Rosshalde. By Hermann Hesse (1914)

My Posts on Hermann Hesse

German Literature VI Annoucement

Links to Participant Posts


German Literature and History on The Reading Life

This will be the fifth year The Reading Life has participated in German Literature Month.  This event is one  of the reason it is great to be part of the international book blog community.  Last year I was motivated to read world class literary works by writers like Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse as well as lesser know treasures.  I learned a lot from the many very erudite posts by coparticipants and from those by our very generous hosts Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life.  You will find excellent reading suggestions and planned events on their blog.  To participate all you have to do is to post on any work originally written in German and put your link on the event blog.  

My Readings For German Literature VI November 2016

1.  The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

2.  Royal Highness by Thomas Mann

3. A Small Circus by Hans Fallada

4.  Rosshalde by Hermann Hesse 

Long ago Hermann Hesse was one of the literary heroes of a worldwide wave of revulsion against crass materialistic society, culminating in what was popularity called "Counter Culture".   Those who fancied themselves spiritually enlightened sought wisdom from Indian gurus, secret eastern cults, mind alerting drugs and such.  Hermann Hesse's novels Stephenwolf and Shidhartra were required reading.  There is about a forty or so hiatus in my reading of Hesse but I have returned to his work.  I reread the two just mentioned works in 2014.I discovered a number of other works by Hesse have  been translated into English in the last forty years. Last year for German Literature V I read Gertrude.  I found this work a bit disappointing in that part of the ethos of the work seems to be only a conventionally beautiful woman could be interesting.  This is not the thought pattern of an "enlightened" person.  I also now saw the prevalence of "Orientalizing" in Hesse.  But I still like him!  I read his short novel Journey to the East and enjoyed it but you can see the craving for a guru,great leader figure and in the context of post WW I Germany this is a bit disconcerting.  

Rosshalde centers on a famous and wealthy artist.  He lives with his wife and son in an estate named Rosshalde.  He and his wife have long ago lost their love for each other, they are bonded by their love of their only child, a son.   The husband stays normally in a guest house.  He knows his creativity is slowing being eaten away by his stilled life style but he cannot bring himself to leave his son and go to India as he wishes with all his heart.  A good friend comes to visit and transforming events occur.  As you read on, you will probably see what is coming to send him to India.

Rosshalde should be read after you have read his famous works.  I acquired it on sale as an E book for $0.99, a fair price.

Mel ü

The Glass Bead Game: Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse

German Literature VI Annoucement

Links to Participant Posts


German Literature and History on The Reading Life

This will be the fifth year The Reading Life has participated in German Literature Month.  This event is one  of the reason it is great to be part of the international book blog community.  Last year I was motivated to read world class literary works by writers like Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse as well as lesser know treasures.  I learned a lot from the many very erudite posts by coparticipants and from those by our very generous hosts Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life.  You will find excellent reading suggestions and planned events on their blog.  To participate all you have to do is to post on any work originally written in German and put your link on the event blog.  

My Posts on Hermann Hesse

For German literature Month during 2013 and 2014  I have posted on novels by the German Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse.  About forty five years ago I was very into Hesse it is good to return.   I am glad I have gotten back into his work.  I do wish I had a 45 year old book blog post to look back on to see what I thought of Steppenwolf or Shidhartha back in the long ago.  

The Glass Bead Game: Magister Ludi is considerd to be Hesse's greatest work. Hesse said it was.  At 562 pages it is the longest.  It is set far in the future and centers on the playing of a game, the glass bead game.  This is a purely intellectual game whose components are music, philosophy, mathematics, and art.  The central character has gained entrance to a highly elite academy devoted to pure studies.  Many of the students are devotees of the glass bead game.  We are never given an account of the rules of the game but we grasp that games are infinitely complex and things of beauty.  

We follow the career of a student who will become a master of the game.  The narrative spins an ever more complicated account of the game.  It is fascinating to try to understand what Hesse is conveying,  Is he suggesting that human intellectual activity is but a game or is the game the only available path to enlightenment.  

 This is a very demanding book, drawing you into the society in which the games occur.  

  Is The Glass Bead Game an attack on escapist pursuits or is it a glorification of pure intellect, music especially.  To Hesse neophytes, first read his shorter works but when the time is right, I suggest you try your luck with the glass bead game.  

I am so glad I have  at last read this book.

Mel ü

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse (1927)

German Literature Month November 2014 Year IV

Works I have so far read for German Literature Month 2014

1.   Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

2.   Gertrude by Hermann Hesse

3.  "Diary of a School Boy" by Robert Walser (no post)

4.  Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

The schedule and guidelines for participation are on the event webpage.  Just reading the  posts of all the other participants is tremendously informative. 

