Digital spaces devoted to Hesse vary in subject matter and format. Some are merely informative (such as online encyclopedias, literary databases, or documentaries hosted on media outlets like YouTube). Some internet users have appropriated Hesse and his image for their own arts and crafts (sometimes sold on host sites like Etsy). Blogs sometimes find inspiration in Hesse and proffer his thought to others for guidance. But perhaps most prevalently, people create online communities to discuss Hesse’s work in detail. What, though, is a “community” in a digital context? According to researchers of Instructional Technology, an online or digital community forms around the discourse of a collective interest: it is a “group of participants in a distance-based environment with a shared purpose and the relationship among them including their sense of belonging, trust, and interaction.”
1W. A. Sadera, et al., “The Role of Community in Online Learning Success,” MERLDOT: Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 5, no. 3 (2009): 278. That digital communities are both “distance-based” and have “shared purpose” are the most crucial factors that define them. All of a digital community’s members equally
decide to join, and their meeting place is the internet, which erases the borders of a “nation” (in Damrosch’s sense of the term) and opens a space that enables its members to congregate with others around collective interests that they might have otherwise never been able to share.
One such digital community is the Aldea Book Club. Originally formed by three members who met in Monterrey, Mexico, the club has moved to the Zoom platform, where participants from all corners of North America meet regularly to discuss literature. The club selects which texts to read for each session by rotating between individual members’ suggestions then collectively voting on which text to read. In May of 2021, the club elected to read Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (Steppenwolf, 1927). I joined the group for the Der Steppenwolf session in 2021, then I met with them again in May 2022 to revisit the text and to observe their engagement with it. The club chose to read this novel because some members recalled having read Siddhartha when younger and wanted to reconsider Hesse’s work from a more mature perspective.
The Aldea Book Club’s primary organizer Adrián Gonzalez claims that each of his two recent readings of
Der Steppenwolf brought different understandings because each reading was approached from a different vantage point. Revisiting it in May 2022, he says, “felt like reading it for the first time, truly.”
2Adrián Gonzalez, Interview, June 5, 2022. Some of the group had, since their first reading of the novel, read and discussed Nietzsche’s
Twilight of the Idols (1889) and
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) as well as Tolstoy’s
War and Peace (1865–69). Gonzalez says that these three works opened new interpretive lenses through which to read
Der Steppenwolf, noting that knowledge of Nietzsche’s philosophy made Hesse’s direct employment of Nietzschean concepts in
Der Steppenwolf transparent. But, the club observes, the novel is not solely Nietzschean; it embodies a variety of philosophies. In particular, Gonzalez detects undertones of ancient philosophical thought, such as Stoicism (as laid out in Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations and Epictetus’s
Discourses) in the protagonist Harry Haller’s musings on twentieth-century bourgeois complacency. Having read and discussed texts that broadened their understanding of multiple Western philosophies, the Aldea Book Club interprets Haller as a vehicle through which Hesse explores the countless, conflicting facets of the self that trigger existential crises. By interacting with a diverse group of literary minds in this digital space, this community was thus able to read the text multiple times in their lives and reevaluate it from different vantage points.
Gonzalez says that the group’s enthusiasm for
Der Steppenwolf has endured more than many of their other selected texts. Consisting of members primarily in their thirties and forties, the group’s fervor for the novel contradicts a popular contention that Hesse only appeals to adolescents. In a 2018
New Yorker article titled “Hermann Hesse’s Arrested Development,” for instance, poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch argues that Hesse is both canonical and “almost perpetually unfashionable among critics.… In America today, Hesse is usually regarded by highbrows as a writer for adolescents.”
3Adam Kirsch, “Hermann Hesse’s Arrested Development,” New Yorker, November 12, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/hermann-hesses-arrested-development. For Kirsch, “most adults grow out of” the core ideas found in Hesse’s novels: “Hesse’s heroes are punk Peter Pans—they don’t grow up, and despise people who do, because they see maturation as a surrender to conformity and accommodation.”
