Peter Camenzind (Berlin: Fischer, 1904); translated by W.J. Strachan (London: Owen, 1961); translated by Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969);

Unterm Rad (Berlin: Fischer, 1906); translated by Strachan as The Prodigy (London: Owen, Vision, 1957); translated by Roloff as Beneath the Wheel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968);

Diesseits: Erzählungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1907; enlarged edition, 1930);

Selma Lagerlöf (Munich: Langen, 1907);

Nachbarn: Erzählungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1908);

Gertrud: Roman (Munich: Langen, 1910); translated by Adèle Lewisohn as Gertrud and I (New York: International Monthly, 1915); translated by Hilde Rosner as Gertrude (London: Owen, 1955);

Unterwegs: Gedichte (Munich: Müller, 1911; enlarged edition, 1915);

Umwege: Erzählungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1912);

Aus Indien: Aufzeichnungen von einer indischen Reise (Berlin: Fischer, 1913);

Die Heimkehr (Wiesbaden: Volksbildungsverein, 1914);

In der alten Sonne (Berlin: Fischer, 1914);

Roβhalde (Berlin: Fischer, 1914); translated by Ralph Manheim as Rosshalde (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970);

Der Lateinschüler (Hamburg: Verlag der Deutschen Dichter-Gedächtnis-Stiftung, 1914);

Am Weg (Konstanz: Reuss & Itta, 1915);

Musik des Einsamen: Neue Gedichte (Heilbronn: Salzer, 1915);

Knulp: Drei Geschichten aus dem Leben Knulps (Berlin: Fischer, 1915); translated by Manheim as Knulp: Three Tales from the Life of Knulp (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971);

Brief ins Feld (Munich-Pasing: Lang, 1916);

Zum Gedächtnis: Nachruf auf seinen Vater (Zurich: Polygraphisches Institut, 1916);

Hans Dierlamms Lehrzeit: Vorfrühling (Berlin: Künstlerdank-Gesellschaft, 1916);

Schön ist die Jugend: Zwei Erzählungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1916);

Alte Geschichten: Zwei Erzählungen (Bern: Bücherzentrale für deutsche Kriegsgefangene, 1918);

Zwei Märchen (Bern: Bücherzentrale für deutsche Kriegsgefangene, 1918);

Demian: Die Geschichte einer Jugend von Emil Sinclair (Berlin: Fischer, 1919); translated by N. H. Priday as Demian (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923);

Kleiner Garten: Erlebnisse und Dichtungen (Vienna: Tal, 1919);

Märchen (Berlin: Fischer, 1919);

Zarathustras Wiederkehr: Ein Wort an die deutsche Jugend. Von einem Deutschen (Bern: Stampili, 1919);

Gedichte des Malers: Zehn Gedichte (Bern: Seldwyla, 1920);

Blick ins Chaos: Drei Aufsäte (Bern: Seldwyla, 1920);

Klingsors letzter Sommer: Erzählungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1920); “Klingsors letzter Sommer” translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston as Klingsor’s Last Summer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970);

Wanderung: Aufzeichnungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1920); translated by James Wright as Wandering: Notes and Sketches (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972);

Elf Aquarelle aus dem Tessin (Munich: Recht, 1921);

Ausgewählte Gedichte (Berlin: Fischer, 1921);

Siddhartha: Eine indische Dichtung (Berlin: Fischer, 1922); translated by Rosner as Siddhartha (New York: New Directions, 1951; London: Owen, 1956);

Die Offizina Bodoni in Montagnola (Hellerau: Hegner, 1923);

Im Pressel’schen Gartenhaus: Eine Zeichnung aus dem alten Tübingen (Stettin, 1923);

Italien: Verse (Berlin: Euphorion, 1923);

Sinclairs Notizbuch (Zurich: Rascher, 1923);

Psychologia Balnearia oder Glossen eines Badener Kurgastes (Montagnola: Privately printed, 1924); republished as Kurgast: Aufzeichnungen von einer Badener Kur (Berlin: Fischer, 1925);

Aufzeichnungen eines Herrn im Sanatorium: Fragment aus einem nicht ausgeführten Roman (Vienna: Phaidon, 1925);

Erinnerung an Lektüre (Vienna: Braumüller, 1925);

Piktors Verwandlungen: Ein Märchen (Chemnitz: Gesellschaft der Bücherfreunde, 1925);

Bilderbuch: Schilderungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1926);

Die Nürnberger Reise (Berlin: Fischer, 1927);

Der schwere Weg (Leipzig: Wolf, 1927);

Der Steppenwolf (Berlin: Fischer, 1927); translated by Basil Creighton as Steppenwolf (New York: Holt, 1929; translation revised by Joseph Mileck, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963);

Verse im Krankenbett (Bern: Stämpfli, 1927);

Krisis: Ein Stück Tagebuch (Berlin: Fischer, 1928); translated by Manheim as Crisis: Pages from a Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975);

Betrachtungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1928);

Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur (Leipzig: Reclam, 1929);