I am very happy to be once again participating in German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life.   Events like this are one of the great things about being part of the international book blog community.  I know there is a lot of work that goes into a month long event and I offer my thanks to Lizzy and Caroline

This is "Award Winner Week" on German Literature Month.  In 1946 Hermann Hesse (1877 to 1962) won the Nobel Prize and the Goethe Prize.

Unlike Siddhartha, Steppenwolf exceeded my expectations.  I had read both works at least twice long ago when Hesse enjoyed a cult like following during the 1960s in America and Europe.  

I will just post briefly on my return to Stepenwolf after around a forty five year hiatus.  I think what struck me most was about how much of the novel is taken up with sexual identity.  If you push Hesse you can seemingly find pretty primitive notions about women as being worth bothering with only if conventionally beautiful.  I see this everywhere in literature, including in the works of famous female writers.,,and I see this as deeply pernicious and as comodifying of women.  There is a lot of Orientalizing in Steppenwolf.  You do need to be careful how you take this.  Do we see it as representative of the zietgeist of Hesse or is he undercutting it?

The story is narrated by Henry Haller.  He sees himself as part man part wolf of the steppes.  He likes to think of himself as above the "petty bourgeois" but he prefers to live among them.  He was deeply cultured and very into the reading life, obsessed with Goethe and adored Mozart.  He was opposed to the jingoistic war mongering of Germany in the late 1920s.  I greatly relished the "treatise of the Steppenwolf".  I thought it brilliant long ago, I recalled much of it and I loved rereading it.  He is basically alone in the world. He is divorced and has quarreled with his love.  He can only half talk to the people he lives among, partially because of his deep culture.

Much of the book is sort of a treatise on the personality.  The ideas are a mix of Jung, Nietzsche and Hindu theories (as understood by the scholars of the time).  There really is a lot more in this book than Shiddhartha.  Like in that novel, a prostitute (or at least a woman from the demi-monde) plays a central part in the development of the central character and the storyline.  Henry Haller is nearing fifty, a date at he once said he would commit suicide if he had found no point in life.   I think one reason prostitutes, courtesans, public women (Anglo Indian expression) play such a large role in novels of this period and earlier is that men could not simply have long conversations with unattached women without some connection being established.  You can say whatever you like to a prostitute and she can give an honest answer.  You see this in the three Hesse novels I have read this month.  The women in Gertrude are not at all prostitutes and are quite uninteresting, just window dressing.  Including Japanese Tea house culture in this, skilled prostitutes learn they must interest men to keep them coming back so the best learn to sense the kind of conversations a man wants.  This is in part what Hermoine does to Harry.  The character of the South American drug dealing saxophone player Pablo is an interesting one.  He is vaguely androgynous, dark and languid.   We are taken into Harry's sexual identity here.  I think in 1927 in Germany this was pretty daring but then we can reflect on Cristopher Isherwood in Berlin and maybe it is a commentary on Weimar culture.  

The magic theater section of Steppenwolf has a lot of fascinating material, much to think about in the murder sprees and in the sexual fantasies.  

I really am glad I reread Steppenwolf.  It restored my love for Hesse.  In circa 1970 readers did not really ponder the women's issues, the Orientalizing and the feminizing of homosexuals but now I can see these things in Hesse but I am not quite sure how to view them.  Is Hesse simply part of his times or is he decades ahead of his culture.  

If you read only one work by Hesse, make it Steppenwolf.

Mel u

Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse 1932 - Orientalizing and Hesse

It has been a long time since I have read a novel by Hermann Hesse, at least forty years.  I can still recall the spiritual journey of Shidhartha.  I can bring up a lot of the ultimate counter culture novel, Stephenwolf and I would still enjoy playing The Glass Bead Game.  Based on my recollection, a lot more works by Hesse have been translated into English since I last read one of his novels.  This is a very good thing as his ideas are much more complicated and subtle than they appear at first.  

I wanted to read a novel,by Hesse as part of my participation in German Literature III.  I also wanted to read one that was not terribly long.  Journey to the East is only 128 pages in my edition and carries on his concerns with the decay of Western culture and his belief in what he sees as the wisdom of the East.  At some point, I don't doubt this has been pondered by academics, I need to step back and wonder how much of his opus is based on Orientalization, the ideas of Jung and Spengler, and whether or not I enjoy reading him for his intrinsic interest and how much of my pleasure in reading Journey to the East is nostalgia.  I will read more new to me Hesse and may reread my old Hesse.  

