Soul of the Age (2 page)

With the distance afforded by his new surroundings, he came to grips ironically with the years of his Tübingen
bohème
in
The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher
(1901). The work, though published at his own expense, was impressive enough to interest Samuel Fischer, the enterprising publisher who was building up one of Germany's most exciting presses. Hesse's next novel,
Peter Camenzind,
which S. Fischer published in 1904, was an immediate success that brought Hesse international recognition, prizes, and his first financial independence.

In the course of a trip to Italy in 1903 Hesse had met Marie Bernoulli (1869–1963), a professional photographer from the distinguished family of Swiss mathematicians. Over the objections of her father, Hesse married the talented but moody young woman who went by the name of Mia and, nine years older than Hesse, already betrayed the melancholy that was to lead within a few years to severe emotional disturbances. (It is worth noting that both his grandfather Gundert and his father had married older women; Hesse was following an established family pattern. And it is probably no accident that, a year following his mother's death, he was attracted to an older woman who bore her name.) Mia found an old peasant house without gas, electricity, or plumbing in the village of Gaienhofen on the shore of Lake Constance—a community so isolated that Hesse had to row across the lake even to buy household necessities. Here, in the course of the next eight years, the new couple built a larger and more comfortable house to accommodate the three sons—Bruno (1905), Heiner (1909), and Martin (1911)—who gradually enlarged the family. Less and less secluded in the village that was rapidly transforming itself into an artists' colony, they received frequent visits from writers and especially the musicians—Othmar Schoeck, Fritz Brun, Ilona Durigo, Alfred Schlenker, and others—whom Hesse had met through the mediation of his musically gifted wife.

Meanwhile, Hesse's literary career thrived. He finished his schoolboy novel
Beneath the Wheel
(1906), and his musicians' novel
Gertrude
(1910), while turning out the dozens of popular stories and poems that were incorporated into commercially successful volumes with such titles as
In This World
(1907),
Neighbors
(1908),
On the Road
(1911), and
By-Ways
(1912). Stimulated by frequent trips to Italy, Hesse wrote biographies of Boccaccio and St. Francis of Assisi (both 1904). He began a busy career as a book reviewer, which eventually produced over three thousand reviews during his lifetime. He contributed to the satirical weekly
Simplicissimus,
whose editor, Reinhold Geheeb, had become his friend in 1906. With Ludwig Thoma, Hesse was a founding editor of the liberal-oppositional weekly
März
(1907–1912).

Yet for all these external signs of success—or perhaps precisely because of them—Hesse was chafing inwardly at the thought that he had become simply another member of the bourgeois society of imperial Germany that he detested. At first his dissatisfaction manifested itself in the increasingly frequent trips that took him away from Gaienhofen for weeks at a time—to the alternative community of “nature healers” at Monte Verità near Ascona (1907), for “nude rock climbing” on the Walensee (1910), on lecture trips through Germany and Austria, and annual tours to Italy with various friends. His nomadic urge was not satisfied by these relatively short excursions. In September 1911—barely a month after the birth of his third son—Hesse embarked on the North German Lloyd steamer
Prinz Eitel Friedrich
on a three-month voyage to the East with the painter Hans Sturzenegger. Hesse imagined this trip as an archetypal return to family origins and to the mysteries of the Orient represented by his “Grosspapa” Gundert. In fact, though he climbed the highest mountain in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), explored Singapore, and visited Sumatra, Hesse never set foot on the subcontinent itself or the Malabar Coast where his grandfather and both his parents had been active. And, as he admitted in a letter to his friend Conrad Haussmann (November 1911), he did not find a people of paradise but only “the poor remnants of an ancient paradisiacal people, whom the West is corrupting and devouring.” Only the Chinese won his admiration.

Immediately after his return to Europe, Hesse gave up the house and his life in Gaienhofen and moved his family back to Switzerland, where they lived until April 1919 on the outskirts of Bern. Their house, owned until his death by the painter Albert Welti, provided the setting for Hesse's next work, the artist-novel
Rosshalde
(1914), which eerily foreshadowed the circumstances of the disintegration of Hesse's own marriage. The other major work emerging from these years before World War I comprised the three stories featuring
Knulp
(1915), whose light-hearted surface masks the underlying quandary of Hesse's early heroes, who long for freedom while they are constrained by the bonds of society and its responsibilities.

