Soul of the Age (3 page)

Hesse's last novel,
The Glass Bead Game,
was originally to have been the story of “a person who lives through the great epochs of human history in several reincarnations,” as he put it in a letter to Rudolf Pannwitz (January 1955)—a series of parallel lives beginning in prehistoric times, running through the Golden Age of India, the patristic period of early Christianity and eighteenth-century Pietism in Germany, and ending in a pedagogical province in the future. But in the course of its eleven-year genesis, from 1931 until the novel's publication in 1943, Hesse's intentions gradually shifted under the impact of current events. Barely had Hesse and Ninon become established in their new house in Montagnola when, in the spring of 1933, the first wave of emigrants fleeing Hitler's Germany reached their threshold. Hesse had resigned from the Prussian Academy of Arts two years before Hitler's rise to power, for reasons that he explained in his letter of November 1930 to Wilhelm Schäfer. From that moment on Hesse was involved, as he had been during the first world war, in the support of those overrun by political events. In 1934 he joined the Swiss Writers' Union so that he would be in a better position to provide assistance and to intervene on behalf of needy émigrés. Again, however, as had been the case twenty years earlier, he experienced abuse from voices in Germany, as well as from other countries, who were dissatisfied by the efforts of the Swiss citizen to maintain the politically neutral position that he justified in his letter to Arthur Stoll of September 17, 1933.

Unlike many opponents of the Nazis, Hesse was permitted for a good many years to continue publishing his works in Germany. Indeed, when Hesse's publisher, S. Fischer, moved abroad with many of the firm's authors, the National Socialists did not permit Hesse's copyrights to leave Germany. (The rights remained with the “Aryan” branch of S. Fischer, which was managed in Berlin by Peter Suhrkamp until his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944.) For those reasons Hesse came in for abuse from various émigré writers who felt that he had not spoken out publicly against Hitler and that he should have refused to allow his works to appear in Nazi Germany. It was Hesse's position, however, that he could do more good by continuing to make his voice heard within Germany since he was one of the few writers not co-opted by the Nazis who could still be published there. And that circumstance continued until 1939, when the Nazis finally declared his works undesirable and denied their publication by the indirect method of refusing paper for their printing.

During the same period, Hesse began in 1935 to review German books for the Swedish literary journal
Bonniers Litterära Magasin
—an opportunity he exploited in order to make known abroad a host of works, including notably those of Kafka and other Jewish writers, that were ignored by official German propaganda organs. It was this activity that drew upon Hesse the disapproval of Will Vesper, a Nazi spokesman who was piqued in part, no doubt, by the fact that Hesse had replaced him at
Bonniers Litterära Magasin.
(See Hesse's letter of January 1936 to Wilhelm Schäfer.) That same year brought the death of his brother, Hans, through suicide (as detailed in the letter of December 1935 to his cousin Fritz Gundert). In 1943, finally, the Nazis denied publication rights to
The Glass Bead Game,
and Hesse published the novel in Switzerland. This circumstance not only deprived Hesse of the basis for his income, it also cut him off from his principal readership and, hence, the opportunity to make his voice heard in Nazi Germany.

Hesse's home in Montagnola, where he found solace tending his garden, became the place of first refuge for many émigrés—including Thomas Mann, the socialist publicist Heinrich Wiegand, and the writer Peter Weiss. And Hesse gave financial and personal support to dozens of others. Montagnola represented for scores of Germans a reservoir of traditional German values that were being trampled underfoot by the Nazis. For this reason it is doubly ironic that, immediately after the war, Hesse again, for a brief time, had to experience political attacks by the democratic forces of liberation—this time in the person of Hans Habe, a German émigré serving in the U.S. Army. With the help of such supporters as Thomas Mann and Theodor Heuss, Hesse rapidly set matters aright. But for the third time since the “Cologne Calumny” in 1915, Hesse came to grief for his efforts to maintain his intellectual and ethical independence, as he explained in his letter of October 23, 1945, to Fritz Gundert.

