Soul of the Age (40 page)

My books are not banned in Germany, but nearly were on several occasions and that could happen again anytime. The authorities frequently blocked all payments to me. Of course, they are fully aware of my Swiss and European attitude, but are on the whole happy enough to label me as an “undesirable.” Most of my books are currently out of print, and, of course, in most cases there is no question of their being republished. But, after all, wars don't last forever, and even though I cannot imagine what the world will be like when this war is over, I am naïve enough to assume that our things will be brought out again, someday. A Zurich publisher, Fretz, had the idea of putting together an edition of my collected poems;
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while they were assembling the material, they discovered that I have written some eleven thousand lines of verse. I felt somewhat taken aback by that figure.

The world is doing everything it can to make parting easy for us old people. It is utterly amazing how much thought, planning, and foresight it takes to perpetrate these lunacies, and the same is true of the irrationality and naïveté with which nations make virtue of necessity and ideology of slaughter. Man is so bestial and yet so naïve.

We are long accustomed here to seeing traces of the war everywhere. My three sons have been in the military for three years, with some interruptions and furloughs. The state is encroaching everywhere upon the natural, civilian life of human beings. At times it seems to me that all this warmongering since 1914 represents a gigantic, if unsuccessful, attempt by mankind to crush the excessively well-organized machinery of the state apparatus.

Fond regards to your family, and especially to your dear wife, from both of us.

TO HIS SISTER ADELE

[
October 1942
]

When celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Mother's birth,
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think of me for a moment, and I shall be with you in spirit. You will no doubt be reminded of days in Octobers past on which we celebrated Mother's birthday. I believe that Ludwig Finckh was there once, although that may have been for your birthday. We filled a basket with beautiful mushrooms from the wood. And you may also recall the pleasure Mother used to get from those events, her skill organizing parties and the like, selecting flowers for little bouquets, etc. That was her voice singing the remarkable song for our birthdays: “Is it not a great joy [to be born a human being]…?” That question is still valid, and certainly not outmoded, as it once seemed.

I have always felt that our mother inherited a remarkable and mysterious combination of traits from her parents. While resembling in many ways her grandfather, whose wisdom I greatly admire, she was very much the Francophone Calvinist in her moral commitment and passionate devotion to good causes.

Our parents bequeathed us many things, including some contradictions and difficulties; the legacy is not simple or easy, but it has a certain richness and nobility. It fosters a sense of duty, and often helps one to keep one's eyes open and see things clearly and make judgments at a time when most people content themselves with slogans. Although our parents demanded quite a lot of us, they asked a lot more of themselves, and showed us through their lives something that has become rare and is unforgettable. Nowadays people always try to persuade us that our parents' faith, worldview, and judgments were primitive and antiquated; but I must say that, even though I sometimes felt that way as a youth, things have sorted themselves out over the years and now seem very different.

A pity that we have no really good pictures of Mother from the later years! But we carry her picture around inside us.

Greetings to all present!

TO ROLF CONRAD

[
Baden
]
November 1942

My Berlin publisher
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has also visited me here, and I have at least regained possession of my manuscript—it was written over the last eleven years and has just been gathering dust for seven months in Berlin. It cannot appear in Germany, and since the work of my final years could be destroyed by a fire or a bomb, I shall now have to have the book published somewhere in Switzerland, so that it will at least be preserved. Of course, its publication in Switzerland is no more meaningful than anything else taking place these days. The book is directed at those readers who are somehow expecting it and could benefit from it. It's now going to be twice as expensive, even for the few who buy it here, and will not earn me anything. But the same applies to most things we do these days—there may be some metaphysical sense to it all, perhaps.

TO THE “NATIONAL-ZEITUNG,” BASEL, ON ITS HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY
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The
National-Zeitung
is not just the place in which many of my short pieces have been making their first appearance, but also the newspaper I read daily. There are two reasons for that. First of all, it is a Basel newspaper, with good coverage of local news, and I find that attractive and advantageous, since I like to know where what I am reading comes from, where it grew up and is at home, and am only open to ideas and opinions when they have an individual countenance, and have been molded and given a unique shape by the locality. And, moreover, Basel is the city where I first went to school. It's an old love of mine—I almost said, “an unhappy love.” This is one reason why I am so fond of the
National-Zeitung.
The other reason is related to my sympathy for the newspaper's social and humanitarian point of view, for its convictions, for its special way of being Swiss, and for its interpretation of the concept of the nation-state.
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I intend to remain loyal to the
National-Zeitung
and wish it all the best on its anniversary and relocation to the new building.

TO ERNST MORGENTHALER

[
April 1943
]

Your kind letter with the two notorious sketches arrived just at the right time, when I was in need of company, or “contact,” as the Bavarians put it. I have been alone for five days, Ninon is away on a trip, and I am sitting here surrounded by little bottles of medicine and Vichy water, pharmacy bills.[ … ]

You're right—if the generals could be persuaded to paint for a few hours every morning, the world would be a different place. But the generals and dictators don't like to get paint stains on their trousers, and having only one model on a chair to torment is no match for their ambitions, since they feel a need to command thousands, millions of people. The likes of us have as difficult a time trying to understand that ambition as has a general trying to comprehend our joys and our sorrows.

