In this blog post, we will examine the anguish and inner transformation experienced between civic life and non-civic (artistic and nomadic) life through Hermann Hesse’s life and his major essays “Wandering,” “Kurgast,” and “The Journey to Nuremberg.”
Commentary and Author Overview
Hermann Hesse, who is better known to Korean readers than any other German author, is one of the leading writers representing Germany in the first half of the 20th century. Born into a distinguished family of theologians in the small town of Kalb in the Swabian region of southern Germany, he entered a Latin school at the age of thirteen and enrolled in the Maulbronn Seminary the following year. However, unable to endure life at the seminary, he fled and drifted from one job to another—working as a bookstore clerk and a watch factory worker—while pursuing literary studies on the side. It was during this time that his debut poetry collection, *Romantic Songs*, was recognized by Rilke, drawing the attention of the literary world and setting him on the path to becoming a writer.
Although Hesse initially wrote in a Romantic style, he struggled to achieve self-realization through an inner journey as he channeled all his anguish, despair, and the mental struggles required to overcome them into his literature—experiences shaped by his turbulent school days, two failed marriages, deteriorating health, and the two world wars. In the course of this journey, he turned his gaze beyond Christian spirituality and Western philosophy to explore Eastern religions and wisdom. Through the literary fruits of this exploration, he deeply inspired the post-war generation, which was spiritually adrift, and his works became almost like a bible for young people in the East and the United States. Never ceasing his efforts toward self-realization until his death, he was awarded both the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Goethe Prize in 1946.
During the middle of his life, Hesse faced significant financial and emotional hardships, from his time in Gaihenhofen in southern Germany and Bern in Switzerland, until he settled in Ticino, southern Switzerland, in 1919. During World War I, while working on relief efforts at a welfare association for prisoners of war in Bern, Switzerland, he wrote articles opposing the barbarism of war and nationalism. As a result, he was branded a traitor by Germans, faced immense criticism, and suffered deep emotional wounds. At the same time, he was struck by a series of family tragedies, including the death of his father, the illness of his youngest son Martin, and the worsening mental illness of his wife, Maria Bernoulli.
Amid these circumstances, Hesse’s own mental and physical health deteriorated, leading him to undergo psychoanalysis in Lucerne. Then, at the age of forty-two, he retired to the small village of Montagnola in the canton of Ticino, where he found a new lease on life and rekindled his creative drive. Spending half his life there, Hesse published such gem-like novels and poems as *Klingsor’s Last Summer*, *Siddhartha*, *Steppenwolf*, *Narcissus and Goldmund*, and *The Glass Bead Game*, which brought him worldwide fame. *Wandering* (1920), *Kurgast* (1924/1925), and *The Journey to Nuremberg* (1927) are also autobiographical works he wrote during this period.
Commentary by Work
‘Wandering’
‘Wandering’ is a sketchbook comprising thirteen prose pieces and ten poems (originally it also included fourteen watercolors, but this edition does not contain the illustrations). Although the work was published in 1920, it was written during the time he was engaged in prisoner relief work. Hesse stayed in Ticino for a total of 12 weeks over four separate periods until 1918, writing poetry and prose and painting, and this material was compiled into *Wandering*.
At the time, Hesse was experiencing a physical and mental crisis due to the exhaustion from prisoner relief work and the trauma of war, and he was undergoing psychoanalysis with his wife, Maria. During this treatment, his primary physician in Lucerne, Dr. Josef Bernhard Lang, encouraged him to express his dreams through painting as well. It was then that he discovered his talent for painting, which later helped him overcome his depression.
Meanwhile, by the end of 1918, when he was writing *Demian*, Hesse’s family had broken apart. His wife remained in a psychiatric hospital, his eldest son was placed with a friend, and his second and third sons were sent to a boarding school in southern Germany, while Hesse himself moved to Locarno. The period during which he wrote *Wandering* thus coincided with the dissolution of his bourgeois life, which he had previously led as the head of a household. Thus, it can be said that Hesse was facing a decisive turning point in his life and stood at a crossroads where he had to choose a new way of life.
These travel notes, which describe his journey of wandering away from his bourgeois life in Gaihenhofen and Bern to the natural life of Ticino in southern Switzerland, metaphorically depict a transition from the northern, bourgeois world to the southern, artistic world. It represents a shift from what is known as the “active life” to the “contemplative life,” and this inner transformation was further embodied in the works he published subsequently.
Hesse symbolically likened this very turning point, in the very first sentence, to a mountain pass dividing the north from the south.