His public vindication came rapidly. In 1946 he received the Nobel Prize for literature for his representation of the classical ideal of humanity and his lofty stylistic values. That same year he was awarded the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt am Main. The remaining years of Hesse's life were as tranquil as his early years had been tumultuous. To be sure, his correspondence steadily increased: in 1948, he noted, between one hundred and five hundred pages of correspondence arrived daily—letters that he increasingly answered with circular letters that he had privately printed for the purpose (see his 1947 “Response to Letters Requesting Help”) or with personally initialed postcards bearing a watercolor from his brush. For the last twelve years of his life, to escape the importunities of visitors who ignored the sign politely requesting no visitors, he and Ninon spent July and August in Nietzsche's Sils Maria, where he could meditate and converse quietly with such old friends as Theodor Heuss.

In 1950 Hesse encouraged Peter Suhrkamp, who had courageously maintained the German branch of S. Fischer under the Nazis, to set up his own publishing company, and during the early years Hesse's works provided the main financial basis for that enterprise. (His
Collected Works
were published in six thin-paper volumes for his seventy-fifth birthday in 1952, and the seven-volume
Collected Works
were brought out in 1957 for his eightieth birthday.) In these final years, although he continued to write letters, poems, and personal essays at an astonishing rate despite increasingly poor eyesight, Hesse wrote no further major literary pieces. He lived quietly with Ninon, surrounded by family and friends. He died peacefully in his sleep on August 9, 1962.

*   *   *

Hesse, like the rest of his family an inveterate paper hoarder, saved some thirty-five thousand letters written to him over the years. However, of the estimated thirty thousand letters that he wrote during his lifetime, only about half have survived. (Until he met Ninon in 1927 he did not routinely keep copies of the letters he wrote.) Most letters from the years up to 1900 are extant because they were sent to his parents and sisters, who threw nothing away. The most important of these have been published in a volume that Ninon Hesse edited in the year of her death,
Childhood and Youth before Nineteen Hundred: Hermann Hesse in Letters and Documents 1877–1895 (Kindheit und Jugend vor Neunzehnhundert: Hermann Hesse in Briefen und Lebenszeugnissen 1877–1895
[Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966]). However, little remains from the Gaienhofen years, and the entire correspondence with his first wife, Mia, was lost in a fire. The letters to his second wife were sealed until 1987 and were not available for inclusion in the
Collected Letters;
while the letters to Ninon remain under seal until the year 2017.

Fortunately, several entire correspondences have been preserved and published separately: the engaging exchange with Thomas Mann, extending from 1910 until Mann's death in 1955; the correspondence with Romain Rolland, which documents the pacifistic and cosmopolitan efforts of these two men brought together by their opposition to World War I; the disappointingly trivial correspondence with Karl Kerényi and the frank and revealing one with Hesse's friend, the socialist publicist Heinrich Wiegand; the businesslike communications concerning copyrights, royalties, and details of publication with Peter Suhrkamp; and others. During his own lifetime Hesse published a volume (
Briefe,
3rd ed. [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964]) containing letters of general interest. The four-volume edition of his
Collected Letters
(
Gesammelte Briefe,
edited by Volker Michels [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973–1986]) contains 1,762 letters from the years 1895 to 1962. Altogether, about three thousand, or one tenth, of Hesse's letters are currently available in German. (Most of Hesse's manuscripts are housed in the Hesse collections of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach and the Schweizerische Landesbibliothek in Bern.)

The present selection, which comprises some three hundred letters taken from the various collections listed above, seeks to be representative. It includes letters from every period, indeed from virtually every year, of Hesse's life from 1891 to his death in 1962. And it reveals Hesse in every facet of his personality as well as in every modulation of his voice—from the pious posings of the early letters to parents and siblings and the self-dramatizing aestheticism with which he presented himself to school friends, through the increasingly relentless self-exposure of his missives from Gaienhofen, to the often startling frankness of his communications to his psychoanalysts and physicians, the growing circle of writers, musicians, and painters who became the friends of his maturity, the public figures who approached the famous man of letters, and finally the many readers who turned to Hesse over the years for advice and consolation. The unmediated tone of the man emerges from the very haste of the letters, which—at least in the years until 1930—were never intended for publication and which assume that the reader can fill in the examples for the frequent “etc.” that punctuate these lines. The ellipses indicated by brackets occur in the German edition and mark omissions to avoid unnecessary repetitions from letter to letter. The notes, which are based on the notes in the German edition, have been revised and supplemented for the needs of readers in the United States.

