1: Hermann Hesse’s Democratization of World Literature
John Pizer
In his study Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (2017), B. Venkat Mani underscores Hesse’s contribution to modernizing Goethe’s world literature paradigm by arguing that Hesse’s
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur (A Library of World Literature, 1929) “democratizes world literature for a public interested in engaging with literature.”
1B. Venkat Mani, Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 148. Mani notes that Hesse embraces the notion of acculturation through world literature as an individual predilection that will be reflected in the constitution of one’s own personal library, but that Hesse also highlights world literature’s universalizing spirit, which imbues the reader with a cosmopolitan outlook. On the other hand, as Daniel Purdy’s recent monograph
Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe (2021) demonstrates, Goethe’s focus with respect to the world literature paradigm that he was largely responsible for instigating centered on his own poetic needs, that is to say, his search for personal creative stimulation.
2Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), esp. 296–354. Indeed, there was nothing democratic in Goethe’s articulation of the concept made in scattered remarks in the late 1820s and early 1830s.
3These scattered remarks were collected by Fritz Strich and published as an appendix to his Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern: Francke, 1946), 397–400. This effort greatly stimulated engagements with the paradigm after the Second World War. Goethe deplored the mass marketing of popular literature in Germany. Subsequent discourse on world literature in Germany after the 1830s and up to the time Hesse published
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur emphasized mediation and commerce, but not the sort of flexibility based on individual circumstances that Hesse’s democratic approach proposes. In other words, Hesse does not suggest an inflexible canonically oriented, one-size-fits-all plan for those readers seeking acquaintance with the literature of the world. He even recognizes—unlike Goethe and subsequent German intellectuals prior to Hesse—that financial circumstances may also play a role in what books readers seeking cosmopolitan acculturation might buy. While his essay does have specific recommendations concerning what works from around the globe these readers might want to purchase, Hesse’s tolerant and socially conscious perspective allows one to conclude that his essay was novel in proposing a democratization of world literature as an educational paradigm. This democratization is more in tune with views from around the same time in the United States under the auspices of scholars like Richard Moulton than discourse in the first half of the twentieth century in Central Europe. Moulton was an English-born American scholar who wrote on such topics as the Bible in literature, Classical drama, and Shakespeare, but he also examined world literature as a pedagogical domain before this topic was introduced to the curriculum of American universities beginning in the 1920s. Hesse’s contribution to the discourse on world literature within the German-speaking world is unquestionably innovative when one considers that a pluralistic view of what constitutes works deserving of the appellation “world literature” is widespread in critical discourse in the twenty-first century. To be sure, Hesse is not directly responsible for this circumstance, given the fact that his treatise on world literature has only relatively recently been translated into English and other languages, but his perspective was ahead of his time in this regard. Thus, Hesse’s inclusivism can be engaged to counter the antidemocratic thought that is increasingly evident, even in the cultural sphere, in today’s world.
Mani himself is the first person to translate Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur into English; his rendering of this work into “A Library of World Literature” appeared in 2018. Given this work’s lack of availability to scholars not conversant with German until quite recently, one cannot plausibly argue that Hesse’s ideas on world literature have exercised a direct influence around the globe. Rather, Hesse’s impact in this regard in the twenty-first century is mostly confined to scholarship, particularly, as we will see, work produced by those acquainted with the world literature paradigm in general and Chinese literature in particular. Before I discuss this scholarship, however, the pioneering character of Hesse’s essay must first be established, and this can only be accomplished by briefly articulating the nature of German-language engagements with Goethe’s paradigm prior to the appearance of Hesse’s essay. First of all, I will show that Hesse himself misunderstood Goethe’s telos in articulating his paradigm, a misunderstanding that extends to Hesse’s citation of Johann Gottfried Herder, who did not use the term Weltliteratur in his writing but is correctly seen as strongly contributing to twentieth- and twenty-first-century engagements with the concept. Next, I will show that Hesse’s Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur did exert an influence on Thomas Mann’s instrumentalization of Goethe in his essay “Goethe als Repräsentant des bürgerlichen Zeitalters” (Goethe as Representative of the Bourgeois Age, 1932), written and published when the menace of Naziism was becoming acute in Germany. I will then show that Hesse’s democratic tendencies are evident in then-contemporary pedagogical engagements with world literature on the part of Moulton. While direct influence cannot be established in this regard, the comparison will highlight Hesse’s trailblazing contribution to Central European discourse on the paradigm. Finally, Hesse’s cosmopolitanism as expressed in his essay, progressive for 1920s Europe, will be investigated for its impact on twenty-first-century scholarship.
