Traces of Hesse in the social consciousness of the three language areas can be found above all in those novels that deal with social upheavals, such as student unrest and non-conformist protest movements.
Hesse in American Literature: The Beat Generation and Counterculture
In the USA, since the late 1950s, allusions to Hesse’s works can be found on the one hand in the novels of the Beat Generation, and on the other hand in the texts that capture the attitude towards life of the rebellious student generation and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s.
Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction novel,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
1Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968; New York: Picador, 1998). from 1968, is representative of the novels of the 60s subculture. In scenically-condensed sketches of the legendary bus trip of Ken Kesey and his hippie community of “Merry Pranksters,” Tom Wolfe allows the reader to participate in a psychedelic journey, with its LSD trips, its visions and rituals. The Merry Pranksters see their unique journey described and interpreted in Hesse’s
Morgenlandfahrt (The Journey to the East): “There is another book in the shelf in Kesey’s living room that everybody seems to look at, a little book called
The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse. Hesse wrote it in 1932 and yet …
the synch! … it is a book about … exactly … the Pranksters! and the great bus trip of 1964!”
2Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 142. The group sees its own experiences reflected in the extraordinary experience of Hesse’s Morgenlandfahrer (those journeying to the East) and their spiritual independence, their barely perceptible transitions between external and interior reality: “The present moment! Now! The kairos! It was like the man [Hesse] had been on acid himself and was on the bus.”
3Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 143. The decline of the community also seems prefigured in the
Morgenlandfahrt: the community disintegrates without Kesey, much like the brotherhood of Morgenlandfahrer after Leo’s departure.
4Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 266. Tom Wolfe not only forcefully accentuates the similarities in experiences of the Pranksters to Hesse’s
Morgenlandfahrt, but also elevates Hesse’s text to a quasi-religious text. For instance, he names the
I Ching and the
Morgenlandfahrt as the two texts in which the community’s experience of “another world,” of “a higher level of reality,” is reflected.
5Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 142.We should note that Tom Wolfe had already made a reference to Hesse in his novel
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965).
6Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965; London: Vintage Random House, 2018). A decade later, Hesse appears in John Barth’s critically acclaimed epistolary novel
Letters (1979).
7John Barth, Letters (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1979). In this novel, which is set in America in the sixties and deals with the conflict between coercion and freedom, Lady Amherst tells of her intimate relationships, including with Hesse, by whom she had become unintentionally pregnant. Here, as in the other novels set in the 60s, a scenario of transgression and sexual freedom is constructed, in which Hesse’s name has its place.
The influential American psychiatrist Timothy Leary also interpreted Hesse’s
Steppenwolf and
Siddhartha as classics of drug culture; he called Hesse a “master guide to the psychedelic experience.”
8Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, “Hermann Hesse: Poet of the Interior Journey,” Psychedelic Review 3 (1963): 181. As a guru of and for the hippie movement in California, Leary decisively shaped Hesse’s image as a drug apostle, and thus also determined the course of his reception for decades to come.
9See Jefford Vahlbusch, “Toward the Legend of Hermann Hesse in the USA,” in Hermann Hesse Today, ed. Ingo Cornils and Osman Durrani (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), 133–46.While the spiritual community of the Morgenlandfahrer plays a pioneering role for the counterculture in Tom Wolfe’s novel, the foremost author of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, positively loathes the German author. Kerouac’s novel
Big Sur (1962) documents the dramatic physical and mental decline of writer Jack Duluoz, Kerouac’s alter ego, in the wilds of Big Sur, California.
10Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (1962; New York: Penguin, 1981). Kerouac’s anger and bitterness are expressed in this record of a struggle, dominated by alcohol, excess, and drugs, with the demands of the literary business. In pointed contrast, he compares the pot-scraper used in the quotidian act of washing-up—a cheap mass-produced product—with Hesse’s
Steppenwolf, the novel of the critical individualist:
Long nights simply thinking about the usefulness of that little wire scourer, those little yellow copper things you buy in supermarkets for 10 cents, all to me infinitely more interesting than that stupid and senseless “Steppenwolf” novel …, this old fart reflecting the “conformity” of today and all the while he thought he was big Nietzsche, old imitator of Dostoevsky 50 years too late (he feels tormented in a “personal hell” he calls it because he doesn’t like what other people like!).