World War I shattered the last vestiges of the Gaienhofen idyll. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Germany and France, Hesse was appalled by the war and the militaristic mentality that had permeated Europe. At the same time, his loyalty to the country of his birth produced a conspicuous ambivalence in the widely circulated essays (collected in the volume
If the War Goes On
 …) in which he exhorted his countrymen to pacifism and to a cosmopolitan humanism transcending all crude nationalistic fervor—most conspicuously in an essay of November 1914 that borrowed as its title the famous words from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony,
“O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!”
(
“O Friends, not these sounds!”
). Although his efforts attracted the attention of a few like-minded Europeans—notably Romain Rolland in France—his essays antagonized many former friends and readers, who denounced him as “a viper nourished at the breast” of an unsuspecting audience. The most vivid example was the “Cologne Calumny” of 1915, in which Hesse was attacked as a draft-dodger hiding out in Switzerland to avoid his patriotic duty. (See the letter “Pro Domo” of November 1, 1915.) In fact, Hesse dedicated himself selflessly to German affairs. Turned down for active service for medical reasons (poor eyesight), Hesse put himself at the disposal of the German Embassy in Bern, where he worked for a relief agency for German prisoners of war, editing two newspapers as well as a series of twenty-two volumes for German prisoners of war in France, England, Russia, and Italy.

Then in 1916, while Hesse was under the strain of his relief work as well as the attacks in the German press, his father died, and Mia succumbed to a gradually worsening schizophrenia that eventually necessitated her institutionalization. As a result of these pressures Hesse decided, toward the end of that year, to put himself in the care of Dr. Josef B. Lang, a young disciple of C. G. Jung, in a sanatorium near Lucerne. The experience of psychoanalysis, which extended through some sixty sessions into 1917 and led to Hesse's acquaintance with Jung himself, struck Hesse less as a revelation than as a systematized confirmation of insights he had gleaned from the great works of literature. (He analyzed his attitude carefully in several essays collected in the volume
My Belief: Essays on Life and Art.
) Above all, Hesse learned through psychoanalysis to rise above the conventional notions of right and wrong that had oppressed him ever since his Pietist childhood and to acknowledge the legitimacy of all human impulses. Instead of forcing his thoughts and emotions into patterns prescribed by society, he learned to accept what he called the “chaos” of his own consciousness, where the boundary between good and evil did not seem so clearly defined as in Judeo-Christian ethics. The immediate product of this psychic release was the novel
Demian,
which Hesse wrote in a few weeks late in 1917. The radical ethical ideas of the novel were formulated more systematically in his two essays on Dostoevsky included in the volume
In Sight of Chaos
(1920). Lang remained Hesse's friend until his death in 1945 and crops up in Hesse's letters and narratives under the pseudonyms “Longus” and “Pistorius.”

Demian
(1919) was published shortly after the war under the pseudonym of its narrator-hero, Emil Sinclair, because Hesse did not wish to be identified with what he now called his “sentimental-bourgeois” works. The deception was so effective that the book received the Fontane Prize for first novels. When the deception was exposed Hesse returned the prize—but not before he had succeeded in winning a new audience with his new authorial persona. By the time the novel appeared Hesse had made a radical break with his own past. In October 1918, just two weeks before the end of the war, he was finally forced to put Mia in a mental hospital. The following April, having wound up his affairs in Bern, he left his sons in the care of friends and moved to southern Switzerland—in order, as he wrote a correspondent that summer, “to survive and heal my private collapse and to attempt on a small scale what Germany must accomplish on a large scale: to accept what has happened, not to shove the guilt onto others, but to swallow it and say yes to destiny.” Here in the Casa Camuzzi, a Baroque hunting lodge in the village of Montagnola, above Lugano, where Hesse was to spend the rest of his life, he experienced what he later regarded as the happiest and most productive year of his life. In a surge of activity he wrote several important essays, including “Zarathustra's Return” (an appeal to German youth, calling for spiritual rebirth and published under the pseudonym of Emil Sinclair), two of his finest novellas—
Klingsor's Last Summer
and
Klein and Wagner
—and began the novel
Siddhartha.
In the company of the artists who now constituted his main society—Louis Moilliet, Karl Hofer, Hans Purrmann, Cuno Amiet, and others—he even toyed with the idea of becoming a painter. In any case, watercolor painting became an increasingly important avocation and, indeed, a significant source of income in the twenties (see the letter to Cuno Amiet of January 5, 1919), when the inflation of the German mark forced Hesse for several years, despite the success of his writings, to live from hand to mouth.