In 1913, Hesse edited an anthology of texts at the behest of a Leipzig publishing house and printed under the title
Das Meisterbuch. These works, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were primarily but not exclusively German; for example, the second work in the collection is a fairy tale by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. Hesse opens his brief afterword to this anthology by remarking that “since the time of Herder and the young Goethe, Germany is acquainted with the concept of world literature, and up to the present day no country on earth as much as the German has made such an effort to make the treasures and pleasures of foreign literatures their own.”
4Hermann Hesse, “Geleitwort,” in Das Meisterbuch, ed. Hermann Hesse (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, 1913), 352. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this chapter are my own. Hesse is correct in maintaining that Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the world center of collecting and translating works from around the globe (with a focus, not surprising, given the limitations on accessibility at that time, on European literature
5On Germany as the center of world literary commerce in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Andreas Huyssen, Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und Aneignung: Studien zur frühromantischen Utopie einer deutschen Weltliteratur (Zurich: Atlantis, 1969), and Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992).). To be sure, it was Herder rather than Goethe who was the truest instigator of the collection and spreading of, particularly, popular works from Europe, especially folk poetry.
6See the discussion in Karl Menges, “Particular Universals: Herder on National Literature, Popular Literature, and World Literature,” in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), esp. 201. As Mani notes in discussing the afterword to the 1913 anthology, Hesse draws on Goethe’s
Weltliteratur concept here “to endorse world literature’s mass accessibility, which was growing in the German-speaking world through the translation, editing, and popularization of world-literary works.”
7Mani, Recoding World Literature, 149.While Hesse was engaged at this time in a pedagogical mission to educate a broad spectrum of the German population by giving them affordable access, in the form of an anthology, to leading works from the (almost exclusively) European literary tradition, this was the aim neither of Goethe nor Herder, who lived at a time of predominant illiteracy and wrote and/or collected for a tiny, acculturated elite. Goethe deplored the first flowering of literary massification in his age, unlike Hesse, who was clearly attempting to further this process by putting together the anthology. In remarks on world literature made in the last years of his life, Goethe argued that the serious-minded would vainly resist the multitude of popular works brought about by the European commodification of the literary marketplace and must resolutely stand their ground until this current (“Strömung”) has passed. This comment occurs in the context of his more famous pronouncement that, given the rapid development of transportation infrastructure, the world is only an expanded fatherland.
8Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Betrachtungen zur Weltliteratur,” Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler, vol. 14 (Zurich: Artemis, 1949), 914–15. With respect to the world literature paradigm, Goethe’s fear stands in marked contrast to Hesse’s democratic inclusiveness, although the latter also adhered to certain canonic standards, as his selection of largely well-known and esteemed works for the 1913 anthology attests.
Goethe is justly credited not only with instigating the discourse on world literature as a discrete paradigm, but also broadening the Enlightenment’s Eurocentric focus by an expansive inclination to consider works from India, China, and the Muslim world. He famously lauded Kalidasa’s
Shakuntala9Goethe, “Indische Dichtungen,” Werke, vol. 14, 718–19. and, in an even more widely cited passage in his conversations with his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, praised China’s ability to generate exquisite prose at a time Europe’s ancestors were still living in forests. It is in the context of this conversation that Eckermann notes Goethe’s proclamation that the term “national literature” is rather passé, and all must do their part to accelerate (“beschleunigen”) this new epoch.
10Goethe, Gespräche mit Eckermann, Werke, vol. 24, 228–29. However, Goethe, while certainly an eager participant in the scientific and cultural debates of his age, lacked the pedagogical and democratizing spirit that informs Hesse’s engagement with European and Asian works in
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. Hesse was the first to exhibit this inclination, at least in connection with the world literature paradigm, in the German-speaking world. Goethe’s focus was far more self-centered. In the context particularly of his immersion into Chinese works, Purdy notes that Goethe “was not interested in organizing knowledge so much as stimulating his own ability to write poetry. Rather than positing and applying an overarching concept of humanity and poetry, his readings were focused on detecting resemblances between his own writing and that of others.”
11Purdy, Chinese Sympathies, 10–11. Beyond this self-interest, Goethe, as well as Herder, was also keenly focused on the commercial aspects of world literary trade. As Christian Moser has indicated, particularly Herder tended to regard Germany as the modern-day equivalent of ancient Phoenicia, the nodal point of global interchange and traffic.
