The Global Impact of Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922)

Hesse biographer Ralph Freedman called Siddhartha “Hermann Hesse’s best known work.”1Ralph Freedman, “Introduction,” in Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Penguin Compass, 1999), vii. Paul W. Morris describes it as “his most influential work.”2Paul W. Morris, “Introduction,” in Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha, trans. Sherab Chödzin Kohn (Boulder, CO: Shambala, 2005), xv. These characterizations in prominent translations assert the novel’s persistent influence on a worldwide readership and “on the western understanding of South Asian religion [and] the modern western conceptions of Asian enlightenment.”3David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 228. Certainly, Siddhartha is among the most prominent literary works worldwide to engage with the life story of the historical Buddha and with basic Buddhist ideas. And yet, its continung impact one hundred years after its original publication cannot simply be explained by readers’ ongoing interest in Buddhism.4Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Penguin Compass, 1999). Other prominent texts referring to Buddha’s life story include Karl Gjellerup’s Der Pilger Kamanita (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1907) and Fritz Mauthner’s Der letzte Tod des Gautama Buddha (Munich: Georg Müller, 1913). Instead, Hesse’s text depicts constructivist experiential learning using a particular narrative technique in a way that enables readers to easily identify with this learning process. This identification effect is also supported by Siddhartha’s hagiographic elements and by its engagement with fundamental human experiences such as the search for wisdom, friendship, love, and death. The novel’s heterodiegetic narrative voice presents the protagonist’s universal human experiences on his path to enlightenment in a way that emphasizes experience and fosters identification.