4Kirsch, “Arrested Development.” Kirsch concludes that Hesse’s appeal to young readers is that they “seldom see beyond the limits of the self.”
5Kirsch, “Arrested Development.”I have myself encountered similar arguments in various academic circles, and these sorts of one-dimensional readings are precisely why Hesse is ripe for reevaluation in the digital sphere. As we have seen, world literature is not confined to academia, and gauging its impact requires examining its role in different contexts. And, as Kirsch highlights, Hesse is undeniably canonical; readers outside academia continue to discover him and find his works fulfilling, as evidenced by the Aldea Book Club. When asked why, after years of regular meetings, Der Steppenwolf seemed to resonate with the club more than other texts, the group found it difficult to explain. But they agreed that a shared common interest in continuing to read, learn, and grow might offer some insight. In Der Steppenwolf, they identify in the fifty-year-old Harry Haller a character whose experience transcends the supposed stagnation of adulthood—what Kirsch classifies as “growing up.” The club’s reassessment of the novel was no doubt facilitated by engaging with it through a digital medium, where readers connect and encounter new ideas from distances that once hindered such interaction. By expanding their club to the digital sphere, the Aldea Book Club was thus able to locate new focal points within Der Steppenwolf, which transformed their initial readings of the novel and solidified its place in their own individual libraries of world literature.
Another social platform frequented for literary discussions is Reddit. By its own definition, Reddit is a site where one can “dive into anything.” The platform hosts multiple discussion forums called subreddits, which are each devoted to specific topics, indicated by an “r/” and whichever subject unites a particular community, such as “r/music” or “r/worldnews.” Its fifty-two million daily active users congregate in roughly 138,000 subreddit communities. According to social scientist Nicholas Proferes, determining the site’s demographics is difficult because “participation on Reddit is pseudonymous.”
6Nicholas Proferes et al., “Studying Reddit: A Systematic Overview of Disciplines, Approaches, Methods, and Ethics,” Social Media + Society 7, no. 2 (2021): 1. But, according to Reddit’s administrators in 2021, 58 percent of its users range between eighteen and thirty-four years old and are male.
7Proferes et al., “Studying Reddit,” 2.The inability to thoroughly document the site’s demographics also poses challenges in determining who exactly accesses the platform for Hesse discussion. But the names of the subreddits themselves indicate the shared interest of groups who either discuss Hesse at length or at least reference his works. The group most actively devoted to Hesse is, not surprisingly, r/hermannhesse. With 979 members, the community’s various discussion threads range in interest. While some of the threads devolve into the internet’s standard incoherence and gratuitous mudslinging, many threads hold productive dialogues. One particularly fruitful discussion occurred in a thread from 2019 focused on
Narziss und Goldmund (Narcissus and Goldmund, 1930).
8TEKrific, “Book Discussion # 2: Narcissus and Goldmund,” Reddit, June 2, 2019, https://www.reddit.com/r/hermannhesse/comments/bw0i5s/book_discussion_2_narcissus_and_goldmund_part_5/. The community member whose pseudonymous handle is TEKrific guided the discussion, interpreting the novel as an investigation of art which questions whether its value is determined by sheer beauty or a meaningful “message.” The discussion that ensues from this explication transitions into a dialogue about the members’ own reflections on art. As the discussion demonstrates, Hesse served as a catalyst for the community to enter into an introspective analysis of aesthetics, beauty, and artistic value.
Furthermore, the group identifies that Hesse structures the novel around correlative themes, which is also the subject of much academic attention. This scholarship is worth briefly looking at because it helps us assess the extent to which Hesse’s readers, in this Digital Age, might discern his own literary influences. Hesse scholar Lewis Tusken, for instance, claims that the novel’s structure cannot be reduced to a singular duality: the novel juxtaposes “art/science, pious/worldly, dark/light, folk beliefs/mockery thereof, simplicity/craftiness, wisdom of the gospels/wisdom of the Greeks, and white magic/black magic.”