12Christian Moser, “Von der Weltgabe zum Weltverkehr: Zur Problematik eines globalen Literaturkonzepts bei Johann Gottfried Herder und Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,” in Weltliteratur in der longue durée, ed. Schamma Schahadat and Annette Werberger (Leiden: Brill/Fink, 2021), 110–14.To be sure, neither Goethe nor Herder focused much attention on the actual economics of world literary trade. Rather, as Moser notes, they resorted to economic metaphors in elucidating the increasing interconnectedness between the various nations with respect to literary production and distribution.
13Moser, “Von der Weltgabe zum Weltverkehr,” 124. Nevertheless, Goethe wrestled with the circumstance that even though, ideally speaking, poetic works are a common good of humanity, this gift to the world has been replaced by a tendency to turn books into yet another commodity offered by the various nations on the international marketplace, a commodity that turns the gift of literature into a product simply owned by those who buy it. While Herder in his early work elucidated international literary relations as marked by a process of reciprocal assimilation, according to Moser, this orientation is increasingly replaced in his later oeuvre “durch die Metaphorik des Tauschs und des Handels”
14Moser, “Von der Weltgabe zum Weltverkehr,” 106. (by the metaphor of exchange and trade). This focus on
Weltliteratur as international literary commerce becomes predominant in German-language discourse on the paradigm throughout most of the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. World literature as constituting a global marketplace is a common trope at this time, and Goethe’s views are cited by such early twentieth-century scholars as Ernst Elster to support this economic orientation.
15See the discussion in John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 69–70. This circumstance must be underscored in order to appreciate the nature of Hesse’s
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur with respect to discourse on world literature in the German-speaking world.
What constitutes the innovative character of Hesse’s essay? Clearly, the emergence of global capitalism in, particularly, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries influenced even such figures as Goethe and Herder to react to the commodification of the book trade by beginning to regard the heretofore “common good” of the poetic world as a product bought, sold, and exchanged. Literature as a global commodity came to dominate much discourse on
Weltliteratur in Germany up to the time of Hesse. This Swabian, by contrast, treated world literature in a non-instrumental manner. Also contrary to the earlier discourse, Hesse did not tend to be prescriptive in his recommendations for creating a library of world literature. In contrast to the earlier discussions in the German-speaking world, Hesse was not interested in dictating a literary canon. Instead, as Gunnar Decker has argued, Hesse’s essay revealed him to be “a lover of any book that helped people lead more meaningful lives. Yet all persons had to discover for themselves what that actually entailed; there was no ready-made instruction manual one could follow.”
16Gunnar Decker, Hermann Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow, trans. Peter Lewis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 567. Decker indicates that the reverence Hesse displayed for books in Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur “was a spiritual legacy of that kind of mysticism that the Pietism of his childhood had also dealt in” (567). To be sure, much of Hesse’s essay consists of brief elucidations of literary works, primarily from Europe and Asia, the readings of which he feels would enrich the lives of his readers. These include works by Jewish authors, and even Hesse’s extremely cursory overview of such writings led to the essay’s proscription by the Nazi regime in Germany.
17See Mani, Recoding World Literature, 175–76. Rather conventionally, Hesse argues that works can be categorized as world literature only if they stand the test of time, that is to say, works that have not been forgotten or consigned to oblivion (“untergegangen”) during the course of a few centuries.
18Hesse, Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur (1929; Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978), 12. This is also available in the Sämtliche Werke edition as follows: Hermann Hesse, “Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001–2007) [=SW], vol. 14, 395–425. Most importantly for our purposes, Hesse claims that the choice of what works of world literature one purchases and with which one acquaints oneself is entirely personal, depending on the individual’s time, monetary resources, and other circumstances.
19Hesse, Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, 4. Hesse realizes that the canonic status of works is subject to change over time, and even a permanent fixture in the canon such as Goethe will be understood disparately by different generations of readers.
20Hesse, Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, 29–31. This insight anticipates the hermeneutic views of such twentieth-century philosophers as Hans-Georg Gadamer. However, contrary to Gadamer and, for that matter, Goethe, Hesse did not regard traditional, prescriptive acculturation (
Bildung) as a guiding principle in his lifelong immersion into the world of books. Rather, consistent with his tendency to recommend that his readers study works from around the globe based primarily on their own individual affinities and circumstances, Hesse’s choice of reading material was guided by the joys of new discoveries, new passions, a special, perhaps momentary, infatuation (“Verliebtheit”).
