One Writer's Inner Struggle

The popular literary form—as opposed to the sequestered academic one—is always straining at the inbuilt inertia of a society that always wants to deny change and the pain it necessarily involves. But it is in this effort that the musculature of important work is developed.




Hermann Hesse's literary career was closely interwoven with his personal fortunes as well as with his philosophical interests. His works before his disillusionment in World War I reflect the German literary traditions of romanticism and regionalism. In this tradition, we are dealing with a line of thought that frames clear-cut distinctions between good and evil, prudence and folly, reality and fantasy.

At any rate, in accord with his original artistic nature, and at a time when in his youth he has not yet seen any of his illusions dissipated, Hesse’s generally lower-middle-class heroes work hard, though rarely successfully, at adjusting to the technological and social change of urban industrial society. By the time the Great War ended, however, the world had undergone a complete transformation and the consequences for Hesse himself were far greater than he could ever have foreseen.

Somehow events in his life were coming to a head, but he felt that he was being lived by them, rather than living them. He became uncertain whether good and bad, right and wrong, had any absolute existence at all. Perhaps the voice of one’s own conscience was ultimately the only valid judge, and if that were so, then each man had only one genuine vocation—to find the way to himself. He might end up as poet or madman, as prophet or criminal—that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern.

His task was to discover his own destiny—not an arbitrary one—and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.

What more need I say?

Beginning with Demian (1919)--if we may be permitted to anticipate our story-- his heroes no longer try to conform but force themselves almost against their own wills to insist, at the price of isolation, on finding an original way of participating in a new age of human involvement and commitment.