Hermann Hesse

Biography

On 7 March 1892 the fifteen-year-old Hermann Hesse vanished from the seminary at Maulbronn. The next day he was found in a field, asleep in a haystack. He later explained that he wanted to become “either a poet or nothing”.

He was born on 2 July 1877 in Calw, in Württemberg, into a family of missionaries. His mother, Marie Gundert, was born at a mission in India; her father, Hermann Gundert, ran the publishing house in Calw and kept a huge library, which the boy used freely. His father, Johannes Hesse, was a Baltic German from Weissenstein (now Paide, Estonia) and at the time of his son’s birth was still a subject of the Russian Empire. The household was Pietist, while in the father’s stories Estonia appeared as a cheerful, colourful country that the children longed to see. In 1881 the family moved to Basel, and in 1886 returned to Calw. Hesse wrote his first fairy tale, “The Two Brothers”, at the age of ten.

After Maulbronn came years of wandering. In May 1892, after a suicide attempt, he ended up at Bad Boll with the pastor Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, then in an institution at Stetten, then at a school in Cannstatt; he passed the one-year examination in 1893 and left school there. He abandoned a bookshop apprenticeship in Esslingen after three days. From the summer of 1894 he spent fourteen months at the Perrot tower-clock factory in Calw: the monotonous soldering and filing soon made him long for books. From 17 October 1895 he worked in the Heckenhauer bookshop in Tübingen, where he collated, packed and sorted books, and after a twelve-hour day read Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, the Romantics and, from 1895, Nietzsche.

His first books did not sell. “Romantic Songs” (1898) sold only 54 of 600 copies in two years, and the prose collection “One Hour After Midnight” (1899) did hardly better. The Leipzig publisher Eugen Diederichs brought them out more as support for a young author than for profit. From the autumn of 1899 Hesse worked in the antiquarian bookshop of Reich in Basel, and in 1900 poor eyesight exempted him from military service. In the spring of 1901 he went to Italy for the first time; that same year he moved to the antiquarian bookseller Wattenwyl. His mother died in 1902. Samuel Fischer became interested in him after “The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher”, and the novel “Peter Camenzind” (1904) was the breakthrough: from then on Hesse made his living by writing.

In August 1904 he married Maria Bernoulli, a photographer from Basel, and settled with her in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance. There he published “Beneath the Wheel” (1906), in which his years at the seminary left their mark, and “Gertrude” (1910); Hesse later regarded the latter as a failure. In 1911 he travelled to Ceylon and Indonesia, but never reached India itself. The journey did not bring the spiritual revelation he had hoped for, though its traces can be seen in his later books. In 1912 the family moved to Bern, where he finished “Rosshalde”.

In the summer of 1914 Hesse wanted to volunteer for the army, but he was found unfit and assigned to the German embassy in Bern. There he dealt with books for German prisoners of war and edited newspapers for them. On 3 November 1914 the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” published his article “O Friends, Not These Tones”, which urged intellectuals not to give way to nationalist polemic. The German press attacked him, abusive letters arrived, and some old friends turned away; Theodor Heuss supported him, as did Romain Rolland, who visited in August 1915. In March 1916 his father died, his son Martin fell seriously ill, and his marriage was breaking down. Hesse was treated by the psychoanalyst Josef Bernhard Lang and later met Carl Gustav Jung. In three weeks in September and October 1917 he wrote “Demian”, which appeared in 1919 under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair.

In April 1919 Hesse went alone to Ticino, and on 11 May he rented four rooms in the Casa Camuzzi in Montagnola. There he began to paint, which shows in the novella “Klingsor’s Last Summer” (1920). “Siddhartha” appeared in 1922. In 1924 he married the singer Ruth Wenger (the marriage ended in 1927) and received Swiss citizenship. Then came “A Guest at the Spa”, “The Nuremberg Journey” and “Steppenwolf” (1927), and in 1930 “Narcissus and Goldmund”.

In 1931 Hesse married Ninon Dolbin and moved to a house on the hill above Montagnola, built for him by his friend Hans Bodmer. From that year he worked on “The Glass Bead Game”. He watched the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany with alarm; in 1933 Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann stayed with him on their way into exile. In the German press he wrote reviews defending persecuted authors, but from the mid-1930s his articles were no longer printed there. He spent eleven years on “The Glass Bead Game”, which was published in Switzerland in 1943. In 1946 Hesse received the Nobel Prize and the Goethe Prize. He wrote no more major novels after that, but many poems, stories and watercolours, and he answered a flood of letters.

Hesse died on 9 August 1962 in Montagnola. He was buried on 11 August in the cemetery of the church of Sant’Abbondio.