21Hesse, Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, 34. As Martin Pfeifer has indicated, Hesse engaged in an entirely “autodidactic study of world literature” by tenaciously immersing himself in the works of his grandfather’s library when he was a young man,
22Martin Pfeifer, “Hermann Hesse und der Buchhandel: Zu Hesses 90. Geburtstag am 2. Juli und zu seinem 5. Todestag am 9. August,” in Über Hermann Hesse, vol. 2: 1963–1977, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 62. and this personal experience shaped the view expressed in
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur that the essay’s readers must ultimately be guided by their own judgment and circumstances in putting together a personal library.
Pfeifer’s brief essay “Hermann Hesse und der Buchhandel” (Hermann Hesse and the Book Trade, 1967) usefully underscores the fact that there is a financial dimension to Hesse’s thoughts on putting a library together as expressed in
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. Pfeifer highlights Hesse’s argument that one should not simply read books, but also buy them. However, Hesse does not argue that making such purchases is a positive activity simply because these purchases further the book trade and thereby feed book dealers and authors, but that the ownership of books brings about its own pleasures for the purchaser, for the individual who is putting together a library. Hesse’s perspective in this regard was obviously shaped by his own youthful experience as a purveyor of books. He expressed the enjoyment he felt at that time from dealing in older, rare books. Pfeifer concludes that Hesse could not have been better prepared for comprehending “die Bedingungen seines Dichterberufes” (the conditions of his profession as poet) than through his youthful experience in the book trade.
23Pfeifer, “Hermann Hesse und der Buchhandel,” 65.Pfeifer’s observation is useful in understanding the economic dimension latent in
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. In urging his readers to buy books in order to build their own personal library, Hesse does not regard such purchased works as commodities, the objects of the commodification of the book trade Goethe and Herder saw as a nascent reality in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and a circumstance highlighted by a number of scholars in engagements with the world literature paradigm up to and after the publication of Hesse’s essay. For example, Elster’s influential essay “Weltliteratur und Literaturvergleichung” (World Literature and the Comparison of Literature, 1901) has as its thesis that Goethe’s term
Weltliteratur simply underscores the dawning of international literary commerce in Goethe’s age. Elster argues that the international market for the book trade was being established at that time, and that this development is what Goethe himself intended his concept to signify.
24See the discussion in Pizer, The Idea of World Literature, 69–70. Rather than focusing on the business aspect of book selling, Hesse saw the purchase of books as an almost sensual pleasure that will lead to the intellectual/spiritual pleasure the purchasers will feel once the books take their place on the bookshelves of the purchasers’ homes. Hesse was not alone in conveying an emotional delight in the buying of books. At almost the same time Hesse published
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, Walter Benjamin expressed, as Mani puts it, “the euphoric ecstasy of acquiring books” in his “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus: Eine Rede über das Sammeln” (Unpacking My Library: a Speech about Collecting, 1928), although, contrary to Hesse, Benjamin commented about “the tedious agony of organization and collation.”
25Mani, Recoding World Literature, 134. Both Benjamin and Hesse clearly treated books as the pleasurable object of purchasing and not as primarily saleable commodities, and with respect to Goethe’s
paradigm, this is another pioneering contribution on the part of Hesse to the discourse on world literature in the German-speaking world.
While
Weltliteratur has been a discursive paradigm in the German-speaking world that has generated considerable debate and controversy since the age of Goethe, it has been a pedagogical domain at American colleges and universities in the United States since the early twentieth century.
26See the discussion in Pizer, The Idea of World Literature, 83–114. One of its early pioneers was Richard Moulton, whose
World Literature and Its Place in General Culture (1911) is relevant because its democratic, flexible orientation with respect to recommended reading anticipates that of Hesse. Of course, Hesse’s
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur was pitched to educated individuals in the general public domain rather than professional educators. Nevertheless, it is of interest how much Moulton’s perspective anticipates that of Hesse in arguing that “World Literature may be different for different individuals of the same nation,” a variability shaped by “the individuality of the student, or of some teacher who has influenced him.”
27Richard G. Moulton, World Literature and Its Place in General Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 7. For more on Moulton’s wide-ranging pedagogical engagement with world literature, see Sarah Lawall, “Richard Moulton and the Idea of World Literature,” in No Small World: Visions and Revisions of World Literature, ed. Michael Thomas Carroll (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996), 3–19. For Moulton, curricular choices are informed by one’s own nation and Moulton consistently emphasized that his own perspective stems from a specifically Anglo-American point of view, just as, according to Moulton, scholars and pedagogues of world literature in other countries can and should orient themselves based on their unique nation-based cultural identities. Here, too, Moulton anticipates Hesse’s perspective, although the cosmopolitan Swabian did not overtly argue for a library shaped by German proclivities. Rather, the focus on German-language literature is evident in the disproportionate attention he gives in his essay to work originally written in this language, a focus already apparent in his introduction to and anthologizing practice in
Das Meisterbuch. To be sure, Hesse was quite progressive with respect to German-language engagement with
Weltliteratur in the first half of the twentieth century in his recommendation that one’s library have a broad selection of Asian works, particularly from China and India. As we will see, it is especially this element in his essay that has influenced scholarship in the present day.
