Apart from in my doctoral thesis “
Outsiders and Others”, Hesse’s authorship has not been approached with queer-theoretical perspectives very often.
1Research in which homoerotic aspects of Hesse’s work is addressed include Craig Bernard Palmer, “The Significance of Homosexual Desire in Modern German Literature” (PhD diss., Washington University, 1997); Steven Bruhm, Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Anjeana Kaur Hans, “Defining Desires: Homosexual Identity and German Discourse 1900–1933” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2005); and Kamakshi P. Murti, “‘Ob die Weiber Menschen seyn?’ Hesse, Women, and Homoeroticism,” in A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, ed. Ingo Cornils (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 263–99. However, as none of these examples include interpretations of (or mention) Unterm Rad they are not drawn on in this chapter. While many scholars acknowledge homoeroticism and sexual ambiguity in his work, such topics are seldom in focus and sometimes outright opposed. Lewis W. Tusken, for instance, regards interpretations that suggest homosexual connotations “confused” since they fail to grasp the metaphorical purpose of character relationships in Hesse’s fiction, which he argues is a primarily “stylistic device.”
2Lewis W. Tusken, Understanding Hermann Hesse: The Man, His Myth, His Metaphor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 49–50, 53.Hesse’s depictions of male bonds are not interpreted symbolically here. On the contrary, I argue that male bonds in Hesse’s work are meant to be understood as queer, a perception confirmed by the author’s own evaluation. In a letter in 1931 regarding possible same-sex desire between male characters in some of his novels, Hesse himself stated that friendships between men in his narratives can indeed be interpreted as homoerotic. The letter confirms homoeroticism in the novels
Roßhalde (1914),
Knulp (1915), and
Narziß und Goldmund (Narcissus and Goldmund, 1930). Hesse writes: “Daß diese Freundschaften, weil zwischen Männern bestehend, völlig frei von Erotik seien, ist ein Irrtum”
3Hermann Hesse, Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 49. (My translation.) (It is a mistake to assume that these friendships, because they exist between men, are completely free of eroticism
4Hesse’s own possible bisexuality has long been a taboo subject in Hesse research. While it is not something I investigate here—since my emphasis is on Hesse’s work rather than his personal life—some scholars have begun to address it. See, for example, Gunnar Decker, Hermann Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow, trans. Peter Lewis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 475–76. For further reading, see also Hesse’s own psychoanalytic “dream journal,” Das Traumtagebuch der Psychoanalyse 1917/18, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 11: Autobiographische Schriften I, ed. Volker Michaels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 444–617.).
Readers, however, have acknowledged queerness in Hesse’s work since the very beginning of his career. Hesse’s work was embraced by the German youth groups called
Wandervogel (Ramblers, or, literally, Migratory Birds), young men who rebelled against industrialization by hiking in the countryside and advocated a Rosseauesque “return to nature.” The link between Hesse’s writing and the
Wandervogel is interesting because these groups were founded on a homoerotic ethos.
5See, for example, Max Fassnacht, “On the Ground of Nature: Sexuality and Respectability in Die Freundschaft’s Wandervogel Stories,” Journal of Homosexuality 68, no. 3 (2021): 434–60. James D. Steakley writes that within the
Wandervogel, “neither comradeship nor even friendship but outright homoeroticism was the binding force [and] the founders and original leaders of the early movement had all been homosexual.”
6James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1982), 56. These young men’s interest in Hesse’s writing suggests that it mirrors homoerotic sentiments.