These letters contain the raw material for the literary works that have drawn millions of readers to Hesse. They reveal the patterns of the writer's daily life, his reading, his health problems, the expression of his beliefs, his habits of composition. But they also echo the relentlessly honest voice of a man striving for his personal individuation, seeking to maintain a position of integrity in a world grown problematic, and hoping through the miracle of communication to demonstrate his commitment to another human being. We see here the aestheticism of the rebellious youth, the dissatisfactions of the young paterfamilias, the moral ambivalence of the war years, the spiritual awakening that followed, the crisis of
Steppenwolf,
the withdrawal into the supratemporal realm of
The Glass Bead Game,
and the ethical tranquillity of the aging Hesse. The life exposed through these letters exemplifies in a very real sense the “soul of the age.”

Theodore Ziolkowski

 

TO JOHANNES AND MARIE HESSE

[
Maulbronn, after September 15, 1891
]

You would probably most like to hear about my life at the seminary. Incidentally, the teachers and I are getting along fine; Klaiber is in the infirmary with a swollen foot, they're taking good care of him there, he's looking quite rosy.

Well, all winter we rise at 6:30, have to be ready by 6:50. Things can get quite hectic in the bathroom; almost all of us wash thoroughly.

At 6:50 we have precatio (prayers). (NB: There are many more of those Latin words from the monastic era—e.g., dormitorium, precatio, recreatio, etc.) During the service, we sing one verse of a hymn first, accompanied on the piano by one of the seminarians. Then the tutor reads aloud the meditation on a passage from the Bible, then comes a prayer, and then more singing. Here's how the singing works: If we sing the first verse of “God Is Faithful” on Monday morning, we sing the second verse after recollection. In the evening we sing the first or second verse of “Command Thy Ways.” Then, on Tuesday morning, we sing the 3rd and 4th verse of “God Is Faithful” and in the evening the 3rd and 4th verse of “Command” and so on, until the chorale is over. After prayers comes breakfast—a rather skimpy amount of milk, not that we get enough coffee to give anybody a stomachache either. In addition, each person gets 1½ rolls. My money is running out fast; had to pay 30 pfennigs for the famulus and bursar; 64 pfennigs for fire insurance at the seminary. Then one needs an enormous quantity of copy books, including three for Ovid alone! We have 41 hours of lessons a week, and that's not counting the hours set aside for disputation and homework. But we also get opportunities to go outside—e.g., from 12:30 to 2 o'clock.

I'd appreciate it a lot if at some point you could send me a batch of ordinary scratch pads. There are lots of things I cannot get my hands on here. I don't have much money left, only spent 11 pfennigs on myself for beer once. Many things are very expensive here, and the famulus occasionally adds a surcharge to make up for his trouble. I can eat my fill at lunch and dinner, then there's afternoon snack. Please do remember to send me as many scratch pads as possible, when convenient, of course. I can put the holes in them.

I wasn't exactly displeased to hear we shall not be having French for a while. There will be Hebrew lessons during the French periods. The teachers, particularly the tutors, are mostly very responsive when we have any questions or requests. In my next letter, if it amuses me, I shall describe for you our daily routine (not the timetable) at the seminary. Yesterday evening I had to draw on my supply of marmalade, and, lo and behold, almost everybody has one to three caches of preserves. They hadn't yet dared own up to them. We're getting better used to one another. I'm in the largest room (Hellas). In our room, we have the top student in the class, the second as well, also the treasurer, the librarian, and this week I am the “censor,” i.e., guardian of the honor code (until Saturday evening).