This brings us to the central issue of how Hesse’s essay impacts recent discussions of world literature as a discursive paradigm. Before discussing such relatively current influence, I would like to consider the essay’s likely impact on the thought of Thomas Mann. For despite the voluminous scholarship on the literary, epistolary, and personal relationship between Hesse and Mann, this aspect has been underappreciated. In an essay written prior to the looming onset of National Socialism and prior to the publication of Hesse’s
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, a work entitled “Nationale und internationale Kunst”
(National and International Art, 1922), Mann discerned the concrete contemporary realization of Goethe’s
Weltliteratur proclamation as a deplorable homogenizing of all Western literatures, a cosmopolitanism run amok, where Scandinavian and Russian elements degenerate into the Parisian, a synthesis of Dostoevsky and America takes place. Mann terms this cultural levelling “the internationalization of art.”
28Thomas Mann, “Nationale und internationale Kunst,” in Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1960), 871. However, in “Goethe als Repräsentant des bürgerlichen Zeitalters” written and published in 1932, on the eve of the National Socialist ascension to power, Mann underscores Goethe’s view that poetry was a common good of humanity, that the nascent age of world literature was particularly important for the Germans and presented the challenge that Germans break out of their “pedantic arrogance.”
29Thomas Mann, “Goethe als Repräsentant des bürgerlichen Zeitalters,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, 326. Nevertheless, Mann characterizes Goethe as a “national author” who spoke as a seventy-year-old to the entire nation in promulgating his
Weltliteratur paradigm. On the occasion of Hesse’s own seventieth birthday in 1947, Mann published a laudation in which he emphasized, as he did in 1922, that national individualism is dying out. However, he explicitly praises
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur not only for evincing Hesse’s enormous erudition, but for its inherently German character. With respect to Hesse, according to Mann, Goethe’s concept of world literature, is “der natürlichste, heimatlichste”
30Thomas Mann, “Hermann Hesse zum siebzigsten Geburtstag,” in Hermann Hesse—Thomas Mann: Briefwechsel, ed. Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp/S. Fischer, 1968), 132. (the most natural, the most homeland-based). While Mann wrote his laudation some fifteen years after his “Goethe als Repräsentant des bürgerlichen Zeitalters,” his intertwining of Germanness and cosmopolitan breadth and inclusiveness in that essay leads to the conclusion that his reading of Hesse’s
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur already influenced the contours of his later, positive take on Goethe’s paradigm in the text written on the eve of the National Socialist ascension to power.
The reception of Hesse’s essay in the second half of the twentieth century was limited by its unavailability in translation into most languages. Mani provided the first English-language translation of Hesse’s text as “A Library of World
Literature” in a 2018 issue of the
Journal of World Literature. In introducing his translation, Mani remarks in a footnote that
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur had previously been rendered into Japanese, Italian, Korean, French, and Chinese in that chronological order.
31B. Venkat Mani, introduction to Hermann Hesse, “A Library of World Literature,” trans. B. Venkat Mani, Journal of World Literature 3, no. 4 (2018): 417n1. The preponderance of translations into the most widely-spoken languages of the Far East undoubtedly reflects Hesse’s own praise and elucidation of literatures from that region in his essay, an unusual proclivity in German-language discourse on world literature in his time, an attention that not only mirrors his fascination with the Far East in his own imaginative works but is singled out in twenty-first-century scholarly engagements with
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. Nevertheless, Mani is accurate in noting that compared to other enunciations of world literature as a discursive paradigm from the German-speaking world by Goethe (1827), Marx and Engels (1848), and Erich Auerbach (1952), Hesse’s treatise on world literature “is virtually unknown, especially in Anglophone scholarship.”
