In this blog post, we will provide a chronological overview of Hermann Hesse’s life and literary world, and examine in particular the significance of “Gertrud,” which is considered his most novelistic work.

The Life of Hermann Hesse

Early Life Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in Calw, a small town nestled in the mountain valleys of southern Germany. Calw is a sleepy, quiet rural town surrounded by the Nagold River, which winds its way through secluded pine forests. Hesse did not live in this hometown for very long; even before leaving it for good at the age of eighteen, he had spent his childhood from the ages of four to nine in Basel, Switzerland. After graduating from elementary school, he moved from one school, sanatorium, and workplace to another in various regions, but his attachment to Calw remained unchanged throughout his life, and he always longed for this small town in the Black Forest in his novels, essays, and short pieces. Even in his short piece titled “Hometown” (1918), Hesse states that although he had seen countless beautiful cities between Bremen and Naples, and between Vienna and Singapore, the most beautiful city of all those he knew was the small, old Swabian town of Kalf. One of the charms of ‘Under the Wheel’ and ‘Youth Is Beautiful’ lies in their depictions of his hometown.
Although it was a small town far from major thoroughfares, Hesse’s childhood was connected to the wider world. His father, Johannes Hesse, was a Russian of North German descent. In his youth, he was drawn to missionary work, studied in Switzerland, and served as a missionary in India. Hesse’s mother, Marie, was also the daughter of a missionary and was born in India. After marrying the British missionary Eisenberg, she devoted herself to arduous missionary work in the remote regions along the Indus River. Thus, Hesse grew up inheriting a cosmopolitan lineage and receiving a well-rounded education.
His maternal grandfather, Hermann Gundert, had returned from India and was running a Protestant publishing house in Kalf. Johannes Hesse had been called there to work as his assistant, and it was there that he met Marie Gundert, who had recently lost her missionary husband. Consequently, Hermann Hesse grew up under the strong influence of this remarkable and enigmatic maternal grandfather. His maternal grandfather was a scholar who knew not only English and French but also some thirty other foreign languages, including Sanskrit and Bengali. His bookshelves held Christian texts, Greek and Latin classics, books on Eastern religions, and even Indian idols and palm-leaf manuscripts. Set against this backdrop, young Hesse could not help but admire his maternal grandfather, whose face was entirely covered in a white beard. Hesse vividly depicted his childhood in a short story titled “The Magician’s Childhood.” His desire to become a magician was undoubtedly rooted in the impression his maternal grandfather left on him. And, just as he had hoped, he became a master magician of language—that is, a poet.
When Hesse was four years old, he moved with his family to Basel, Switzerland, because his parents had taken positions at a mission hall that served as a base for overseas missionary work. In Basel, young Hesse grew up in the suburbs, where meadows stretched as far as the eye could see, finding companionship in butterflies, dandelions, and the blue sky, and savoring the solitude of the open fields. Already shaken by strange, magical impulses, the boy could not control the turmoil within him and became a wild child whom no one could handle. Even his patient mother was constantly worried; it is said that from that time on, he composed something resembling poetry and sang it to his own melodies.
At the age of nine, Hesse returned to Calw with his parents. Over the next four years, Hesse absorbed so much in his hometown that he would never feel hungry for the rest of his life. And from that time on, two worlds began to clash within and without his heart: the world of his deeply devout, pure, and dignified parents, and the defiled, sinful world of vagrants, drunkards, and robbers, as described by the housekeeper and other servants who came and went. This is well reflected in short stories such as “The Interrupted Lesson” and “A Child’s Heart,” as well as in ‘Under the Wheel’ and ‘Demian’. The world of evil was stronger than the world of good, stirring the young Hesse’s curiosity and filling him with dread. Hesse possessed two souls that were far too contradictory for him to become a pastor without difficulty. He was not born to lead an uneventful childhood and become a kind-hearted young man. It was from that tormented and perilous life that the poet was born.
Hesse attended the Latin school in Göppingen at the age of thirteen and entered the seminary in April of his fourteenth year; however, his honorable admission there turned into the tragic experience of leaving as a dropout just six months later. The circumstances are depicted very realistically in ‘Under the Wheel’. Although the seminary teachers’ lack of understanding ruthlessly pushed the sensitive boy’s heart under the wheels and crushed it, the reality was that Hesse himself was being swept away by an inner storm, thinking, “I will either become a poet or nothing at all.”