The year that followed the liberating euphoria of 1919 was “probably the most unproductive of my life, and thus the saddest,” Hesse noted in his “Diary of 1920.” In the lull that followed the frenzy of creativity he filled his time with other and more routine activities. With the monthly journal
Vivos Voco,
which he founded and coedited with Richard Woltereck from 1919 until 1921, Hesse continued the cultural criticism that had occupied him during the war, attacking among other things the resurgent anti-Semitism that, to his dismay, he noted in postwar Germany. The creative lull that interrupted the progress of his novel
Siddhartha
was finally overcome in 1921 by two new factors: his growing attachment to the singer Ruth Wenger, and a series of therapeutic interviews with C. G. Jung, whom Hesse visited in Küsnacht. In 1922
Siddhartha
was completed and published. In early 1924 Hesse was awarded the Swiss citizenship for which he had applied the preceding summer (see his letter of July 26, 1923)—technically, for a restoration of citizenship he had given up as a child—on the grounds that his three sons were Swiss and that the experience of the recent war had taught him that his loyalties lay with his elective country. His divorce from his first wife was granted in the summer of 1923, freeing him for marriage to Ruth Wenger, which took place—despite a growing reluctance evident in the letters of 1922 and 1923—in January of 1924.

While Ruth had been the muse of such works as
Klingsor's Last Summer, Siddhartha,
and the charming fantasy
Pictor's Metamorphoses,
Hesse's marriage to the much younger woman seemed misbegotten from the start. Although Hesse was content to spend his winters in Basel and then in Zurich, where Ruth pursued her career and her social activities, his regular return to Montagnola meant long periods of separation, leading in 1927 to a second divorce. During this period, despite all the complaints in his letters about his life of hermitlike solitude, Hesse was actually engaged in a frenzy of activity. His annual trips (since 1923) to the spa at Baden for the treatment of his sciatica (where he always stayed at the hotel Verenahof) and a lecture tour to Germany generated two of his most brilliantly ironic autobiographical accounts,
At the Spa
(1925) and
The Journey to Nuremberg
(1927). He wrote a number of essays, edited works of his favorite writers—Jean Paul, Novalis, Hölderlin, and others—and translated medieval Latin tales into German. In 1926, in another of his characteristic bursts of creative activity, he completed
Steppenwolf,
which appeared the following year simultaneously with a biography by his friend Hugo Ball that had been commissioned for his fiftieth birthday. Yet the mood of despondence that characterized those years was blatantly evident in the bitter poems published in 1928 under the title
Crisis: Pages from a Diary.

In 1927 Hesse immediately set to work on his next novel. That same year he met an admirer with whom he had been corresponding since her teens, the art historian Ninon Dolbin, née Ausländer (1895–1966).
Narcissus and Goldmund
(1930) became Hesse's most successful work during his own lifetime. And in 1931 Hesse married Ninon and moved with her into a new house in Montagnola, built for them by his friend and patron Hans C. Bodmer, where they were to spend the remainder of their lives. The fruit of Hesse's new happiness and security was the story
The Journey to the East
(1932), in which he paid cheerful tribute to his friends (“Ninon, known as ‘the foreigner'” [her maiden name: Ausländer], “Louis the Terrible” [Louis Moilliet], “Longus” [J. B. Lang], and others), to his cultural icons, and even to figures from his own works.