32Mani, intro. to Hesse, “A Library of World Literature,” 48. I analyze all three of the enunciations on the world literature paradigm mentioned here by Mani in The Idea of World Literature.It is too soon to say whether Mani’s translation will inspire broader Anglophone engagements with Hesse’s essay, but this work has certainly not been ignored in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond by those conversant with German. The reception of Hesse’s treatise in the German Democratic Republic is quite interesting in this regard, for if the expansive, democratic tendencies of
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur drew Thomas Mann’s praise and likely somewhat shaped his own engagement with Goethe’s paradigm in 1932, precisely these nuances drew negative comments in the GDR. In his essay on Hesse’s reception in East Germany, the title of which—“Hermann Hesse heute in der DDR” (Hermann Hesse Today in the GDR)—shows its dated character (it was published in a volume which appeared in 1979), Klaus Walther demonstrates that critics in the GDR accused Hesse of creating an imaginary, idealized world in
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, which they also characterized as lacking a core concept as well as being eclectic and obsolete. Walther defends Hesse in noting that this author did not intend to write a literary history but was reflecting the image of his own library of world literature.
33Klaus Walther, “Hermann Hesse heute in der DDR,” in Hermann Hesses weltweite Wirkung: Internationale Rezeptionsgeschichte, vol. 2, ed. Martin Pfeifer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 183. I would argue that precisely Hesse’s flexibility, tolerance, and breadth of vision is what irritates these totalitarian state intellectuals, as it would be natural for dogmatic Marxists to equate flexibility with a lack of conceptual focus and a reverence for tradition with obsolescence. After all, precisely this expansiveness and flexibility drew the praise of the French scholar René Étiemble, who wrote in 1974 in an essay entitled (in translation) “Should We Rethink the Notion of World Literature?” that he was completely in accord with the views of “Hermann Hesse, who refuses to back any preconceived program of world literature.”
34René Étiemble, “Should We Rethink the Notion of World Literature? (1974),” trans. Theo D’Haen, in World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 95.As I indicated at the outset of this chapter, Hesse’s democratic inclusiveness and expansiveness in connection with world literature, his flexibility with respect to what one might include in one’s library in selecting books written in many parts of the world in a variety of languages, was groundbreaking in the German-speaking world. However,
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur did not necessarily have a direct influence on subsequent discourse concerning the
Weltliteratur paradigm, although it did demonstrably impact the thought of such twentieth-century icons as Thomas Mann and René Étiemble
.35Hesse’s views concerning Weltliteratur also had an impact on the decisions made by his publisher on what books from around the globe would be accepted into their catalog, particularly after the expanded edition of Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur appeared in print in 1929. See Ingo Cornils, “A Model European? Hermann Hesse’s Influence on the Suhrkamp Verlag,” German Life and Letters 68, no. 1 (2015): 54–65. Hesse’s refusal to propose a pantheon of world literature shaped by the dictates of a tightly circumscribed acculturation,
36For a contrary view that maintains that Hesse’s essay, despite its nod toward global inclusiveness, was actually informed by a largely conventional perspective of acculturation as an obligatory immersion into traditional canonic works of German literature, see Leo Kreutzer, “WELTLITERATUR! Weltliteratur? Zur kulturpolitischen Diskussion eines verfänglichen Begriffs,” Welfengarten: Jahrbuch für Essayismus 6 (1996): 213–30, esp. 213–15. an ideal of
Bildung still sustained well into Hesse’s lifetime, has been validated by the virtual disappearance of this prescriptive tendency in the new millennium. His non-instrumental embrace of, particularly, Asian works as worthy of inclusion in a German library would certainly not incur much opposition at the present time, as is evident in recent scholarship on the world literature paradigm by such noted comparativists as David Damrosch, Aamir Mufti, Haun Saussy, Alexander Beecroft, and others who analyze world literature on a global scale. However, how much of a role Hesse’s essay played in this regard is difficult to discern, even if we accept that his fictional works with a Far East setting and atmosphere, especially
Siddhartha (1922), played a major role in kindling interest within the Western world for the culture and philosophy of India as well as the Far East. Thus, I will confine my discussion in the remaining pages of this chapter to a few important twenty-first-century scholarly works that do entail a discussion of
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, and thus directly reflect the impact of Hesse’s unique articulation of the world literature paradigm in the present day. This focus will be on scholarship that seeks to deepen the dialogue with Indian and Far Eastern thought evident in
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur and in Hesse’s broader engagement with this region in his life and works, but I will also take a more expansive look at Mani’s engagement with this text.
The late scholar Adrian Hsia devoted much of his career to exploring the affiliations between Hesse and the Far East, and his 2009 essay “Goethe, Hesse, Richard Wilhelm und die Weltliteratur” particularly highlights how
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur provides insights into the culture and philosophy of China as mediated through the filter of Goethe’s paradigm. Richard Wilhelm was a noted German Sinologist who lived in China for twenty-five years and published a number of books, mostly in the 1920s, on Chinese thought and lifeways. In
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, Hesse lauds Wilhelm’s translations of Chinese classics as one of the most significant events in German intellectual life and underscores how Wilhelm was completely at home in the Chinese cultural milieu of his time.