11Kerouac, Big Sur, 31.Although his critical view of
Steppenwolf cannot be dismissed out of hand, Kerouac is patently positioning himself against the emerging swell of popularity for Hesse by radically disavowing a text that strongly influenced the Beat Generation, which is inseparably linked with his, that is, Kerouac’s, name. Even after the turn of the millennium, the Beat Generation and its excesses and mind-altering drug experiences have still been thematized. Take T. C. Boyle, who, in his novel
Outside Looking In (2019), describes the development of the community around Timothy Leary. People there read Hesse as a matter of course, primarily
Narziß und Goldmund (Narcissus and Goldmund),
Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game), and
Der Steppenwolf.12T. C. Boyle, Outside Looking In (New York: Ecco, 2019). Steppenwolf also appears as a reference in Boyle’s novel
Drop City (2003), which also describes a hippie commune.
13T. C. Boyle, Drop City (2003; London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).The degree to which reading Hesse can already be considered a constituent of the American social climate of the 1960s and 1970s can be seen in John Updike’s story
Gesturing from the prose volume
Too far to go: The Maples Stories (1979).
14John Updike, Too far to go. The Maples Stories (New York: Random House, 1982). Seventeen vignettes from the lives of Richard and Joan Maple depict the typical “ups and downs” of a middle-class American couple from the 1950s to the 1970s. After separating from his wife, Richard ambles through Boston. In a laundromat, “where students pored over Hesse and picked at their chins while their clothes tumbled in eternal circular fall,”
15Updike, Too far to go, 221. he attentively registers each everyday experience. It is not difficult to imagine the Buddhist wheel of rebirth which is mentioned in Hesse’s
Siddhartha in the circular motion of the washing drum. Just as Siddhartha leads a life of transitions, which require him to be in perpetual flux, so is Richard confronted with decisions that change his life. At the same time, the scene develops an ironic potential in its situational comedy: the seriousness of the students reading in contrast with the banal symbolism of the washing drum reflects the individual search for meaning in a monotonously mechanized everyday world in which the individual with his or her seemingly individual problems, when observed closely, actually meets a vapid, commonplace fate. In these texts, Hesse, even where he is vituperated and ironized, becomes the lead figure of a rebellious, youthful counterculture generation, with its protests critical of culture and civilization and its longing for individual freedom.
Hesse in Japanese Literature: Resistance against Social Constraints
Mentions of Hesse in Japanese novels which, written some twenty years later than Updike’s Stories, nevertheless deal with the same epoch of social upheaval, embody a contemporary phenomenon.
Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel
Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood, 2011),
16Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (New York: Vintage International, 2011). titled after the Beatles’ song and set contemporaneously with its publication, intertextual references are repeatedly used as a means of adding an extra interpretive dimension to a situation. Thus, the friendship of the young Toru Watanabe with the intellectually superior Nagasawa harks back to their shared appreciation of the novel
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “You and I are the only real ones in the dorm. The other guys are crap,” Nagasawa explains to fellow student Toru, and he continues, “I can see it. It’s like we have marks on our foreheads. And besides, we’ve both read
The Great Gatsby.”
17Murakami, Norwegian Wood, 42. Inevitably, the reader is reminded here of the conversation between Demian and Emil Sinclair, in which Demian reinterprets the biblical fratricidal mark of Cain as the dispensation of an award. While Hesse’s
Demian is only alluded to here, Watanabe’s later reading of
Unterm Rad (Beneath the Wheel, 1906) is closely interwoven with the events of Murakami’s novel. Following the suicide of his friend Kizuki, Watanabe falls in love with Kizuki’s girlfriend Naoko. Both try in vain to cope with Kizuki’s death together. While visiting Midori, a fellow student, Watanabe discovers
a discolored copy of Hermann Hesse’s
Beneath the Wheel that must have been hanging around the store unsold for a long time. … I had first read the novel the year I entered middle school. And now, eight years later, here I was, reading the same book in a girl’s kitchen, wearing the undersized pyjamas of her dead father. Funny. If it hadn’t been for these strange circumstances, I would probably never have reread
Beneath the Wheel. The book did have its dated moments, but as a novel it wasn’t bad. I moved through it slowly, enjoying it line by line […] in the middle of the night.
18Murakami, Norwegian Wood, 307.The tale of the young student Hans Giebenrath, driven to suicide by social expectations and self-alienation, not only mirrors Kizuki’s fate, but also anticipates the suicide of Naoko, who, haunted by depression and hallucinations, takes her own life. Not only does Watanabe’s reading of Unterm Rad already echo the dark tone that foreshadows Naoko’s suicide, but the thematic link between sexuality and death also links the two novels: While Unterm Rad deals with Giebenrath’s emerging heterosexual as well as homosexual feelings, Naoko despairs in her love affair with Watanabe, not least because of her inability to surrender sexually. Watanabe, on the other hand, frees himself from the shackles of despair and turns to the fun-loving Midori.
Unterm Rad, translated into Japanese as early as 1938, quickly became extraordinarily popular in Japan.