Journey to the East is not the master work my three classics are but it is for sure worth reading as a fourth Hesse.  Like his other works it focuses on "secret wisdom" obtainable though a profound study of the teachings of eastern masters.  1932, when it was first published in Germany, was a very difficult year for Germany and much of the world.  Huge numbers were out of work, many people were deeply dissatisfied with received forms of wisdom, cults were every where and the darkest one of all was soon to take over Germany. The underlying ideology of Nazism was also a form of a journey to a fantasy of the wisdom of the ancient east.  It also focused on guru like great leaders and extraordinary teachers of opaque and obscure wisdom, just like Journey to the East and other core Hesse texts do. Hesse kind of also, in my opinion, plays on the vanity of his readers who see themselves as penetrating beyond the thought patterns of ordinary people.  In all of his works I have read there is a contempt for the mundane world and a sense of elitism based on a grasp of secret teachings.  

Journey to the East is told from the point of view of a man who is a member of an ancient league seeking wisdom through a real and virtual journey to the east.  Among the members have been Rilke, Don Quixote, Plato, Pythagoras, Mozart, Tristram Shandy and Puss in Boots as well as the ferryman from Shidhartha.  When one joins the league, you are sworn to secrecy.  The central character of the novel is confused about the league, is it necessary to physically go east to find true wisdom or is the east all around us.  He decides to write an exposé on his experiences with the league.  There is also some interesting plot lines involving a missing lowly servant who turns out to be the president of the league.  There is a scene at a league meeting in which we first learn the servant is the league president when he appears in magnificent garb.  (I admit when I read the description of the garb and the meeting I did not think divine teachings I thought this just might be silly).

It is hard to pin down this work, and the rest of Hesse, as "meaning something". Just when you have a theory, Hesse undercuts you.  

What Hesse work should I next read?

Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse Short Stories by Two German Nobel Prize Winners

"Infant Prodigy" by Thomas Mann (1903, 5 pages)
"Within and Without" by Herman Hesse (1920, 9 pages)

When I saw that  Lizzy's Literary Life was having a November event  devoted to reading and posting on German literature I knew I wanted to participate.  Today I am posting on short stories by two of the Greatest German writers of the 20th century, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.       

On November 5, I read "Germelshausen" by Friedrich Gerstacker (1816 to 1872-Hamburg, Germany).  It is  a very interesting fun to read short story from which the plot  of Brigadoon was lifted.

Gerstacker is a minor writer, pretty much forgotten but for this one story.   Thomas Mann (1875 to 1955) and Hermann Hesse (1877 to 1962), both Nobel Prize winners, are towering cultural icons best known for novels but both wrote a number of well regarded short stories.  

I will just post briefly on the two stories so readers can get an idea of them.

Thomas Mann (there is additional information on my post on his most famous work, The Magic Mountain) won the Nobel Prize  in 1929.   Mann fled Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power.   He moved to the United States in 1939.   

"An Infant Prodigy" (1903) is one of Mann's earliest published works.    Told in the third person it is the story of a piano concert by an eight year old boy who is considered a musical prodigy of great talent.    It is very interesting in that we see how various members of the audience view him and relate to their experience of his music and we see how the boy feels about his own playing and the people that come to see him.  It is a good story and worth reading.

You can read the story here (I have no translator information for the story.)

Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize in 1946.   (I wonder what political message might have been intended by the giving this prize to a German right after the war).   He is most famous now for two of his novels, Steppenwolf (1927) and Siddharta (1922).   I have seen a number of book blog posts on Siddhartha.   During the 1960s Hesse's work was very in vogue with the "counter-culture" of the time for its seeming repudiation of the shallow values of the west.   I read at one time pretty much all of his translated novels.  During WWII Hesse remained silent.    His work was eventually banned from publication by the Nazis.

One of the dominant themes of Hesse's work is the divide between science and rationality versus magic and spirituality.  

"Within and Without" very much captures a lot of the main themes of Hesse.   The story is about a man whose whole is devoted to the pursuit of knowledge.   By that he means knowledge based only on science and logic.   He was aware that there are other kinds of knowledge.   He tolerate religion as it is the accepted thing to do among scientists in his society.   He hates what he calls superstition and any belief in anything that science and logic do not support.   Of course as the story proceeds events will radically undercut his world view.   He hates the then fashionable idea that science was just one of many ways of organizing and explaining our experience with no more validity than any of the others.   He hates all forms of mystical cults.  

One day he goes to visit a friend of his who he always felt was a total believer in science and logic.   He is horrified to see his friend has a saying on his wall that epitomizes all that the man does not believe in.   "Nothing is without, nothing is within, for what is without is within".   To him this is the worst kind of mystical thinking inspired by "decadent" eastern forces trying to undermine the culture of his country by attacking it at the very basis for thought.    As we can guess, he undergoes some heavy changes.   

I have no translator information for this story.   It does feel very much like one of his novels and captures a lot of his themes.   I guess I would recommend Hesse neophytes start with Siddhartha  (It is quite short and easy to read and there is even a movie based on it.   It is an example of Orientalizing India thought).   From there if you like it I would read Steppenwolf then maybe The Glass Bead game.    Hesse was once a super trendy writer but maybe less so now.   

Mel u