37Hesse, Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, 39–41. Hsia notes that Hesse saw in Goethe a representative of ideal humanism, a humanism that postulated one must search for the foreign in the self and the self in the foreign. He argues that Hesse’s reading of the I Ching (late ninth century BCE) in Wilhelm’s rendering influenced the composition of
Der Steppenwolf (1927), but Hesse’s relationship to Chinese culture was also shaped by Goethe’s engagement with this domain.
38Adrian Hsia, “Goethe, Hesse, Richard Wilhelm und die Weltliteratur,” Hermann-Hesse-Jahrbuch 4 (2009): 43. Wilhelm also praised Goethe for his dialogue with Chinese thought. In his concluding paragraph, Hsia makes the trenchant observation that
Goethe announced the advent of world literature, Hesse furthered it and completed Goethe’s representation through his own life and work. We who study the works of both poets must make our contribution, modest though it may be, to sustaining and further developing world literature.
39Hsia, “Goethe, Hesse, Richard Wilhelm und die Weltliteratur,” 58.In issuing this challenge, Hsia concomitantly makes Hesse into a role model for contemporary scholars of the world literature paradigm.
Hsia elucidates the nexus between Goethe, contemporary scholars of world literature such as Fawzi Boubia (who contributed to the effort to expand Goethe’s paradigm beyond the Eurocentric focus of many of its interpreters), Hesse, and Wilhelm. Hsia thereby initiates his own early twenty-first-century world literary dialogue. Echoing Boubia, Hsia also pleads for a greater inclusiveness with respect to the global dimensions of such scholarly conversations. Hsia discerns a tendency, still evident in late twentieth-century scholarship, to exclude discussions of the literature of Asia and Africa but is encouraged by the expansiveness in this regard by contemporary scholars of world literature discourse, such as Martin Bollacher and the previously-mentioned Étiemble. Hsia clearly regards Goethe and Hesse as trailblazers in establishing a truly global conception of
Weltliteratur.
40Hsia, “Goethe, Hesse, Richard Wilhelm und die Weltliteratur,” 58.While Hsia draws on a network of figures and discourses in order to illuminate the context of Hesse’s
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur from an early twenty-first-century perspective and to urge contemporary scholars to continue the work and further the goals of Goethe and Hesse in maintaining and developing
Weltliteratur as a dialogue among the nations, for “Weltliteratur ist das Leben unserer Welt”
41Hsia, “Goethe, Hesse, Richard Wilhelm und die Weltliteratur,” 58. (World literature is the life of our world), Chunhua Zhan’s article “Hermann Hesse’s concept of world literature and his critique on Chinese literature,” published in 2018, has as its central focus Hesse’s many reviews of Chinese works in German translation. However, the beginning and conclusion of Zhan’s essay add some new dimensions to recent scholarship on
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur and reveal one of its most recent critical impacts. In summarizing the contents of Hesse’s treatise, Zhan notes that Hesse felt an immersion into world literature nourished an individual’s ability to achieve development both mentally and spiritually, that world literature was defined by quality rather than quantity, and that a lively, personalized interest rather than the fulfillment of rote duty was key to a positive interaction with the literature of the globe.
42Chunhua Zhan, “Hermann Hesse’s concept of world literature and his critique on Chinese literature,” Neohelicon 45 (2018): 283. Toward the close of her article, Zhan draws attention to an article Hesse wrote at the invitation of a Swedish newspaper in 1935 in which he draws on Goethe’s
Weltliteratur paradigm to evoke the world as a common home for all peoples, to assert that Goethe’s concept has not disappeared in Germany, and that one can see it is still effective (“wirksam”). In commenting on this newspaper article, Zhan correctly asserts that in the twentieth century
few writers have paid as much attention to the concept of world literature as Hesse had done. Hesse not only edited and published works of world literature himself, but also tried to explain it, promote it, and give it a precise and classic connotation, considered it as the last common spirit to broaden and enrich one’s own language and literature through empathetic translation!
43Zhan, “Hermann Hesse’s concept of world literature,” 296.Zhan’s article furthers the scholarship on Hesse’s relationship to the world literature paradigm by pointing out that this engagement is evident not only in Hesse’s writing on the subject, but in his editorial, publishing, and promotional activities as well. It thus comports well with the introduction to the essay collection
German in the World: The Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies, where James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield assert that Goethe’s
Weltliteratur paradigm in the present day “asks us to think about the global positioning of German-language culture more structurally, in terms of networks, flows, and literary systems, and the people that power those systems: authors, translators, publishers, as well as texts and their contexts.”
