Introduction: “The Tender Secrets of a First Love”

This chapter casts light on how queerness is represented in Hesse’s Unterm Rad (Beneath the Wheel, 1906), and assesses whether Hesse’s views on queerness, as they are portrayed in his work, are relevant for today’s queer culture. In broad strokes, the contributions in this book consider Hesse’s global legacy, relevance, and cultural impact, and seek to position Hesse in the twenty-first century. Therefore, a queer-focused contribution is important, not least because Hesse’s writing includes queerness (as we shall see below), but also because the twenty-first century is an era characterized by major transformations for queer people. On the one hand, significant progress has been made (marriage equality, anti-discrimination laws), but on the other hand, we are currently witnessing right-wing reactionary projects (like “Don’t Say Gay” laws in North America) and ever-increasing support for neo-Nazi political parties in Europe. Had Hesse been alive today, he would surely have been alarmed by those political tendencies.

When portraying his characters’ longings to “be themselves”—a trope found in most of Hesse’s writing—Hesse’s stories tend to rely on queerness, both in the shape of nonconformity and in norm-challenging sexuality and the prevalence of homoeroticism; oftentimes those conceptions are entwined in his work. In “Outsiders and Others: Queer Friendships in Novels by Hermann Hesse” (2022), I interpret the author’s “Be yourself” ideal within a frame of queer theory and suggest that Hesse’s perception of Eigensinn (self-will), which is a defining characteristic in his characters, can be regarded as a queer trait.

In Hesse’s conception, self-will means wandering one’s own path and refusing to conform to society’s norms.2Hermann Hesse, Eigensinn macht Spaß: Individuation und Anpassung, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2002), 84. In its contemporary queer-­theoretical definition, the term “queer” means exactly that. To be queer is to deviate from and challenge that which is thought to be normal. The signifying trait of any queer-theoretical perspective is critique of norms, most often heteronormativity, which is the system of norms that determines how we understand gender and sexuality, and stipulates that heterosexuality is natural whereas other sexualities are not.3Cf. Rachel Carroll, “Introduction: feminism, queer theory and heterosexuality,” in Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction, ed. Rachel Carroll (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 1–21. Therefore, as a modern identity category, identifying as queer signifies taking control over how one is defined in mainstream culture. In that regard, identifying as queer mirrors how Hesse’s self-willed protagonists define themselves as outsiders.

This chapter builds on my previous queer-focused research on Hesse’s work, but with another one of his novels in the spotlight. The main characters in Unterm Rad, Hans Giebenrath and Hermann Heilner, challenge normativity and tradition at their authoritarian boarding school, a theological seminary in Maulbronn. Their nonconformity alone makes them queer in a queer-theoretical sense. But even more so, Unterm Rad is interpretable as queer because its all-male school leaves no room for heterosexual desires to develop, instead paving the way for a same-sex romance between Hans and Hermann. In Hesse’s words: “the two precocious boys were enjoying an unconscious foretaste of the tender secrets of a first love.”4Hermann Hesse, The Prodigy, trans. W. J. Strachan (London: Peter Owen & Vision Press, 1957), 101. Strachan’s translation was the first one in the English language, which is why it is used here. Subsequent translations, however, have favored Beneath the Wheel as the English title rather than The Prodigy. Subsequent references to Strachan’s source will appear as parenthetical page numbers in the text. As we shall see throughout this chapter, the bond between Hans and Hermann is not a “foretaste” of a first love meant to prepare them for heterosexuality, however—it should be seen as a romance in its own right.

The following questions guide this essay: What do we stand to learn about Hesse’s writing by approaching it with queer theory? And how can we expand our understanding of queerness by studying Hesse’s work? To answer those questions, I approach Unterm Rad with a “queer surface reading,” a method in which one operates from the notion that norm-challenging qualities in a work can be found on the text’s surface rather than “hidden between the lines.”5Jenny Björklund, “Queer Readings/Reading the Queer,” Lambda Nordica 23, nos. 1–2 (2018): 7–15. In the following, I emphasize and interpret Unterm Rad’s surface signs of queerness.