During his time as a bookstore clerk, Hesse became an apprentice at the Heckenhauer bookstore in the university town of Tübingen in the fall of his eighteenth year. While working there, he immersed himself in Romanticism and Goethe and wrote poetry and prose diligently. He spent his romantic literary youth befriending Pink, a medical student with a passion for literature, and Wilhelm Gundert, who later translated ‘The Blue Cliff Record’ into German.
In 1899, at the age of twenty-two, Hesse self-published his debut poetry collection, ‘Romantic Songs’. True to its title, it is a romantic and musical collection of poems. Hesse’s second book, ‘An Hour After Midnight’, was published by a well-established publishing house and received such favorable reviews—even earning praise from the young Rilke as “prose born of reverence, an essential element of art”—that despite a print run of 800 copies, only 53 were sold over the course of a year.
That fall, Hesse moved to an antiquarian bookstore in Basel. He always worked diligently. His work at the bookstore aided his literary studies and provided material for his writing. During this time, he traveled through Switzerland and Italy, taking diligent notes. The bookstore owner at the time was generous and understanding enough to publish his employee Hesse’s book. Thus, the book ‘The Posthumous Writings of Hermann Rauscher: The Hesse Volume’ was published. Reflecting the escapist skepticism and self-flagellating, sincere love of the fin de siècle, it developed a unique style, generated considerable attention, and went through multiple printings.
Furthermore, the book caught the attention of the poet Karl Busse, leading to the inclusion of Hesse’s first poetry collection (1902) in the “New German Lyric Poets” series that Busse edited. Only then was Hesse’s long-held dream of becoming a poet finally realized. Hesse was delighted to dedicate this collection to his mother, who had endured so much hardship for him, but she had passed away just before its publication, so he included a poem titled “To My Beloved Mother” at the beginning of the book. The collection went through numerous printings, and although its title was changed to ‘Poems of Youth’ after World War II, it continues to be published today with the same content.
Furthermore, ‘Hermann Laucher’ caught the attention of Fischer, a prominent publishing house that had recently emerged as a leading force in literary publishing. Consequently, his next work, ‘Peter Camenzind’, was published by Fischer in 1904 and achieved great success thanks to its fresh style and vivid descriptions. After a long period of confusion and trials, Hesse, at the age of twenty-seven, became a popular author.

The Pre- and Post-War Years and Middle Age

Having gained literary fame before and after World War I, Hesse chose not to move to a major city. Instead, he rented a farmhouse in Gaihenhofen, a village on the banks of the Rhine River bordering Switzerland, and began his married life there with his wife Maria, who was nine years his senior. He was, after all, something of an eccentric. Yet his life in nature, with the flow of fortune as his companion, yielded a bountiful harvest. During this time, Hesse published two novels, ‘Under the Wheel’ and ‘Gertrud’, as well as numerous short stories, poems, and essays, including ‘Youth Is Beautiful’.
Hesse had three sons and spent seven fulfilling and prosperous years in Gaienhofen. It was a highly productive period during which he was at the height of his creative activity, writing reviews and book critiques tirelessly after becoming co-editor of ‘März’, a magazine that satirized the emperor’s authoritarian rule.
A rift soon developed in his marriage to his wife, who was nine years his senior. Feeling bored with the conventional European culture, he traveled with the painter Struchenegger from the summer of 1911 through the end of the year, visiting Singapore, Sumatra, and Ceylon. After the trip, he moved to the suburbs of Bern, the capital of Switzerland, and depicted the breakdown of a painter’s marriage in a work titled ‘Rosshalde’. This work reflects the crisis in his own marriage; even if he were to be defeated by it, he seemed to have declared in advance his resolve to “live for his art as an artist.” Just as in the novel, her real life was fraught with difficulties and her family life was falling apart; however, on the creative front, works such as ‘Knulp’—a story of a wanderer that only Hesse could write—and the poetry collection ‘Music of the Lonely’, which has become synonymous with Hesse’s poetic legacy, were written before World War I.