I just thought of a story about painting. I was in Locarno in March 1918, had just begun to paint, attempted a few watercolors; one day I asked the painter Gustav Gamper, a quick and skillful watercolorist, to take me along with him on a painting expedition. We headed off toward Gordola with our rucksacks and little chairs; I was feeling quite fearful and anxious about the tasks ahead, and as we went along, I pleaded with Gamper: “Please do me a favor—no waterfalls.” I thought that was hardest of all to do. Suddenly he stopped at a fork in the path: some velvet brown foliage behind a little wall, through which one could see a gorge with a waterfall, and higher up the mountain a chapel and a couple of huts. He unpacked immediately; the scene really looked very charming, and he completely disregarded my objections. So we sat down and started painting right away. When we were almost finished, a little wagon with a horse and a local Ticino family came along, and Gamper said: “Let's paint the little carriage in quickly,” and indeed within two minutes it was in his picture; I was astounded and gave up all hope.

That was back in 1918. Recently a package arrived from Gamper; he wanted to give me something, and it was the watercolor he had painted back then. I searched for a long time, and finally found mine, without the little carriage, but with bushes gone wild and a waterfall daubed in white.[ … ]

TO A YOUNG PERSON

Zurich, May 1943

I'm not capable of writing a proper letter—am being pestered again by physicians—but would nevertheless like to respond to your greetings. I can see from your letter that you're confronted by a dilemma. But since our experience can never be conveyed in words, your letter naturally only touches on the problem. The issue revolves around the word “ego.” You speak of the self, as if it were a familiar, objective quantity, which, of course, it isn't. Each of us consists of two selves, and only a sage would know where the one begins and the other leaves off.

Our subjective, empirical, individual self is actually very mobile, moody, also very dependent on outward events, easily influenceable. We cannot consider it a reliable entity, nor can we allow it to serve as our standard and our voice. This ego merely teaches us something that is reiterated often enough in the Bible: we are, as a species, weak, defiant, and despondent.

But then there's another self, buried within the first; the two often mingle, but ought not be confused. This second, lofty, sacred self (the Indian Atman, which you consider an equal of Brahma) is not by any means a personal entity, but represents rather our own share of God, life, the universe, everything that is impersonal and suprapersonal. We would be better off going in pursuit of this self. However, that isn't easy: the eternal self is quiet and patient, but that other self is forward and impatient.

Religions consist in part of insights about God and self, in part of spiritual practices and methods of training that allow one to free oneself from one's moody private self and thus facilitate greater intimacy with one's own divine inner qualities.

To my mind, all religions are more or less equal in value. While any one individual religion could make a person wise, it could become degraded and get turned into a silly form of idolatry. Virtually all real knowledge, however, has been lodged in the religions, particularly in mythology. All myths are wrong unless we approach them with due reverence. Each one, however, can unlock the world's heart. Each one knows ways of transforming the idolatry of the self into the worship of God.

Enough. I regret not being a priest, although if I were, I might have to ask you for the very thing you cannot afford at this stage. And so it's preferable that I should greet you as a wanderer, one who, like you, goes about in darkness, but knows of the light and seeks it.

TO ROBERT WALSER
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[
August 1943
]

We are elderly people now and work is more or less out of the question. Besides, I can no longer read very much. But now and then, when I wish to read something beautiful, I take down one of your dear books and, as I read, enjoy the stroll with you through this beautiful world. I have done so again and just wished to let you know.

TO OTTO BASLER

[
Bremgarten Castle, August 16, 1943
]

[ … ] There once was a city that supplied me with more mail than any other; many of my friends were there, even though most of them didn't know one another. The city was called Hamburg. It no longer exists. I still don't know which friends have died. I have only heard about two of them who lost the roof over their heads along with all their belongings and are now making their way as refugees and beggars to southern Germany; one of them is my cousin Wilhelm Gundert, to whom (together with Romain Rolland)
Siddhartha
was dedicated.

Emmy Ball's daughter, who is married and had been living in Rome, has arrived in Germany as a refugee; she is completely frantic and confused, and is deathly afraid for her husband, who was not allowed to leave. And my sister, who lives near Stuttgart, writes that it is strange not knowing when one goes to bed in the evening whether one will live to see the next morning.

[ … ] People are always amazed that my very literary stories and poems, which seem so freely inventive, encompass some things that actually exist and can even be documented. Readers are often caught by surprise or laugh aloud on discovering suddenly that there is really a painter called Louis who is a friend of Hesse's,
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that Castle Bremgarten, the black king,
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the Siamese
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of the Nürnberg journey really exist! And there is a large number of other passages, known only to me, in seemingly fictional contexts that comprise a hidden memorial to real events and actual experiences.

Another example: The legendary figure of Collofino (Feinhals) often appears in my stories. There is a real person called Collofino; he has written a few things: I used to be quite friendly with him, and we often exchanged greetings and presents. Most recently he appears very discreetly in the Latin quotation used as a motto for
The Glass Bead Game.
It says: “ed. Collof.”—i.e., edited by Collofino—and that is correct since the Latin version of the saying, allegedly written by one Albertus Secundus but actually originally formulated in German by me, came about with assistance from Collofino. The other collaborator was Franz Schall, whom I'm also going to name in the book.
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At my request Schall, an excellent Latinist, translated the motto into medieval Latin; I then showed it to Feinhals, who found some things that needed refining and so he engaged in some correspondence with Schall about the matter. All of which led to the final version of the saying, as it now stands. So, as you can see, there is more work behind some of the little details than readers might suspect.

Schall is now dead. And Collofino, a very rich man in Cologne, who owned a large business and also a large house filled with art objects, wrote to me recently from a Baden hospital: In June, his business, and a few days later his home, were so badly destroyed that there wasn't a trace left of either, nothing whatsoever. That's what is happening nowadays. Collofino is about seventy-four years old.