In this blog post, we will explore together, through his life and works, how Hermann Hesse’s wandering was not mere despair but a pilgrimage to find his self.
Hermann Hesse, a 20th-century literary giant and poet born in Germany, is a writer relatively familiar and approachable to us. This is partly due to the Eastern hues and sensibilities in Hesse’s literature, and partly because his works are accessible to read.
He was born in 1877 in Calw, in the Swabian region of southern Germany. His father, Johannes Hermann Hesse, was a pastor. Johannes Hermann Hesse was sent as a missionary to India, but in 1874, he married Marie Dubois, a widow with two sons, in Calw.
This Marie Dubois became Hermann Hesse’s mother.
Hermann Hesse came to Switzerland with his parents when he was three years old and spent his childhood there. He entered seminary after attending a Latin school, as his parents wished, but he wanted to be a poet rather than a pastor and ended up dropping out. For someone as naturally sensitive and romantic as he was, the overly strict seminary was simply unbearable. However, unable to completely abandon his studies, he enrolled in a Gymnasium high school, but soon dropped out again. Plunged into deep despair, he was sometimes seized by suicidal impulses. Unable to bear seeing his son like this, his father brought him to Caldebro to help with his work. But Hermann Hesse found that unsatisfying too, so he took a job as a watchmaker’s apprentice at a local factory. Whenever he could, he holed up in his grandfather’s study and began reading books.
After working at the watch factory for about a year, he went to Tübingen and became a bookseller. At this bookstore, he read many books and also developed friendships with professors.
The region where Hermann Hesse was born is a place that produced many writers and poets. Literary giants like Schiller and Hölderlin hailed from this area. Thus, Schwabing was the cradle of German Romanticism, a fact seemingly deeply connected to the region’s splendid landscapes.
As seen in his novels and poetry, the celebration of nature is an inseparable element of Hermann Hesse. Therefore, his novels are fundamentally prose-like and saturated with lyrical elements. Regardless of which work one examines, his oeuvre is consistently permeated by a lyrical and romantic current. He enjoyed traveling, wandering far and wide, and his intellectual journey was equally extensive. He delved deeply into Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, Zen Buddhism, Goethe, Nietzsche, and more, using these as fertile ground for his own creative work.
This wandering of Hermann Hesse was a pilgrimage seeking self-salvation. Salvation lay solely within himself, a path he termed ‘the way inward.’ This inner journey is also the path his works pursue, a theme glimpsed in ‘Demian’.
After World War I ended, Hermann Hesse separated from his wife and children, retreating alone to Montagnola in southern Switzerland to complete ‘Demian’. This work was initially published anonymously and had a profoundly shocking impact on the postwar younger generation upon its release. ‘Demian’ can be considered Hermann Hesse’s representative work from his forties. While his other works share similar tendencies, this one particularly depicts the inner world of humanity. However, its defining characteristic lies in its refusal to remain at the level of superficial observation; it delves into the realms of the human unconscious, the realm of dreams, and even the realm of inspiration.
He left behind many other works, but ‘Schön ist die Jugend’, ‘Twilight of the Gods’, and ‘Storm’ in particular represent the core of his thought and soul, and can be considered his alter egos.
Much like a sculptor carves a single subject into various forms using chisels from different directions, perspectives, and focal distances, Hermann Hesse sketched the form of love in myriad shapes. The subject matter, of course, stems from his own youth—from his boyhood days, trembling with fear as he crossed the garden of love—yet the anguish and ecstasy inherent to a human being flow through it continuously.
‘Twilight Figures’ is a work depicting the end of a decaying human being and their solitude. It can also be seen as a representation that, without concealing the era’s crisis plunged into an abyss, ascends to a higher spiritual world through anguish.
Hermann Hesse’s courage and conviction awaken in readers dreams that look toward the future, freeing them from mere melancholy or sentimental nostalgia. The reason Hermann Hesse’s works have already transcended their time to attain classical value is solely because they address themes of sorrow and will that resonate universally.
