. 4 (2020): 503–9. At the same time, she observes, a small number of “awakening people” eagerly embrace his elegant language and message about individual conscience.
Shrikant Pathak and Girissha Tilak do not dwell on the widely assumed popularity of Hesse in India (a Western projection of a continuing “missionary” influence that is particularly rife in biographies and manifests itself in Conrad Rook’s 1972 exoticizing film adaptation of Siddhartha) or a possible cultural appropriation by Hesse, but rather explore a “reverse” cultural appropriation where several recent translations of Siddhartha into the Indian language Marathi, via the hands of publishers and translators with their own agendas, “de-exoticize” and decolonize the novel for their audiences.
Closing this section, Christiane Schönfeld examines the 2020 adaptation of Narcissus and Goldmund by the acclaimed Austrian film director Stefan Ruzowitzky. The film suffered from a premiere scheduled just when the world went into lockdown, which meant that it did not see a wide distribution. Schönfeld offers a sophisticated argument, considering Hesse’s avowed reluctance to see his works filmed alongside the “bankable” recognition factor of an adaptation of a modern literary classic, whilst critically assessing the impact of the film.
3. Philosophical Impact
Widening the focus even further, Karl-Josef Kuschel opens this section by demonstrating how Hesse’s idea of the unity of humankind developed in quite distinct stages. While this worldview was first formed during his three-month journey to Sumatra, Singapore, and Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka) in 1911, it took many years for Hesse to realize that this idea “was not just an ethno-political demand wrested from a world in chaos …, but also a deep religious-philosophical experience out of which an ethos, an ideal, a normative standard and motivation could grow.” Kuschel is skeptical, though, whether a concept of globalization based solely on technological progress and economic gain will lead to Hesse’s dream of greater intercultural understanding, a universal globalization of consciousness, and planetary solidarity.
In her chapter on Hesse’s love for gardening, Flavia Arzeni compares Hesse’s gardens in Gaienhofen, Bern, and Montagnola. She shows how Hesse’s favorite pastime, once ridiculed in the German press as a retreat from harsh reality, is now associated with therapeutic mental and physical health benefits and prefigured several modern trends, including mindfulness, a concern for our environment and our natural resources, the appreciation of working in and with nature, and the “Slow Movement.”
In their chapter on Hesse’s attitude towards technology, Thomas Taro Lennerfors, Thomas Cyron, and Michal Zawadzki demonstrate that Hesse had a complex understanding of technology in all its forms, reflecting his own experience of the paradigm shift from simple crafts to industrial manufacture during his lifetime. Instead of the anti-modern luddite his critics (and his fans) believe him to be, Hesse was aware of both the advantages and the pitfalls of technology. While his view on this subject was not as prescient as Walter Benjamin’s critique of technology in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Lennerfors, Cyron, and Zawadzki argue that Hesse can teach us how to live well with technology.
Carina Gröner examines the strong constructivist features in Siddhartha and Hesse’s narrative strategy, which supports the reader’s identification with the protagonist. By concentrating on the narrative voice and focalization in the novel, and then following the sequence of the protagonist’s “experiences”—understood as the basis for a constructivist learning cycle—Gröner is able to show how Hesse makes these experiences, stripped of any religious doctrines, accessible to the reader.
In the final chapter of the section, Laszlo V. Szabo makes the case for the therapeutic value of Hesse’s novels for readers suffering from depression and other mental health conditions. Hesse had first-hand experience of mental health challenges and worked through them not only in long psychoanalytical sessions with Josef Bernhard Lang and Carl Gustav Jung, but candidly wrote about his experiences, and pointed to potential remedies in Siddhartha (meditation and self-reflection), A Guest at the Spa (irony and psychosomatic therapy), and most notably in his novel Steppenwolf (healing through sensuality and social integration).
Concluding the volume, but also looking forward, is Neale Cunningham’s chapter on “Understanding Hesse’s Global Impact through the Notion of Spiritual Capital.” For many readers around the world, it is the spiritual dimension in Hesse’s works that engages them—the search for meaning in a materialistic world, but beyond religious dogma. We know that Hesse himself was alienated from his Pietist upbringing in his youth, and all his works represent a search for a wider, alternative spiritual home, as reflected in his imaginary
Life Story Briefly Told (1925) or his confessional
My Belief (1931).
6“Life Story Briefly Told,” in Hermann Hesse, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Theodore Ziolkowski (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 43–62; “My Belief,” in Hermann Hesse, My Belief: Essays in Life and Art, ed. Theodore Ziolkowski (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 177–80. Cunningham argues that “the potential for the formation of secular spiritual capital among readers of Hesse’s works offers a binding factor and a different concept of living in the world, linking self and other.”