To provide a proper overview of Hesse’s presence on the internet, it is useful to also survey, to some extent, the digital spaces he inhabits outside the interactive ones thus far examined. Aside from forums and discussion boards, Hesse is a subject of numerous websites and blogs. Some are merely biographical, such as Encyclopedia Britannica (whose Hesse page receives roughly 3,300 viewers monthly), NobelPrize.org (2,300 monthly viewers), and ThoughtCo. (310 monthly viewers).
1“Hermann Hesse,” Encyclopedia Britannica, Britannica, last modified September 10, 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hermann-Hesse. “Hermann Hesse Biographical,” Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967, ed. Horst Frenz (Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969), accessed on August 4, 2022, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1946/hesse/biographical/. Lily Rockefeller, “Biography of Hermann Hesse, German Poet and Novelist,” ThoughtCo., last modified November 26, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/biography-of-hermann-hesse-4775337. Meanwhile, others place more emphasis on his literature. All Poetry, for instance, hosts English translations of his poems, and sites less frequently accessed, such as Aeon, The Culturium, and FEE outline some of his most essential themes.
2M. M. Owen, “The inward gaze,” Aeon, last modified July 16, 2020, https://aeon.co/essays/hermann-hesse-and-the-double-edged-sword-of-dwelling-on-ones-self. “Hermann Hesse: The Journey to the East,” The Culturium, last modified March 5, 2017, https://www.theculturium.com/hermann-hesse-the-journey-to-the-east/. “Why Hermann Hesse Saw ‘Willfulness’ as the Virtue Above All Others,” FEE Stories, FEE, last modified September 5, 2021, https://fee.org/articles/why-hermann-hesse-saw-willfulness-as-the-virtue-above-all-others/.A worthwhile website that skirts the usual subject matter and instead concentrates on Hesse’s lesser-known material is The Marginalian.
3The Marginalian, accessed August 4, 2022, https://www.themarginalian.org/. A somewhat small operation, by its own definition the site is a “one-woman labor of love,” created, edited, and maintained by Maria Popova, a writer and critic of the arts. The site covers literature, philosophy, art, and “other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality.”
4The Marginalian, accessed August 4, 2022, https://www.themarginalian.org/about/. With roughly 4,500 monthly visitors, around forty readers a month access the site’s eleven Hesse articles via search engine results, a significant number for organic traffic on an ad-free, individually run website. Rather than offering readings of his novels, The Marginalian instead peruses some of Hesse’s overlooked anthologies for guidance on enriched living. For instance, the article “The Day Hermann Hesse Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Tree” profiles the recent posthumous compilation
Trees, which amasses English translations of essays, poems, and paintings by Hesse that contemplate the symbolism and significance of trees.
5Maria Popova, “The Day Hermann Hesse Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Tree,” The Marginalian, accessed August 4, 2022, https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/06/08/hesse-trees/. Another article introduces a video filmed for the YouTube series “Wander” in which a reader narrates a visual tour of the Royal Botanic Gardens by reading one of Hesse’s essays on trees.
6Maria Popova, “Wander: Natascha McElhone Reads Hermann Hesse’s 100-Year-Old Love Letter to Trees in a Virtual Mental Health Walk Through Kew Gardens,” The Marginalian, accessed August 4, 2022, https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/05/04/natascha-mcelhone-wander-hesse-kew/. Additionally, “Hermann Hesse on the Three Types of Readers and the Most Transcendent Form of Reading” details Hesse’s taxonomy of reader types and guides its audience on how to draw inspiration from Hesse and apply it to their own reading practices.
7Maria Popova, “Hermann Hesse on the Three Types of readers and the Most Transcendent Form of Reading,” The Marginalian, accessed August 4, 2022, https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/11/hermann-hesse-types-of-readers/.An especially noteworthy article on The Marginalian is “The Timeless Magic of the Book in the Age of Technology: Hermann Hesse on Why We Read and Always Will.”
8Maria Popova, “The Timeless Magic of the Book in the Age of Technology: Hermann Hesse on Why We Read and Always Will,” The Marginalian, accessed August 4, 2022, https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/06/07/the-magic-of-the-book-hermann-hesse-my-belief/. In the article, Popova offers an alternative perspective to the contention that newer media forms have killed the book and that fewer and fewer people find enrichment in reading literature. Hesse notoriously critiqued modernization in a similar vein. Novels such as
Steppenwolf bemoan the radio’s inauthentic reproduction of the live music experience; the short essay
A Guest at the Spa criticizes the superficiality of print culture’s gradual devolution into mere “infotainment”; and
The Glass Bead Game envisions a world where the life of the mind has been irreparably separated from mainstream society. Ironically, though, Hesse’s 1930 essay “The Magic of the Book” offers a counterpoint to anxieties that literature has similarly lost its value in the modern age. While Hesse addressed this concern in the early twentieth century, Popova highlights its relevance to today, when digital media has exacerbated the seemingly inevitable decline of literary reading.
In Hesse’s essay, he celebrates how books are now “accessible to everyone.” While some call this “progress” and “a matter of course,” he states, “others call it a devaluation and vulgarization of the spirit.”
9Hermann Hesse, “The Magic of the Book,” in My Belief, ed. Theodore Ziolkowski, trans. Denver Lindley (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 154. Hesse’s fictional Harry Haller might agree that mass production and consumerism have not only depreciated the quality of literature but also eroded the sophistication of its readership. But Hesse himself seems to align with the notion that mass producing literature is more beneficial than harmful:
We need not allow ourselves to be robbed of the agreeable feeling of progress attained, instead we will rejoice that reading and writing are no longer the prerogatives of a guild or caste. Since the invention of the printing press the book has become an object of general use and luxury distributed in huge quantities. Large printings make possible low book prices and therefore every country can make its best books (the so-called classics) available to those in modest circumstances.
10Hesse, “The Magic of the Book,” 154–55.Likewise, addressing the newfound fear in his day that cinema and radio will eliminate the book, Hesse states, “even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulation in words and the handing on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and a continuing consciousness of itself.”
11Hesse, “The Magic of the Book,” 155. Popova finds this argument increasingly relevant in the Digital Age, asserting that even now “timeless works” continuously enchant “the public imagination decades or centuries or millennia after their creation.”
12Maria Popova, “The Timeless Magic of the Book in the Age of Technology: Hermann Hesse on Why We Read and Always Will,” The Marginalian, accessed August 4, 2022, https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/06/07/the-magic-of-the-book-hermann-hesse-my-belief/. As Hesse says, “poets live and die, known by few or none,” and years after their death, they “suddenly rise resplendent from the grave as though time did not exist.”
13Hesse, “The Magic of the Book,” 158. And, for Popova, Hesse “stands as testament to his own point.”
14Popova, “Timeless Magic.” Hesse was, of course, addressing fears that printed books and their cultural impact were threatened by technological media; and he could have never envisioned the evolution of digital technology and its ramifications for literature. But when one examines the enthusiasm for Hesse online, his argument rings true. Digital media have, in many ways, democratized access to literature in the same way Hesse once argued mass printing did. But even more liberating, these media outlets, as this essay has shown, have erased the national boundaries that once limited the average reader’s interaction with a literary community to physical proximity by opening new spaces for discussion and intellectual engagement.