19See Neale Cunningham, Hermann Hesse and Japan: A Study in Reciprocal Transcultural Reception (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021). Japanese youth saw the story as a reflection of the enormous pressure to perform under which they were suffering in school. In this regard, Murakami’s mentioning of
Unterm Rad shows on the one hand this early reception of Hesse, but, on the other hand, the turbulence of the late 1960s and the resistance to social constraints.
20On social upheavals, see Ellis S. Krauss, “The 1960s’ Japanese Student Movement in Retrospect,” in Japan and the World: Essays on Japanese History in Honour of Ishida Takeshi, ed. Haruhiro Fukui and Gail Lee Bernstein (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 95–115. In Sho Shibata’s novel
Saredo warera ga hibi (Und unsere Tage waren es doch [Anyway, that was our time], 1964), several suicidal persons come into contact with the twenty-volume edition of the works of the author H., very probably Hermann Hesse.
21Sho Shibata, Und unsere Tage waren es doch (1964; Munich: iudicium, 2009). In a second-hand bookshop Fumio, the hero, discovers these volumes which belonged to the student Sato, who took his own life. Sato’s fate triggers violent changes in various people, and this turbulence is always ultimately attributed to the discovery of the Hesse edition. In any case Hesse must have been known to the readership of the time as the author of
Unterm Rad because otherwise the author Shibata would not have referred to him in that way.
22I owe this reference to Eduard Klopfenstein (Zurich).Hesse in German-Language Literature: LSD, ’68 and Coming of Age
In the literature of German-speaking countries, too, allusions to Hermann Hesse appear almost as an embodiment of the times like in Uwe Timm’s novel of the student movement
Heißer Sommer (1974, Hot Summer).
23Uwe Timm, Heißer Sommer (Munich: dtv, 1974). But few novels before the 1980s and 1990s addressed the social upheavals of the 1970s. Ralf Rothmann’s novel
Stier24Ralf Rothmann, Stier (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). (Bull) published in 1991, can serve as an example. In it, the dropout and later writer Kai Carlsen looks back on his youth in the Ruhr region in the 1970s. In the club “Blow Up,” a meeting place for the subculture, Kai is introduced to the rules of the scene: “Greta … had opened my eyes … to many things: Showed me how to roll a joint, which trips to take, which ones were better not to, how to resist conscription, and what of Carlos Castaneda or Hermann Hesse you had to have read.”
25Rothmann, Stier, 21–22. One night Greta offers him some LSD: “Then we’ll just go on a trip, she said …. From the pocket of her duffle coat she pulled out a mirror and, between the pages of Hermann Hesse’s ‘Demian,’ which she was carrying, a razor blade. She opened the wrap …”
26Rothmann, Stier, 72. Only later in the “Blow Up” does Kai accidentally learn of Greta’s former violent outburst which he himself did not witness: “Demian, said another [woman] near me, fishing for the peach pieces in the punch bowl.—It was ‘Demian’ by Hermann Hesse. The stupid guys thought she was going at them with the book and bent over laughing. When they realized that a razor blade was sticking out, it was too late. All that blood.…”
27Rothmann, Stier, 205. Hesse as an author of the subculture, and
Demian as a companion on LSD trips: these set pieces of a tradition that had already established itself in US literature in the 1960s were obviously still useful to the early 1990s author Rothmann in evoking a past epoch. Also, in Josef Haslinger’s story “Ich hatte in Frankfurt zu tun” (I Had Things to Do in Frankfurt), the young people read
Demian while taking drugs.
28Josef Haslinger “Ich hatte in Frankfurt zu tun,” in Zugvögel (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007), 7–37.Hesse’s novels have often been considered as appropriate reading for German adolescents.
Unterm Rad,
Demian, and
Der Steppenwolf belong to the very experience of coming of age. In Julia Schoch’s 2018 novel
Schöne Seelen und Komplizen (Beautiful Souls and Accomplices), for example, the teacher Raoul tries to enter into an intimate conversation with his young student Christoph through reading
Unterm Rad with him. Christoph, however, expresses his distance from the novel’s author: “I think Hesse is too late for me.”
29Julia Schoch, Schöne Seelen und Komplizen (Munich: Piper, 2018), 111. Bene, the headstrong outsider in Iris Wolff’s novel
Die Unschärfe der Welt (The Blurriness of the World, 2020), also reads
Demian in his youth, and it encourages his willfulness.
30Iris Wolff, Die Unschärfe der Welt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2020). Even in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s young adult novel
Tschick (2010, translated as
Why We Took the Car, 2014),
Steppenwolf is alluded to in the young people’s conversation as a matter of course.
