Hermann H
esse’s impact on literature, culture, environmentalism, and philosophy is beyond question, as the contributors to this volume amply demonstrate. However, this chapter will suggest a new and overlooked concept that underpins the global affinity of Hesse’s readers with his works. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work on identifying cultural, economic, social, and symbolic forms of capital as the wealth of human relationships in society, beyond the marketplace, commodification, and economic transactions, opens up an initial terrain for thinking about Hesse’s impact in the private sphere. Building on this idea, this chapter therefore examines the concept of a secular “spiritual capital” that arises in the case of a positive reaction of a reader to Hesse’s texts. This spiritual dimension is not limited to particular readers in a particular cultural or linguistic community but can be identified among Hesse readers transculturally. His continuing reception and legacy in Japan and his growing reception in China are evidence of this phenomenon.
1See, for example, the chapters (4 and 8) by Yoichi Yamamoto, “The Reception of a Hermann Hesse Short Story in Japan over 70 Years,” and Zhan Chunhau, “Hermann Hesse’s Impact on Mainland China,” in the present volume. See also my book for further context: Neale Cunningham, Hermann Hesse and Japan: A Study in Reciprocal Transcultural Reception (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021). Importantly, the “communities of spirit” that Hesse himself has described, for example, in his short novel
The Journey to the East, have the potential to mitigate the harsh realities and conflicting forces of the neoliberal marketplace. The members of such communities can draw upon the accumulated capital of knowledge and thinking about Hesse in an ever-expanding body of published materials and also nurture personal relationships through face-to-face colloquiums or virtual communities. Such communities place a greater emphasis on the transcendent and aspirational ethical values of both individually and collectively generated capital. This capital is manifested both in the formation of national or regional societies of Hesse readers and, increasingly, transculturally in Hesse discussion communities on the internet.
2See chapter 2 of this book by Adam Roberts, “A World Literature of One’s Own: Hermann Hesse and the Digital Age.” Roberts quotes researchers from Instructional Technology who write that an online or digital community forms around the discourse of a collective interest as a “group of participants in a distance-based environment with a shared purpose and the relationship among them including their sense of belonging, trust, and interaction.” W. A. Sadera, et al., “The Role of Community in Online Learning Success,” MERLDOT: Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 5, no. 3 (2009): 278. In these communities, readers can seek meaning and connectedness to others through Hesse’s works, and be individually and collectively inspired to embark on explorations of selfhood, forge more authentic relationships with nature and the sacred, and discover potential spiritual orientations. The accumulation of capital is largely spiritual, but also documented and embodied by the repository of some forty-four thousand letters written by readers to Hesse
3Volker Michels at Suhrkamp Verlag is currently publishing a ten-volume collection of Hesse’s letters. According to Michels, writing in May 2021 in the afterword to the seventh volume of the collection, some forty-four thousand letters which were written to Hesse have been deposited for research purposes so far in the Schweizerisches Literaturarchiv in Berne, Switzerland, and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA), Marbach, Germany. Michels writes further that around half the letters written by Hesse responding to his readers have now been collected in the Hermann-Hesse-Editionsarchiv, Offenbach, Germany (some twenty-two thousand), while the other half has yet to be traced down. Hermann Hesse, Die Briefe, vol. 7: 1947–1950: Das Unertraegliche muss zu Wort kommen, ed. Volker Michels (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021). and the ever-expanding collection of secondary research works on Hesse. This chapter, therefore, proposes a novel approach to understanding Hesse’s global impact and his continuing modern relevance through an examination of the potential for the generation of “spiritual capital” among the readers of Hesse’s works to whom it may offer access to a global refuge.
Hesse’s texts are read individually and collectively around the world.
4See further the chapter in this volume by Yoichi Yamamoto who states that Hesse’s short story “Jugendgedenken” (Memories of Youth), translated into Japanese as “Shonen no Hi no Omoide,” has been read by millions of Japanese junior high school students in their textbooks since 1947. Concepts of world literature theory are being shaped by Germanists such as Rebecca Braun (2020) who has theorized the notion of “world authorship” to capture the process by which a work of literature enters the nodal world literature system. Beyond the writer who puts pen to paper in the act of literary creation and authorship, the literary text passes through the hands of “translators, publishers, agents, reviewers, lawyers, benefactors, prize judges, and so on,” who exert sociocultural agency “also as historically rooted individuals who actively co-create in their own particular way the authorship that is bound to a literary text at any one time or place.”
5Rebecca Braun, “Introduction,” in World Authorship, ed. Tobias Boes, Rebecca Braun, and Emily Spiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4. Moreover, as B. Venkat Mani writes in the introduction to his translation of Hesse’s
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur (A Library of World Literature), the readers of the text “are not recipients of, but participants in the transformation of world literature.”
6Hermann Hesse, “A Library of World Literature,” trans. B. Venkat Mani, Journal of World Literature 3, no. 4 (2018): 418. In other words, Mani correctly observes that the fellowship of readers, and by extension the researchers, translators, teachers, and writers inspired by their reading of Hesse, exercise a degree of individual and collective agency over Hesse’s worldwide impact.
7See the chapter by Helga Esselborn-Krumbiegel, “Hermann Hesse in Cultural Memory: Intertextual Traces in American, Japanese, and German Literature,” in the present book. While this agency has an impact on Hesse’s global reception, this chapter takes a different route to uncover what goes on beneath the surface criteria of his reception. I propose that we explore this elusive element of Hesse’s global impact in order to get to the heart of what it really means to “read” Hesse. In a first step, I explore the concept of “spiritual capital” from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on different kinds of “societal capital,” and then consider Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall’s work on the shift towards a “values-based culture.”
Bourdieu speaks particularly of “cultural capital,” created beyond the marketplace and economic interests, which represents symbolic interests in the cultural sphere that are free of material interests.
8Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 177. The actual act of reading a text takes place in the private sphere, where it enters into “relatively autonomous areas of practice” where “symbolic interests become autonomous by being opposed to material interests.”
9Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 177. Broadly understood in this way, it should be noted that “spiritual capital” cannot be commodified, although, as we learn below, it can be manifested. Significantly, a focus on the individual or shared enjoyment of reading a text by Hesse may help counter the rise of scientific materialism and scientific imperialism, which have become the main cornerstones of approaches to understanding the world in modernity.
10Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 13. See also Ingo Cornils’s work on Blake and Hesse in this context: “Furchtbare Symmetrien: Romantische Verwandtschaften im Werk der Dichter-Maler Hermann Hesse und William Blake,” arcadia: international journal of literary culture 46, no. 1 (2011): 149–66. Philosopher Ken Wilber argues that the “value spheres” of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit have become dissociated, often radically, from what he terms the “dignities” of a liberal democracy in modernity, characterized by, for example, freedom from slavery and advances in health care, putting “scienticism” on a trajectory to provide the sole explanation of “reality” in the West.
11Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, 13. Given that scenario, it makes sense to work toward reintroducing and nurturing the spiritual dimension in our modern lives. In the following section, I map out these troubling contemporary experiences of the modern subject in a precarious, neoliberal economic system.