“I bid farewell near this house. For a long time, I will no longer see such houses. For I am approaching the mountain pass leading over the Alps. The German landscape, the German language, and the northern German architectural style all end here. How wonderful it is to cross such a boundary!”
This mountain pass serves as the boundary between the civic life of the North and the artistic life of the South, and *Wandering* can be seen as an attempt to cross that boundary. Having spent the first half of his life on “this side” of the Alps, he now moves to the region “beyond” the mountains. The second half of his life is intended to be lived as a different person from who he has been until now.
Hesse realizes that the harsh demands he placed on himself to fulfill his roles in his past life were wrong, and he even believes he went along with the madness of war and the misery of the world. Consequently, he feels disillusionment and skepticism toward the bourgeois life he has lived, and toward everything he once cherished as sincerity and virtue; this becomes the reason he chooses the world of art and fantasy—symbolized by the south—at this crossroads. Longing for such a transformation, he now wishes to be a wanderer who settles nowhere on earth.
However, as is typical of Hesse’s thought, which constantly oscillates between extremes, he cannot completely abandon his yearning for the civic world he now seeks to leave behind. “I wanted to become an artist and a dreamer of fantasy,” he says. “But in doing so, I also wanted to possess virtue and a homeland.” Yet he confesses, “It took a long time before I realized that one cannot have both.”
Though he always seeks unity or oneness—and though he knows that “all the waters of the world meet again, that the glaciers and the Nile mix in the wet clouds”—at this mountain pass, he chooses the south. Hesse compares this to the watershed of a mountain pass where rainwater splits to flow toward the distant, cold sea—or the coasts of Liguria and the Adriatic, where Africa lies beyond.
Nevertheless, the South and the North, the life of an artist and the life of a citizen, carry equal weight for him. Therefore, the South he has now chosen is not the ultimate goal of his life. It is merely a process toward the metaphysical goal of unity. “The goal reached was not the goal. Every path was a detour, and every rest brought new longing,” Hesse says. Thus, this oscillation between two poles of equal weight becomes the fundamental theme of this travelogue. For Hesse, wandering can be described as a kind of “dialectical movement” that manifests as a metaphysical desire.
In his essay “Second Home” (1930), Hesse described this travel journal as “a hymn to the landscape of Ticino.” Of course, *Wandering* pays tribute to the landscapes of Ticino by vividly describing their topography—such as the waterfalls of Brione (“the Bridge”), the “pastor’s house” in Tegna in the Centovalli valley, the “trees” in the triangle formed by the small river Maggia, and the “chapel” on the path from Monti to the pilgrimage church of Madonna in Locarno.
However, Hesse regretted that readers failed to notice the author’s profound reflections underlying such praise for the local scenery. “In a book like my ‘Wandering,’ my readers see pleasant pastoral poetry and a certain lyrical music, but they do not surmise the concentration, resignation, and fate that lie behind it. Unless one works inwardly while simultaneously turning outward, unless one lives looking at both the inner and the outer worlds at the same time, one cannot reach this concentration. (…) Of course, this stems from weakness. Of course, all my actions arise from weakness and suffering, and not from some pleasant arrogance, as laypeople sometimes imagine in a writer.”
These words, spoken by Hesse to his fellow writer Wilhelm Kunze in 1921, reveal that behind the beautiful scenic descriptions in this work lies the author’s profound reflection, born of deep anguish and wandering in life. His artistic insight—gained while wandering between these extremes and painfully searching for the “path inward”—is already encapsulated in the passage from *The Chapel*, which anticipates the theme of *Siddhartha*: “Faith is not gained through asceticism or sacrifice. (…) The god we believe we must believe in is within us. One cannot affirm God while denying oneself.”
‘Kurgast’
In May 1919, the wandering Hesse settled down again, renting a small “house for a bachelor” in a beautiful spot near Lugano. His life, which began without his wife Maria—who had been discharged from the hospital before him and went straight to Acona—or his three sons, can be seen as a kind of experiment to make a fresh start as a writer and painter. In the “noble ruins” of this place, where the only heating was a meager fireplace, he endured four bitterly cold winters.
During this time, he developed rheumatoid arthritis and sciatica; doctors recommended that Hesse undergo thermal therapy, and several people in the area suggested the Baden sanatorium, located between Basel and Zurich. Hesse had friends in Baden, and his younger brother Hans also lived there. However, the primary reason Hesse chose this sanatorium was its famous thermal waters. Popular even among the ancient Romans, Baden’s thermal springs—with a water temperature of 48 degrees Celsius—rank among the warmest in Switzerland; they are sulfur springs containing slightly radioactive salt and calcium sulfate.
