The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (2 page)

Unfortunately, the change of environment did not help Hesse, and certain events led to increasing psychological stress in his life. His son Martin was stricken by mental illness and had to be placed in a foster home in 1914. He and Maria barely communicated. His father’s death in 1916 led to great feelings of guilt. And after the outbreak of World War I, he gradually found himself at odds with most of his German compatriots. Though he sympathized with Germany, he took a public position against war, for which he was constantly attacked by the German press. Since his eyesight had prevented him from serving in the army, he cared for German prisoners of war in Bern for over two years. In 1917 he suffered a nervous breakdown and went to Sonnmatt, a private sanatorium near Lucerne, where he underwent electroshock therapy and numerous analytic sessions with a Jungian psychologist. Finally, in the spring of 1919, he separated completely from his wife, moved to the village of Montagnola in the Italian part of Switzerland, and appeared to be coming out of his depression.

It is astounding that despite—or perhaps because of—all his psychological troubles, Hesse wrote some of his best works during this painful time. In 1913 he published his diary,
Out of India (Aus Indien)
, about his journey to the Far East, followed by the novel
Rosshalde
in 1914. During this year he also published his provocative essay, “Oh, Friends not these Tones!”
(“O Freunde nicht diese Töne!”)
, a pacifist tract, which enraged numerous Germans, who had become extremely militaristic. Until this time Hesse had been the “classic aesthete” and had rarely participated in politics. The war had awakened him, however, and though he never became a political activist, his writings began to assume a new political dimension that can be traced in his essays and fairy tales of the period, especially “A
Dream About the Gods” (1914), “Strange News from Another Planet” (1915), “If the War Continues” (1917), and “The European” (1918). Time and again, Hesse courageously stood up for his pacifist convictions and often exploded with frustration, as one of his letters to his friend Hans Sturzenegger in 1917 clearly demonstrates:

While the dominant theme in Hesse’s works continued to concern art and the artist, his collected fairy tales,
Märchen
(1919), reveal a shift from a solipsistic position to a consideration of the responsibility of the artist in society. At the same time, Hesse wanted to provide counsel for young readers in Germany, and works such as
Demian
(1919)—published under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair, who appears in “If the War Continues”—and
Zarathustra’s Return
(
Zarathustras Wiederkehr
, 1919), dealing with ways to overcome chaos and
nihilism, were clear gestures of reconciliation with his German readers after the destruction and turmoil of World War I.

It was from his retreat in Montagnola that Hesse felt, paradoxically, that he had enough distance to become more open and engaged with social and political problems. He was never inclined to align himself with a particular ideology; he was still the searcher, the artist on a quest to find himself. But by now he had found some tentative answers that he was willing to impart in his writings. Hesse had completely broken from his Christian and bourgeois upbringing and had been strongly influenced by Nietzsche, the German romantics, and Oriental religions. He now sought to combine these strands of thought in his own existentialist philosophy, concerned with finding the path home and discovering the divine within the essential nature of each individual. The book that perhaps best expressed his thinking at this time was
Siddhartha
(1922), a fairy-tale journey of rebellion and self-discovery, exuding the peace of mind that Hesse desired for himself.

The 1920s were not entirely peaceful for Hesse, however. In 1923, due in part to the continual harsh criticism of his works in the German press, Hesse became a Swiss citizen. This was also the year when he ended his marriage to Maria. In 1924 Hesse married Ruth Wenger, who was twenty-five years younger than he was. A sensitive young woman, she was a talented singer and dedicated to her career, but her health was very fragile and she suffered from tuberculosis. Given the differences in their ages and temperaments, this marriage was bound to fail, and within eleven weeks they parted ways. Again Hesse went through a major psychological crisis and contemplated suicide. But then he made a conscious decision to overcome his despair and introverted nature by frequenting taverns, dance halls,
and places in Zurich and Bern where he had never before spent much time. To a certain extent, Hesse recorded these experiences in his famous novel
Steppenwolf
(1927), and the publication of this work seemed to cathartically release the wildness within him and enable him to settle down again in Montagnola to focus on his writing. During this time he met Ninon Dolbin, an art historian, who began living with him in 1928 and married him in 1929. A remarkably independent and wise person, Ninon Dolbin had a steadying influence on Hesse throughout the rest of his life, and although his difficulties with women and his own sexuality were not put to rest with this marriage, Hesse was able to establish a rapport with her that he had not been able to have in his other relationships.

With this marriage Hesse entered the mature period of his writing. He had begun numerous stories and novels during the 1920s and continued to publish literary essays and reviews in Germany and Switzerland. By the beginning of the 1930s he finished two important works he had begun earlier,
Narcissus and Goldmund
(
Narziss und Goldmund
, 1930) and
Journey to the East
(
Die Morgenlandfahrt
, 1932). The two books rounded out many of the existentialist, romantic, and Oriental ideas with which he had been experimenting during the 1920s. Now, in 1932, he was ready to begin his magnum opus,
The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel)
, which would take him ten years to complete.

Although Hesse had always enjoyed traveling and lecturing and visiting such Swiss cities as Basel and Bern, he felt great pleasure in his large home in Montagnola. During the next twelve years, he rarely left his Swiss retreat, where he followed a set routine with Ninon. Mornings and afternoons were devoted to painting, gardening, and correspondence, while evenings he read and wrote. Over the years
Hesse had become a respected watercolor painter and had illustrated some of his own books; he continued to develop his talents as a painter during the 1930s and 1940s. Meanwhile, there was also another talent that he cultivated at this time, that of playing “host.”