In July 1914, World War I broke out, ushering in an era in which the entire world was gripped by the delusion of patriotism—or, more accurately, militarism. The people were all enthusiastic about the war. Even scholars and poets stoked patriotism with stirring rhetoric and fanned the flames of hatred toward enemy nations. Hesse, born into a cosmopolitan family and imbued with a strong sense of global brotherhood through his extensive travels across Asia, could not go along with this. While acknowledging that soldiers on the front lines had no choice but to fight, he published an appeal in the Swiss ‘Neue Zürcher Zeitung’ to intellectuals, arguing that even those who had originally been engaged in humanitarian culture should not, in a fit of rage, incite mutual hostility and hatred among human beings. This was undoubtedly an anti-war argument rooted in pacifism. Hesse was immediately subjected to insults—labeled a “traitor” and a “collaborator”—and received threats from the German media. The people who defended Hesse at that time were Theodor Heuss, who later became the first President of West Germany, and Romain Rolland, who found himself in a similar situation in France. This incident marked the beginning of a long and deep friendship between Hesse and these two men.
‘Demian’, a controversial work published around the time of World War II, was published anonymously so that Hesse could make a clean break with his past and start from scratch. Among Germans who were in a state of disillusionment and confusion following Germany’s defeat in World War I, ‘Demian’ caused a sensation, leading to a major uproar—including rumors that the City of Berlin intended to award a literary prize for new writers to the author of ‘Demian’. Hesse later revealed his authorship and returned the award, but he had achieved his goal of breaking free from the inertia of writing that relied on past fame. Afterward, Hesse began writing ‘Siddhartha’. In this work, as he pursued the Buddha’s path to enlightenment through his retreat into the mountains, Hesse seems to have arrived at a profoundly positive worldview and a classically grounded artistic realm.
However, Europe, having endured the World War, was still driven by selfishness—both on the part of nations and individuals—which led to a loss of faith in God and a superficiality of the soul. Faced with this reality, Hesse keenly felt his own status as an outsider and wrote ‘Steppenwolf’ as part of his pursuit of that outsider identity and his critique of civilization. In modern society, intoxicated by material excess, the unconventional and isolated outsider who refuses to conform was likened to the wolf of the wilderness.
Hesse also went through a turbulent period in his personal life. He separated from his wife Maria, who was nine years his senior and suffered from mental illness, and married the younger Ruth Wenger, only to experience the failure of that marriage when they parted ways after just three years. However, in 1926, he met Mrs. Ninon Dolbin, recognized her as an exceptional secretary, and married her in 1931. With the help of a friend, he acquired a new home in Montagnola, and his life finally began to stabilize, albeit barely. Yet this stability was short-lived; with the rise of the Nazi regime, Europe once again began to be thrown into turmoil. Since Hesse was labeled an undesirable author in Germany—where he had a large readership—it became difficult to publish his books, and his livelihood was threatened. To help writers like Thomas Mann who had fled Hitler’s Germany, he raised funds by selling ‘The Metamorphosis of Pictor’, a children’s story he had written and illustrated himself, to a benefactor; later, he had to make a living by selling paintings he had created as a hobby.
In the midst of these circumstances, Hesse embarked on a grand futuristic novel. He began writing the utopian tale ‘The Glass Bead Game’. Although the work began around the same time as Hitler’s regime, it veered toward the exact opposite extreme. On one side, a regime was sweeping across Europe with terrifying momentum through violence that crushed humanity; on the other, Hesse single-handedly and tirelessly painted a spiritual utopia that, starting from a critique of war and culture, transcended time and space to gather the essence of scholarship and the arts from all eras and regions. At first, it seemed as though the sword was mightier than the pen. However, by the time ‘The Glass Bead Game’ was completed over the course of about ten years and published in Switzerland, the Nazis had already met their end. While the Third Reich soon collapsed and became nothing more than a nightmare, ‘The Glass Bead Game’ shone brilliantly, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature—the first such award granted after the world war.
Hesse’s garden was planted with Eastern plants such as camellias, persimmon trees, and bamboo. He took delight in Zen and the I Ching. Even when his friend, President Hoiss, sent him the Pour le Mérite medal, he consulted the I Ching first; when the hexagram “Tai” (Peace) appeared, he deemed it an auspicious sign and accepted the medal.
He lived a rich life, detached from the mundane world yet loving its colorful realities, and passed away on August 9, 1962, at the age of 85.

“Gertrud”: The Work with the Most Novelistic Structure

“Gertrud” is Hesse’s third full-length novel, following “Peter Camenzind” and “Under the Wheel.” ‘Gertrud’ was serialized in magazines throughout 1909 and the following year, and was published as a book in 1910 by Langen in Munich. While almost all of Hesse’s works after ‘Peter Camenzind’ were published by Fischer, ‘Gertrud’ was the only exception, being published by a different publisher. The reason for this was likely that Hesse was co-editing the Langen-based magazine ‘March’ with Ludwig Thomas and others at the time.