Hesse stayed at a sanatorium hotel named Verena Hof, after the patron saint of the town, and received treatment there. Thanks to the effects of the thermal waters and the help of Dr. Josef Markwalder, who did his utmost to treat Hesse, he was able to complete his treatment and return home that fall.
To endure the unfamiliar life there, where he had to spend his days passively as a patient, Hesse began to write down his impressions every day; the resulting memoir is *Kurgast*, a kind of “psychology of convalescence.” This autobiographical account, in which daily life at the sanatorium and the author’s inner state are depicted almost exactly as they were—with only the names of a few characters changed—was thus likely Hesse’s attempt at self-psychoanalysis and self-therapy to preserve himself amidst the decadent life of the sanatorium, cut off from civic life.
Hesse began writing this memoir in May 1923 and completed it in October of the same year after his second stay at the sanatorium. He described it as having a “half-joking, half-serious tone,” yet called it his “most personal and serious book.” He initially titled it “Spa Psychology, or the Commentary of a Baden Sanatorium Patient” and, borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche’s *Twilight of the Idols*, added, “Idleness is the beginning of all psychology.”
The patient’s daily routine begins with a visit to the spa, which features several powerful springs feeding some forty baths in the spacious basement of the building. Passing through a labyrinth of underground passages leads to a very old, dark, domed structure. There, in a damp, warm, sulfur-scented space, are small chambers less than two meters wide, lined with white tiles, which converge into a single bath via two flights of stairs.
This bath is filled with “mysterious water” that has been boiled to a depth of over a hundred meters “in the Earth’s unknown kitchen since thousands of years ago” and “flows ceaselessly in a faint beam of light.” In that dimly lit bathhouse, where sunlight filters through the ash-gray glass from the roof, the patient sweats and struggles through the bath; yet, within that space, he feels a certain sense of protection.
And so the daily routine continues with calisthenics and mealtimes that are always overflowing with greasy food—making them tedious and exhausting. The time that remains after that becomes even more unbearable for him. The pleasures available through walks, roulette games, concerts, movies, picture postcards, and tea rooms—that is, the “vices” and “immorality” into which he has inevitably fallen—soon become tiresome to him.
Sitting alone on a chair in a secluded corner of the garden, he reflects on how quickly physical idleness leads to mental decadence. And he looks back on himself, who has colluded with and joined this decadent world. “To have colluded with this world, joined it, adapted to it, and found comfort within it… Because I colluded with this world and accepted it, I am now in the worst possible state! And yet I remain there. Indolence is stronger than my discernment, and a fat, lazy belly exerts greater power than a timidly sighing soul.”
Yet the artist’s soul does not remain forever in such indolence. “There are times when the soul suddenly awakens, and the words in my mouth stir my own anger, compelling me to hastily and coldly leave that place and seek solitude.” Rather, it is precisely because of this that a more productive desire for thought and writing surges forth, leading to “the psychology of the artist and writer, the passion, seriousness, and ambition of writing.”
In his belief in oneness, Hesse sublimates his state of “decline” here into “not annihilation, but merely a transformation.” “For the foundation and breeding ground of all our thoughts, and of our psychology, is faith in God and faith in oneness. And no matter how desperate the situation, unity can always be reborn through grace or the path of insight.” “I have always succeeded in liberating myself, in forgetting my ego and devoting myself, in feeling unity, in recognizing the rift between the inner and the outer, the self and the world, as an illusion, and in willingly immersing myself in unity with my eyes closed.”
From this productive dialectic of polarities, born of the tension between opposites, he develops an art theory at the end of his manuscript that offers profound insights. As a writer, his desire is to find expressions of dual harmony and duality. He states, “I want to write movements and phrases where melody and counter-melody are always heard, so that unity always coexists with all variety, and seriousness always coexists with all playfulness.”
Ultimately, the author demonstrates once again here his insight that life is “something that is achieved only by moving back and forth between these poles, between the two main pillars of the world.” Of course, he knows that he will never succeed in “bending the poles of life to bring them closer together and recording the dual harmony of life.” Nevertheless, “continuing to undertake such attempts again and again, following the dark command within his heart”—this is precisely the driving force that compels Hesse to write and to live. His artistic anguish and vitality, as he floats eternally between the poles in pursuit of the ideal of unity, stem directly from this.