31Wolfgang Herrndorf, Tschick (Stuttgart: Rowohlt, 2012).A look at the literature of the new millennium indicates that Hesse has again become relevant. Thus, in Christian Kracht’s novel
Imperium (2012,
Imperium, 2015), the sectarian Engelhardt who wants to realize himself in his rigid way of life comes across the author Hesse in Florence, as Haid does in Gerhard Roth’s novel. But he observes him without coming into closer contact with him.
32Christian Kracht, Imperium (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2012). Thomas Melles’s autobiographical novel
Die Welt im Rücken (2016,
The World at my Back, 2023) meanwhile, repeatedly emphasizes the close connection to Harry Haller: “I was Steppenwolf, I.”
33Thomas Melle, Die Welt im Rücken (Stuttgart: Rowohlt, 2016), 70. Similarly, in Saša Stanišić’s novel
Herkunft (2019,
Where You Come From, 2021), the seventeen-year-old Italian Piero virtually devours
Steppenwolf, feeling both suffused and understood by the book.
34Saša Stanišic, Herkunft (Munich: btb, 2020). And it is certainly not without reason that the first-person narrator in Deniz Ohde’s novel
Streulicht (Stray Light, 2020) is asked about
Unterm Rad in her final school exam, she who had to fight constantly not to end up under the wheel.
35Deniz Ohde, Streulicht (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020).The fact that Hesse’s role in the individuation process of young people is sometimes viewed critically can be seen in Thomas Klupp’s novel
Paradiso (2009). The screenplay student Alex Böhm comments on “this Hesse nonsense. I know a lot of people who read far too much Hesse and were then convinced that they were modern Siddharthas or Goldmunds.”
36Thomas Klupp, Paradiso (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2009), 92.The role Hesse played for young readers in the former GDR is revealed by Jana Simon’s literary reportage
Denn wir sind anders: Die Geschichte des Felix S. (Because We Are Different: The Story of Felix S., 2002).
37Jana Simons, Denn wir sind anders: Die Geschichte des Felix S. (Berlin: Ullstein, 2011). When asked to present their favorite books, most young people name books by Hermann Hesse, just as the German writer and poet Peter Härtling, in his memoir
Leben lernen (Learning to Live, 2003) mentions that when he read
Unterm Rad, he wished he had had a buddy like Giebenrath at school.
38Peter Härtling, Leben lernen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003). The journalist Olaf Gruber in Jens Sparschuh’s novel
Eins zu Eins (One to One, 2003) also tries to reassure himself of his unbroken self-confidence by feeling like Steppenwolf.
39Jens Sparschuh, Eins zu Eins (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003). Furthermore, in Ingo Schulze’s
Neue Leben (2005,
New Lives,
2008), Enrico Türmer reads through the eight volumes “bound in marbled gray and bearing a gold-on-blue mantra on their spines—the name Hermann Hesse.”
40Ingo Schulze, Neue Leben (Munich: dtv, 2005), 174. His environment becomes a “novel backdrop” for him: “The Kreuzschule, this dark wall, was my Maulbronn” (Hesse fled from the monastery school in Maulbronn after seven months). The way to school becomes a “dream world” for him: “Here, as well as in Montagnola (Hesse’s long-term place of residence), a pilgrim could stop off in terms of good and beautiful. Read ‘Narziß und Goldmund’ or ‘Unterm Rad’ again, and you will know what I saw.”
41Schulze, Neue Leben,197–98. Thus he immerses himself in this world, “my Hermann Hesse world,” a refuge probably not only for the younger generation.
For the German-language authors of pop literature, on the other hand, reading Hesse is sometimes nothing more than part of the ’68 cliché. In Sybille Berg’s novel
Die Fahrt (The Journey, 2007), the old 68er, Graham, a tour guide in Myanmar, is branded a bore in a few brushstrokes by Pia, one of his companion globetrotters: “The dinner surpassed every horror Pia could have imagined. Graham talked about himself, his business, his boat, and about Hesse, whom he had once read. Heavy with boredom, Pia’s face almost fell into the badly-cooked spaghetti.”
42Sybille Berg, Die Fahrt (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2022), 47. See also Berg’s Sex II (2020), where Hesse is also cited, in fictional transcripts, as an author for adolescents. Similarly, in Christian Kracht’s
Faserland (1995) the first-person narrator remembers Hesse only as tiresome and boring school reading.
43Christian Kracht, Faserland (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1995). In his story of a youth in the GDR of the 80s, Thomas Brussig has Anton, a high school graduate looking for orientation, meet a philosophy student wearing glasses, who annoys him with his rambling teachings: “when you are about to take a pair of nickel glasses for granted, she always plunges into the usual gossip about Hermann Hesse and about that time, sixty-eight and so. That’s always very annoying.”
44Thomas Brussig, Wasserfarben (1991; Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2016), 186–87.