Hermann Hesse, however, is by no means only described as an author of the rebellious young generation, but just as often as an author of the educated bourgeoisie. Those who read Hesse are often considered to be educated in the fine arts, and thus not infrequently come under suspicion of elitist inwardness. Accordingly, Hesse readers are almost always ironically paraded or disavowed in novels that mention him.
Hesse’s Cultural Legacy in American Literature
The drug dealer Dieter in John Irving’s novel A Son of the Circus (1994) supplies his couriers with unsuspicious reading materials to distract customs agents:
Dieter’s women were outfitted with the kind of well-worn travel guides and paperback novels that suggested earnestness in the extreme. … As for the paperback novels, by Hermann Hesse or Lawrence Durrell, they were fairly standard indications of their readers’ proclivities for the mystical and poetic; these latter tendencies were dismissed by customs officials as the habitual concerns of young women who’d never been motivated by money. Without a profit motive, surely drug trafficking could be of no interest to them.
1John Irving, A Son of the Circus (New York: Random House, 1997), 274.Here, in the context of drug trafficking, educational aspirations and a touch of alternative ways of life enter into a dubious symbiosis.
In Jonathan Lethem’s novel
The Fortress of Solitude (2003) the aspirations of the white “hero” Dylan Ebdus to obtain a middle-class education are marked by his reading of
Steppenwolf, upon which Dylan’s black buddy Mingus Rude from Brooklyn comments snidely: “Those guys suck.”
2Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (London: Faber & Faber, 2004), 314. Dylan’s white hippie parents move, with him in tow, to Dean Street in Brooklyn, a sordid quarter which is predominantly inhabited by people of color, but he neither succeeds in integrating into the black community nor fleeing the black ghetto in his later “improbable, intoxicating escape from Dean Street.”
3Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude, 446. Like Harry Haller, Dylan Ebdus never really makes it to the other side. All he succeeds in doing is gauging the “collapsing middle” that lies between the utopia of a “bohemian demimonde” in Brooklyn and the reality of the “realtors.”
4Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude, 581. Dylan’s reading now marks precisely the point between the alternative way of life in Brooklyn, in which he had to remain an outsider, and the white middle-class culture to which he is on his way. The fact that he reads
Steppenwolf, of all books, suggests that the author presumes this novel is familiar reading, firmly ensconced in the world of the bourgeois middle class.
Hesse in the Educational Canon of Japanese Literature
From the 60s onwards reading Hesse appears in Japanese literature as an indication of traditional education. To give an example, the geisha Kikuno in Yukio Mishima’s novel of social commentary
Kinu to Meisatsu (1964,
Silk and Insight, 1998),
5Yukio Mishima, Silk and Insight (New York: M. E. Sharp, 1998). set in 1954, enjoys a “classical” education, which obviously includes knowledge of European literature. Weary of her luxurious life in Tokyo she starts to work in a silk factory in the countryside, but soon comes to miss cultured sociability. When she meets a former acquaintance, Okano, again, she takes the opportunity to immerse herself in a sophisticated conversation about literature: “Kikuno, who had been starved for someone she could talk about literature with, breathlessly prattled on about Romain Rolland’s
Jean Christophe and Hermann Hesse.”
6Mishima, Silk and Insight, 52. The referential attachment to Romain Rolland is significant because Hesse as well as Rolland were highly appreciated by Japanese readers and regarded as the epitome of pacifist internationalism. As a sign of a cultured education, the conversation between Kikuno and Okano here also points to Hesse’s anchoring in the educational canon.
Name-dropping is also an oft-used stylistic device in Ryu Murakami’s 1987 novel
69 Shikusuti Nain (
69, 2013),
7Ryu Murakami, 69 Shikusuti Nain (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987). to bring to life the atmosphere of the 1960s. The novel, in witty episodes, describes the attitude to life of young people in the Japanese provinces in a time of social upheaval, as when young Ken meets a former classmate, a sex worker for American soldiers:
There’d been a girl in my junior high school named Chiyoko Masuda who became a navy whore. She was in the calligraphy club and used to win a lot of prizes. A serious sort. In my second year there, she sent me a love letter, saying she wanted to correspond with me. She said she liked Hesse, and that it had made her happy to hear me mention during a class meeting that I liked Hesse, too, and that it would be nice if we could write each other letters about Hesse and things.
8Murakami, 69, 27.Up to this point, the Hesse name-dropping is just a set piece dictated by contemporary taste. Hesse is in: young people read him, especially the serious ones. Hesse is a part of youth literature and a valuable educational and intellectual commodity; people practice calligraphy, a traditional Japanese cultural practice, and read Hesse for edification. But now comes the surprise, the turning point of this witty, often biting story:
Then one day during my first year of high school I saw Chiyoko Masuda, her hair dyed red and her face caked with make-up, walking arm in arm with a black sailor. … There were some navy groupies who lived in a house near mine, and I’d peeked through their windows a few times when they were having sex with American servicemen. I wondered if Chiyoko, too, sucked black guys’ dicks. I couldn’t figure out how calligraphy and Hesse led to black dick.
9Murakami, 69, 27.The harsh montage of reading Hesse on the one hand and the carnal practices of a sex worker on the other accentuates the contrast between a civilized bourgeois background, represented by calligraphy and Hesse, and the non-bourgeois life of Chiyoko Masuda.
Hesse as a Mainstream Author in German Literature
In German-language literature, Hesse has been regarded hitherto primarily as an author of inwardness for an educated bourgeois audience.