During the Nazi period numerous political refugees and friends fled Germany, and Hesse spent a great deal of his time helping them and providing them with a place to stay. However, he never published an official or public condemnation of Hitler and Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s. He still smarted from having been burned during World War I and the Weimar period for his public stand in behalf of peace. He firmly believed that the artist could not change society, but that politics could ruin an artist’s perspective, perhaps even destroy it. The artist’s role was to remain true to his art and not be influenced by ideologies on either the Right or the Left. Of course, in his private correspondence and in the reviews he wrote for various journals in Sweden and Switzerland, he made his position against Nazism quite clear. And yet he would issue no public declaration of opposition to German fascism. This refusal is clearly explained in a letter of 1936 to his editor at the Fischer Verlag:

These views and many other reflections about art and education were incorporated into
The Glass Bead Game
, which was first published in Zurich in 1943 and subsequently in Germany in 1946. It was to be his last novel, and fittingly, it encompassed the wide range of issues that had been central to his writing since the turn of the century.
The Glass Bead Game
reads like an autobiographical novel of development. The young protagonist, Josef Knecht, is chosen to attend an elite school in Castalia, a province dedicated to intellectual and aesthetic pursuits. Like many of Hesse’s other young “heroes,” he must undergo an apprenticeship under the guidance of a wise man, in this case the Magister Musicae of Monteport, who teaches him to comprehend dreams and to embrace life’s opposites—to play with them and become one with them. Once Knecht has achieved everything he possibly can as the grand Magister Ludi in this spiritual realm, he decides that he wants to leave Castalia and make a more practical contribution in the outside world. He had
been bothered by the esotericism and elitism of Castalia and felt that a Magister of his stature should assume more social responsibility. Knecht’s tragic death at the end of the novel reflects Hesse’s own ambivalent attitude toward the social commitment of the artist as well as his self-questioning position in regard to aestheticism. By contrast, Hesse never questioned the value of art as a means of maintaining social values and imparting wisdom against the barbarism of his times.

After World War II, Hesse’s own artistic productivity declined out of choice. He preferred to spend his time responding to demands from the outside world while trying to lead a “normal” private life. After 1945 Hesse had suddenly become famous and was sought out by critics, the media, and literary societies, not to mention numerous friends who could now travel freely in Europe. Nor could he avoid controversy. First came a difficult period in which it seemed that Hesse’s works might be banned by the American occupying forces simply because they had not been banned by the Nazis. This censorship never occurred, and Hesse wrote numerous political essays about the necessity for moral regeneration in Germany and for overcoming the militaristic mentality. Four of his most important essays of the immediate postwar period were later published in
War and Peace (Krieg und Frieden)
in 1949.

Hesse always suspected that his admonishments would not be taken seriously in Germany. Immediately following the war, however, he was so disappointed and embittered by the continuation of certain forms of fascist and materialist thought in Germany and by his disputes with the Allied authorities that his nerves became frayed. Even though he received the Goethe Prize in 1946, followed by the Nobel Prize, also in 1946, he became so depressed that he again
withdrew to a sanatorium for treatment. Only in March 1947 did he feel sufficiently healthy to return to Montagnola, where he spent the last fifteen years of his life following his artistic pursuits and nursing his frail health.

Although many writers, politicians, and friends called upon Hesse to take an active role in politics in the name of peace, he continued to refuse to commit himself to any one party, country, or ideology. In reviews, essays, and letters, he wrote about both the dangers of American capitalism for Europe—what he called the Americanizing of Europe—and the totalitarian threat of the Soviet Union. It was clear that his non-involvement had a great deal to do with his “politics” of nonviolence. Hesse refused to compromise his integrity or support causes that might be manipulated for nefarious ends. Humanity came first for him, not a political party or movement, and he believed peace could be achieved only if people were given freedom to realize their humanitarian impulses.

As the cold war escalated in the 1950s, Hesse withdrew from the world’s stage and kept his opinions to himself. Except for writing some short stories, he spent most of his time painting, maintaining a vigorous correspondence, and fighting various debilitating illnesses. He had always suffered periodic spells of depression and physical exhaustion; after 1950 his eyes began to weaken, and in 1955 a heart condition prevented him from leaving the area around Montagnola. At about this time the doctors discovered he was suffering from leukemia, which became virulent at the end of 1961. Thanks to blood transfusions, he was able to live fairly comfortably until his death on August 8, 1962.

•  •  •

In many respects Hesse’s great achievement as a writer was in the domain of fairy tales and fantasy literature. He wrote his very first fairy tale, called “The Two Brothers” (
“Die beiden Brüder”
), when he was only ten years old, and his first significant period as a writer, 1895–1900, was a time when he immersed himself in reading and emulating European and Oriental fairy-tale writers. Like no other writer of the twentieth century, all of Hesse’s works drew in some way on the great fairy-tale traditions of Europe and the Orient. He was most successful as a writer when he combined different traditions with his own personal experiences and endowed them with an unusual lyrical and sometimes sentimental but nonetheless strong note of refusal.