9Lewis Tusken, Understanding Hermann Hesse: The Man, His Myth, His Metaphor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 129. Other scholars identify a masculine-feminine or motherly-fatherly division, while some focus on the static versus the ecstatic: Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy.
10See: Ernst A. Rose, “The Fullness of Art,” in Hesse Companion, ed. Anna Otten (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 158–69. Also see: Oskar Seidlin, “Hermann Hesse: The Exorcism of the Demon,” in Hesse: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Theodore Ziolkowski (Hoboken, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1973), 51–75. On the division of spirit and nature, see: Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 229–52. The r/hermannhesse subreddit never explicitly references this last common interpretation. And, while we cannot determine the community members’ credentials, the absence of any direct reference to Nietzsche from the discussion suggests that they were not influenced by scholarship. Yet even without scholarly guidance, the thread’s development reveals that, through Hesse, the group incidentally engaged with the core idea of this Nietzschean concept. By approaching
Narziss und Goldmund from the group members’ different vantage points, this online community was thus able to further explore philosophical interrogations of art and aesthetics.
Other subreddit communities also engage with Hesse’s works and thought, such as r/worldanarchism, whose subreddit “Anarchism: The Political Philosophy of Hermann Hesse” debates a 1974 thesis that argues Hesse’s politics are anarchistic.
11burtzev, “Anarchism: The Political Philosophy of Hermann Hesse,” Reddit, October 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/worldanarchism/comments/q75k4h/anarchism_the_political_philosophy_of_hermann/. Additionally, the subreddit r/philosophy sometimes discusses Hesse: in an archived thread from September 2021, some of its members ponder Hesse’s “inward gaze” and debate whether or not Kirsch’s article misconstrues the recurring “self-will” (
Eigensinn) in Hesse’s novels as self-involvement.
12ADefiniteDescription, “The inward gaze: in Hermann Hesse’s novels, as in his life, self-discovery walked a tightrope between deep insights and profound solipsism,” Reddit, September 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/q3a4x6/the_inward_gaze_in_hermann_hesses_novels_as_in/. Other groups that often house Hesse discussion threads are r/book, r/literature, r/quotes, r/Buddhism, and r/book suggestions. While some posts and comments found in these communities’ threads rarely extend beyond shared enthusiasm for Hesse’s works, the interests that attract people to these various subreddits are clear: the virtues of solitude, his novels’ relatability, self-discovery, and Buddhism.
13Master_Bruno_1084, “Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space, in which the stars revolve.—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf,” Reddit, July 8, 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/loner/comments/vvj2fo/solitude_is_independence_it_had_been_my_wish_and/. Best_Green9211, “Are Hermann Hesse’s books in high regard because they are relatable?,” Reddit, February 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/shzq6z/are_hermann_hesses_books_in_high_regard_because/. Becoolandchilandlive, ‘“The true profession of a man is to find a way to himself”—Hermann Hesse and the Courage to Be One’s Self Through Self Discovery,” Reddit, March 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/tuhr0w/the_true_profession_of_a_man_is_to_find_his_way/. Deleted Username, “Is Hermann Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha’ good for a beginner,” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/uhxvk1/is_ hermann_hesses_siddhartha_good_for_a_beginner/.Siddhartha is, in fact, the most discussed novel in these communities. It is a common entryway to Hesse and, as online traffic reveals, it is perhaps his most widely read novel. Using Keywords Everywhere, a browser add-on that shows monthly search volume for websites and trend data for search engines, one can see that in July 2022, for instance, Siddhartha’s English-language Wikipedia page received 16,200 viewers. Demian, by contrast, received 3,900, Steppenwolf received 3,100, and, only 2,100 people accessed The Glass Bead Game’s Wikipedia page. The search terms “Hermann Hesse Siddhartha” on YouTube also reveal that Siddhartha is the subject of the most watched YouTube video devoted to Hesse. Hosted by the channel “Greatest AudioBooks,” the video had been viewed 749,000 times as of July 2022, while the general search terms “Hermann Hesse” reveal that the next highest watched Hesse-themed video has been accessed only 201,000 times.