10Here are some representative examples: Ralf Rothmann, Hitze (Heat, 2003); Adolf Muschg, Gegenzauber (Counterspell, 1967) and Kinderhochzeit (Child Wedding, 2008). While references to Hesse in Uwe Tellkamp’s novel
Der Turm: Geschichte aus einem versunkenen Land (2008,
The Tower: Tales from A Lost Country, 2016) still imply an educated bourgeoisie that is threatened but remains sure of itself, in Markus Werner’s novel
Am Hang (2004,
On the Edge, 2013) inwardness is deconstructed, as it were, in a tense encounter between the misanthropic husband of the nervous and sensitive Valerie and her lover, the womanizer Clarin.
11Uwe Tellkamp, Der Turm: Geschichte aus einem versunkenen Land (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012), translated as The Tower: Tales from a Lost Country (London: Penguin Random House, 2016). Markus Werner, Am Hang (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007), translated as On the Edge (London: Haus Publishing, 2016). The novel is set in Montagnola where Hesse lived and Agra, a little hamlet nearby where he often went for a walk, and the conversations between the two men who seem to have met by chance take place at the Hotel Bellevue-Bellavista, a frequent meeting place for Hesse and his friends and colleagues. The husband, Loos, who, incognito, eavesdrops on the lover, reveals himself to be a humanist critical of civilization in the Harry Haller mould, his wife Valerie an ardent Hesse admirer. Valerie, the husband reports, not only loved Hesse’s watercolors, but also his literature, “probably because she was always in some way searching, and for searchers Hesse was a fine address; one could open his books, where one wanted, one always came across a life wisdom or life rule, something that he, Loos, found quite desperate, while his wife had collected such wisdoms in a checkered booklet.”
12Werner, On the Edge, 44.Hesse as a counsellor for the masses: this image obviously persists in German-language literature. But a look at the inner state of the characters reveals how little they are able to live their believed and desired inwardness. While Loos tries to find out why Valerie left him it is Valerie’s favorite quote, of all things, that accidentally also opens the eyes of her lover Clarin and reveals to him the husband’s identity:
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavour.
13Hermann Hesse, “Stufen,” cited in Werner, On the Edge, 187.These lines from Hesse’s poem “Stufen” (Stages) become almost an anti-motto, since none of the characters succeeds in making a new start in this emotionally and ideologically charged scene: the husband wants his wife back but fails because of his idealistic rigor; Valerie, though she briefly breaks out of her overly idealized world, loses Clarin because of his non-commitment and destroys her marriage because of her demands on her own integrity; Clarin, deceived and confused after he has realized that he has all the while been talking to Valerie’s husband, is solely concerned with bringing “order and overview” to the chaos of his experiences.
14Werner, On the Edge, 189. With Hesse, one might say, the characters enter the blind alley of emotional turbulence.
In the 2009 novel
Sieben Jahre (Seven Years, 2012) by the Swiss author Peter Stamm, the intertextual Hesse quotations are stretched out from being of a referential character on the one hand to being ironically refracted on the other.
15Peter Stamm, Sieben Jahre (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2011); in English: Seven Years (London: Granta Books, 2012). In the correspondence between the two young architects Alex and Sonja, the enthusiastic, monied Sonja quotes from one of Hesse’s letters: “
So that the possible can come into being, the impossible has to be attempted again and again.”
16Stamm, Seven Years, italics in the original, Ebook, n.p. Superficially, she wants to defend her bold architectural designs. Her skeptical boyfriend Alex, however, caught up in the dreary routine of an architect’s everyday life—unlike her, he comes from a simple background—dismisses her visions as “gossip.” His jealousy is expressed in his imagining of a tawdry seaside scene with Sonja and her boss Albert: “I pictured her walking along the beach with her Albert, the mistral playing in her hair, and her appealing to all the senses of her boss. She was gazing at him adoringly and he was quoting Hermann Hesse to her: “Every beginning has its magic.”
17Stamm, Seven Years, Ebook, n.p. Here the author unmistakably alludes to the custom, practiced ad nauseam, of quoting this line from Hesse’s famous poem “Stufen”
in the most diverse contexts, from a festive speech to a political statement, thus diminishing its expressive value to the point of arbitrariness. The fact that the afore-quoted passage from Hesse’s letter, “So that the possible can come into being, the impossible has to be attempted again and again,” appears a second time in the novel alerts one to its significance, which is not merely situational, especially since there are no other intertextual references in the novel. With the relationship between Alex and Sonja already in jeopardy, Sonja quotes this sentence again, this time in direct conversation.
18Stamm, Seven Years, Ebook, n.p. This time her partner’s reaction is sharper: “I said that was an idiotic saying.”
19Stamm, Seven Years, Ebook, n.p.Looking at the development of the novel, Hesse’s guiding principle can be interpreted as a kind of motto, namely, that it tells the story of an impossible love. Thus, we encounter the phenomenon of a double coding in this newer text as well: on the one hand, Hesse’s quotations—the two lines from Stufen and the aforementioned quote from Hesse’s letter—are trivialized and parodied; on the other hand, they comment on the central concern of the novel.
Two examples, among many, may demonstrate how Hesse’s poem “Stufen” is quoted again and again in literature. In her novel
Echos Kammern (Echo’s Chambers, 2020), for example, Iris Hanika alludes to Hesse’s poem when, during a viewing of an apartment, a woman says: “There was no magic in this beginning, but the apartment is great.”
20Iris Hanika, Echos Kammern (Graz: Droschl, 2020), 97. And Sten Nadolny plays with the quote in his novel
Das Glück des Zauberers (The Magician’s Luck, 2017) when he writes: “‘And in every magic force dwells’—yes, now came that famous phrase—‘In every magic force dwells a beginning!’ … He often spoke and wrote the sentence about magic having a beginning. A poet named Hesse then picked it up somewhere and plucked at it.”
21Sten Nadolny, Das Glück des Zauberers (Munich: Piper, 2017) 50.