44James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield, “Introduction: German in Its Worlds,” in German in the World: The Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies, ed. James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020), 7. Zhan’s article indicates that, through
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur but more broadly in all the significant world-literary activities Hodkinson and Schofield identify as issues with which contemporary investigators of German Studies might engage, Hesse was a pioneer, a mediator through his broad involvement with the world of books in the German-speaking domain as well as in the wider global networks in which this domain is and was positioned. This is also evident in his correspondences with writers from many nations, such as T. S. Eliot. Zhan shows us that Hesse was one of the significant figures in much of the twentieth century who helped “power those systems” of which Hodkinson and Schofield speak. In this regard, Hesse serves as an inspiration in the twenty-first century to those who wish to contribute to not only identifying but also promulgating “networks, flows, and literary systems,” particularly in the area of German-language literature and culture. This identification and promulgation, as Hodkinson and Schofield indicate, is and will continue to be a seminal aspect of world literature discourse in the twenty-first century, and Hesse is a role model for this discourse.
Zhan ends her essay by noting that while Goethe’s age marked the temporal inception of world literature as a discursive paradigm, “it is Hesse, who has ushered in a new era both for theory and for practice which greatly enriched the construction of world literature in the early twentieth century. Hesse further fostered the great ideals through his own critique and creation especially referring to oriental literature.”
45Zhan, “Hermann Hesse’s concept of world literature,” 300. The articles by Hsia and Zhan thus show that Hesse has inspired further work on this construction in the new millennium, particularly with respect to highlighting Hesse’s engagement with Asian (mostly Chinese) literature.
I will conclude with a more in-depth examination of B. Venkat Mani’s engagement with
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur in
Recoding World Literature because, among the spate of books focused on the concept of world literature to appear in the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century,
46Among the best known of these works are David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (2003), Emily Apter, Against World Literature (2013), Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (2015), and Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (2016). it is, to my knowledge, the only one to treat Hesse’s text in a more than cursory manner. Mani discerns Germany’s seminal role in shaping discourse on the world literature paradigm. More than previous discussions of the concept, Mani’s
Recoding World Literature shows how politics, history, and material conditions shape this discourse. Distribution and printing costs strongly impact the book trade, and political ideology clearly prevented Hesse’s democratic approach to constituting one’s personal library, guided by a progressive attitude to the literary output of all peoples, including Jews, from gaining traction after the National Socialist takeover of Germany in 1933. As previously noted, the National Socialist government proscribed Hesse’s text simply because it contained a brief discussion of works written by Jews that he refused to cut. Mani coins the term “bibliomigrancy” as an all-encompassing designation for the conditions that must be prevalent in order for a book to be coded first as a work of national literature, and then potentially recoded as belonging to the domain of world literature. The role of libraries, both the traditional physical institutions established in buildings and now often virtual, is central to Mani’s discussion of bibliomigrancy, and he credits Hesse with being the first writer specifically to underscore the inherent interconnectedness between libraries and world literature or, more precisely, how libraries mediate the status of works as world literature. For Hesse, in Mani’s view,
Bildung does not have an instrumental function serving to endow an individual with a set of skills, but rather is a broad path for imbuing life with meaning, for understanding the past and, concomitantly, being able courageously to face the future.
47Mani, Recoding World Literature, 148–49.Mani credits Hesse with both grasping the material and temporal conditions that help shape how one constitutes one’s own library and linking such conditions to a
necessarily democratic approach to putting together
a library of world literature. One can see this by underscoring the first word in the title of Hesse’s essay; Hesse’s designation
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur already signals his non-prescriptive approach, anticipating the essay’s perspective that the choice in constituting the contents of a library is always an individual one. Hesse’s importance for Mani’s thinking about the world literature paradigm is evident in his drawing upon the author of
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur in the penultimate paragraph of
Recoding World Literature: “World literature is anything but a detached engagement with the world. As Hermann Hesse put it, our love for books and our desire for reading will determine our relationship to world literature.”
48Mani, Recoding World Literature, 249. It is to be hoped that Mani’s recent translation into English of
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, which now makes the work available for the globe’s vast Anglophone population, will further the impact of Hesse’s inspiring views concerning the
Weltliteratur paradigm and so help further to shape, in a positive, democratic direction, our relationship to world literature in the twenty-first century.