As he himself described his novels as “not novels in the traditional sense, but biographies of the soul,” Hesse was not bound by conventional narrative structures; however, ‘Gertrud’ stands out as the most novel-like of his works, featuring a dramatic and eventful plot. Of course, the fact that it is the confession of a solitary artist is very typical of Hesse. In particular, it holds an important place as a representative novel exploring the quest for happiness, a major theme in Hesse’s literature.
Having made a name for himself as an emerging author through the success of ‘Peter Camenzind’, Hesse settled in Gaienhofen on the banks of the Rhine, a little downstream from Lake Constance, after his marriage, and devoted himself to writing. While most people move to the city upon achieving success, Hesse moved from the city to the countryside. This is a very interesting point. Although it was a quiet rural life, poets, painters, and musicians frequently visited, so his days were surrounded by an artistic atmosphere. In particular, Hesse’s wife, Maria, was an outstanding pianist who loved Schumann and Chopin, allowing Hesse to immerse himself in musical life as well. It was also during this time that his lifelong friendship with Ottmar Scheck—who would later become Switzerland’s greatest composer—began. Scheck set many of Hesse’s early works, such as ‘Elisabeth’ and ‘Ravenna’, to music. It is no coincidence that ‘Gertrud’, a novel about a musician, was written in this environment.
The three main characters in this novel each possess very distinct personalities, yet they all reflect Hesse in their shared sense of loneliness. The protagonist, Kun, has become even more lonely after becoming disabled, but he is fundamentally the “unfortunate artist type” who cannot easily adapt to everyday life. Since an artist is someone who creates his own world—a new and unique world that did not exist before—he is inherently destined to be isolated from the everyday world.
The protagonist, Kun, perhaps partly because of his disability, lives his life in a state of passive, self-reflective resignation and solitude. Despairing over an inescapable love, he experiences such anguish that he is driven to the brink of suicide, and he lives a solitary life with unhappiness as his constant companion, both in life and in art. Kun feels disillusioned with life and tries to live solely for music, but he still cannot give up on earthly love. Moreover, this soon becomes the source of his anguish. What is the path to happiness? The unhappy protagonist’s search prompts us to reflect deeply on happiness in life. The more lonely the soul becomes, and the more deeply one contemplates death, the more acute the pain of love becomes. In this sense, this work can be described as a “treatise on love, death, and solitude.”
Peter Kamenzint, the protagonist of ‘Peter Kamenzint’, is more active and ambitious. This is because Hesse sought, through Kamenzint, to break free from pathological introversion. Therefore, it can be said that Kun, the protagonist of ‘Gertrud’, is closer to Hesse in terms of introverted loneliness. Muot, the opera singer, is a passionate and magnetic figure, yet he, too, is lonely. Rather, he is starved by his loneliness. Whereas Kun is self-reflective, Muot is self-destructive. These two artists are each experiencing the dangerous terror of art. Gertrud is the possessor of a lonely soul that is refined, aristocratic, and restrained. That such a woman is drawn to Muot, who possesses a completely opposite personality, cannot help but be a tragedy of the human soul.
At first glance, ‘Gertrud’ does not appear to be an autobiographical work like ‘Under the Wheel’. Yet, on an internal level, it is indeed autobiographical. In the preface to this work, Hesse emphasizes inner destiny over external destiny, writing, “Since I have created my inner destiny myself, whether it be sweet or bitter, it is naturally mine, and I alone intend to take responsibility for it.” In the sense that it is underpinned by this inner destiny, this work is also autobiographical.
While most of Hesse’s novels are so-called Bildungsromane that trace the development of the soul over time, ‘Gertrud’ features a plot that is quite tumultuous and highly fictional. In this respect, it can be considered an exceptional work for Hesse, and one might even say it is his most entertaining work in the general sense. However, the process of seeking God amid solitary anguish, passing through religious despair that compels one to lament that “God is dead,” and gradually coming to realize that living for others brings greater happiness than living solely for oneself—and thus contemplating the significance of service—suggests the development of wisdom from Hesse’s early years to his later years. It is, indeed, a work that is quintessentially Hesse.