‘The Journey to Nuremberg’
In late September 1925, Hesse received invitations for recitals from Ulm, Augsburg, and Nuremberg, prompting him to embark on a journey through Germany. This work, which chronicles the inner conflict leading up to his decision to embark on the lecture tour, as well as his expectations and disappointments along the way, and the encounters, comfort, and happiness he experienced, reveals not only the anguish of the artist Hesse as he grapples with the disconnect from reality but also, on the other hand, his love for life.
The recitals were “merely a pretext”; the actual purpose of the trip was to meet his friend Becker in Blaubeuren, visit his sister, and see the writer Gehipp, with whom Hesse had been friends for twenty years. Furthermore, the trip was spurred by his resolve—formed a year earlier while rereading Mörike’s works—that if he ever traveled to southern Germany, he would without fail visit Blaubeuren, where Mörike’s water nymph, the beautiful Lau, had lived.
In addition to concerns stemming from Germany’s political situation, Hesse was also troubled by his increasingly complicated personal life. Having remarried Ruth in 1924, he had actually spent very little time with her—a woman twenty years his junior—and even during the winter they spent together in Basel, they lived in separate quarters. Just as with the “Dutchman” in *Kurgast*, it was unlikely that his new wife, who was full of vitality, could have maintained a harmonious marriage with Hesse, a man devoted to a sensitive spiritual life. Furthermore, the health of his first wife, Maria, did not improve amid a series of misfortunes, including her brother’s suicide and her younger brother’s admission to a mental hospital.
Amid these ongoing practical hardships, Hesse decided to travel in order to temporarily set aside his mental exhaustion and focus on his inner self. Yet his description of his fear of being bound by fixed commitments reveals his extremely delicate inner state as an artist. He worries that the journey might disrupt his creative rhythm, fearing that “one of the most beautiful and rare moments—the moment when a magical bird sings and the desire to create cries out—might fly away” while he is traveling.
Just as his creative process is attuned to his mood, his approach to travel is also unique. For him, what matters most is not the destination or the goal, but the method and the path. Although we live in an amazing age where people can travel over a thousand kilometers in a single day, for him, “enduring at least four or five hours on a train” is inhuman. That is why he needs a week for a journey that others could complete in a day. Yet, whenever a place captivates him along the way, he sets out much earlier than usual so he can stop anywhere—revealing the inevitable nature of a wanderer. And the special moments he occasionally encounters become the greatest gifts to him.
“It was in front of the city gates of a small town near the Upper Rhine that seemed to be sleeping. There, on the damp meadow, I saw a Frutti dancing the wedding dance with his wife. Only a Frutti could do that.”
On his way to his first engagement, a poetry reading in Ulm, Hesse made brief stops in Locarno, Baden, and Zurich. He visited Becker, a friend from his school days in Blaubeuren (formerly Maulbronn), and sought out the stone bathtub in the convent courtyard where Mörike’s water nymph once lived. He does not hide his disillusionment and disappointment with Nuremberg, the medieval city he had so anticipated.
While lamenting the decaying culture of this sick city—choked by exhaust fumes, noise, and congested traffic, and driven mad by technology—he finds some compensation for this disillusionment through the joyful encounters he experiences during his visits to Augsburg and Munich. Behind this sense of alienation and conflict with reality lies a hidden affection for it.
His detailed account of his own state of mind at the recitation event reveals Hesse’s intense artistic spirit. He meticulously described the pain of standing before the public, his wariness toward the countless enthusiastic admirers, and his concern that he might create a false image of literature in their presence—or that he himself might become a victim of personality cult worship amidst their applause.
Yet, even amidst the reality he encounters on this journey, the inner conflicts, and the resulting anguish, what sustains him is humor. “The only thing that captivated me was this question: ‘You, the traveling mad writer, are you truly mad? Is it not simply because you cannot adapt to reality “as it is” that you often feel sick, suffer the pains of life, and no longer wish to live? (…) Your resistance to this terrible ‘world as it is’ is a hundred times right.’”
He continues, “If you are dying and suffocating because of this world rather than accepting it, then you are right. And once again, I felt a jolt between the two extremes. I sensed the gap between reality and ideal, and I felt the suspension bridge between reality and beauty swaying. It was humor. Yes, it was humor that made it bearable.”
For Hesse, humor becomes a vital way of life in the process of finding his true self and pursuing wholeness. In this painful reality, humor teaches detachment and acts as a mediator between reality and ideal, between fact and “beautiful illusion.” This diary thus anticipates the humor of *Steppenwolf*.
As Hans Sahl noted, the self-destructive pessimism of *The Journey to Nuremberg* is transformed into irony and humor. In this way, humor becomes the path that allows Hesse to survive even amidst all suffering.
