Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Most of his works explore an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality.
Hermann Karl Hesse was born in Calw in Württemberg, German Empire to Johannes Hesse and Marie Gundert. Hermann had five siblings, two of whom died in infancy. In 1873, the Hesse family moved to Calw, where Johannes worked for the Calwer Verlagsverein, a publishing house specializing in theological texts and schoolbooks. Marie's father, Hermann Gundert (also the namesake of his grandson), managed the publishing house at the time, and Johannes Hesse succeeded him in 1893.
Hesse attended school briefly in Göppingen before, at the behest of his father, he entered the Maulbronn seminary in 1891. Though a model student, he was unable to adapt and left less than a year later. Hesse, who aspired to be a poet, was apprenticed in a Calw tower-clock factory and later in a Tübingen bookstore. He would express his disgust with conventional schooling in the novel Unterm Rad (1906; Beneath the Wheel), in which an overly diligent student is driven to self-destruction.
In 1896, Hesse’s poem "Madonna" appeared in a Viennese periodical and Hesse released his first small volume of poetry, Romantic Songs. In 1897, a published poem of his, "Grand Valse", drew him a fan letter. It was from Helene Voigt, who the next year married Eugen Diederichs, a young publisher. To please his wife, Diederichs agreed to publish Hesse's collection of prose entitled One Hour After Midnight in 1898 (although it is dated 1899). Both works were a business failure. From late 1899, Hesse worked in a distinguished antique book shop in Basel. In 1900, Hesse was exempted from compulsory military service due to an eye condition. This, along with nerve disorders and persistent headaches, affected him his entire life.
In 1901, Hesse changed jobs and began working at the antiquarium Wattenwyl in Basel where he had more opportunities to release poems and small literary texts to journals. His new bookstore agreed to publish his next work, Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher. In 1902, his mother died after a long and painful illness. With the publication Peter Camenzind in 1904, came a breakthrough: from now on, Hesse could make a living as a writer. That same year, Hesse married Maria Bernoulli and the couple settled down in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, and began a family, eventually having three sons. In Gaienhofen, he wrote his second novel, Beneath the Wheel, which was published in 1906. By 1911, there was an increased dissonance in Hesse’s marital life, and he left for a long trip to Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Following Hesse's return, the family moved to Bern (1912), but the change of environment could not solve the marriage problems, as he himself confessed in his novel Rosshalde from 1914. A visit to India in these years was later reflected in Siddhartha (1922).
During World War I, Hesse wrote denunciations of militarism and nationalism, and edited a journal for German war prisoners and internees. This placed him in the middle of a serious political conflict, attacked by the German press, the recipient of hate mail, and distanced from old friends. Around the same time, a deeper life crisis befell Hesse with the death of his father, the serious illness of his son Martin, and his wife's schizophrenia. He was forced to leave his military service and begin receiving psychotherapy. This began for Hesse a long preoccupation with psychoanalysis, through which he came to know Carl Jung personally, and was challenged to new creative heights.
By the time Hesse returned to civilian life, his marriage had fallen apart. He became a permanent resident of Switzerland in 1919 and a citizen in 1923, settling in Montagnola. His next major works, Kurgast (1925) and The Nuremberg Trip (1927), were autobiographical narratives with ironic undertones and foreshadowed Hesse's following novel, Steppenwolf, which was published in 1927. In the ensuing years, Hesse observed the rise to power of Nazism in Germany with concern. In 1933, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann made their travels into exile, each aided by Hesse. Hesse made a quiet statement of resistance by reviewing and publicizing the work of banned Jewish authors, including Franz Kafka. In the late 1930s, German journals stopped publishing Hesse's work, and the Nazis eventually banned it. Hesse’s final and longest novel is Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; English titles The Glass Bead Game and Magister Ludi). The last twenty years of Hesse’s life was mostly spent on publishing letters, essays and short stories.
Hesse died on 9 August 1962, aged 85, and was buried in the cemetery of Sant’Abbondio in Gentilino.
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