Trost der Nacht: Neue Gedichte (Berlin: Fischer, 1929);

Der Zyklon und andere Erzählungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1929);

Zum Gedächtnis unseres Vaters, by Hesse and A. Hesse (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1930);

Narziss und Goldmund: Erzählung (Berlin: Fischer, 1930); translated by Geoffrey Dunlop as Death and the Lover (New York: Dodd, 1932); translated by Ursule Molinaro as Narcissus and Goldmund (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968);

Kinderseele und Ladidel: Zwei Erzählungen, edited by W M. Dutton (Boston: D. C Heath, 1930; London: Harrap, 1948);

Jahreszeiten: Zehn Gedichte (Zurich: Fretz, 1931);

Weg nach Innen: Vier Erzählungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1931);

Die Morgenlandfahrt: Eine Erzählung (Berlin: Fischer, 1932); translated by Rosner as The Journey to the East (London: Owen, Vision, 1956; New York: Noonday, 1957);

Kleine Welt: Erzählungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1933);

Schön ist die Jugend (Darmstadt: Winklers, 1933);

Vom Baum des Lebens: Ausgewählte Gedichte (Leipzig: Insel, 1934);

Fünf Gedichte (Zurich: Fretz, 1934);

Magie des Buches (Berlin: Privately printed, 1934);

Fabulierbuch: Erzählungen (Berlin: Fischer, 1935);

Das Haus der Träume: Eine unvollendete Dichtung (Ölten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1936);

Stunden im Garten: Eine Idylle (Vienna: Bermann-Fischer, 1936);

Tragisch: Eine Erzählung (Vienna: Reichner, 1936);

Der Brunnen im Maulbronner Kreuzgang (Leipzig: Poeschel &Trepte, 1937);

Gedenkblätter (Berlin: Fischer, 1937; expanded edition, Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1947; expanded again, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984);

Neue Gedichte (Berlin: Fischer, 1937);

Der lahme Knabe: Eine Erinnerung aus der Kindheit (Zurich: Fretz, 1937);

Ein Traum Josef Knechts: Zum 2. Juli 1937 (Montagnola: Privately printed, 1937);

Zehn Gedichte (Bern: Stämpfli, 1939);

Der Novalis: Aus den Papieren eines Altmodischen (Ölten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1940);

Kleine Betrachtungen: Sechs Aufsätze (Bern: Stämpfli, 1941);

Die Gedichte (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1942);

Das Glasperlenspiel: Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung des Magister Ludi Josef Knecht samt Knechts hinterlassene Schriften, 2 volumes (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1943); translated by Mervyn Savill as Magister Ludi (New York: Holt, 1949); translated by Clara Winston and Richard Winston as The Glass Bead Game (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969);

Zwei Aufsätze (Zurich: Fretz, 1945);

Berthold: Ein Romanfragment (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1945);

Der Blütenzweig: Eine Auswahl aus den Gedichten (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1945);

Zwei Briefe, by Hesse and Thomas Mann (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1945);

Der Pfirsichbaum und andere Erzählungen: Werbegabe (Zurich: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1945);

Rigi-Tagebuch 1945 (Bern: Stämpfli, 1945);

Traumfährte: Neue Erzählungen und Märchen (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1945);

Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur: Mit den Aufsätzen “Magie des Buches” und “Lieblingslekture” (Zurich: Classen, 1946);

Statt eines Briefes (Montagnola: Privately printed, 1946);

Dank an Goethe (Zurich: Classen, 1946);

Der Europäer (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1946);

Feuerwerk: Aufsatz aus dem Jahre 1930 (Olten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1946);

Gedichte (Stuttgart & Bad Cannstatt: Cantz, 1946);

Späte Gedichte (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1946);

Krieg und Frieden: Betrachtungen zu Krieg und Politik (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1946);

Haus Zum Frieden: Aufzeichnungen eines Herrn im Sanatorium (Zurich: Johannes-Presse, 1947);

Heumond: Aus Kinderzeiten (Basel: Verein gute Schriften, 1947);

Stufen der Menschwerdung (Olten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1947);

Berg und See: Zwei Landschaftsstudien (Zurich: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1948);

Blätter vom Tage (Zurich: Fretz, 1948);

Legende vom indischen König (Burgdorf: Jenzer, Berner Handpresse, 1948);

Frühe Prosa (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1948);

Musikalische Notizen (N.p., 1948);

Notizen aus diesen Sommertagen (Basel: National-Zeitung, 1948);

Preziosität (N.p., 1948);

Die Stimmen und der Heilige: Ein Stück Tagebuch (N.p., 1948);

Zwei Erzählungen: Der Novalis, Der Zwerg, edited by Anna Jacobson and Anita Ascher (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948);

Gerbersau (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1949);

Glück (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1949);

Aus vielen Jahren: Gedichte, Erzählungen und Bilder (Bern: Stämpfli, 1949);

Brief an einen schwäbischen Dichter, edited by W. Matheson (Olten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1950);

Zwei Briefe: An einen jungen Künstler; Das junge Genie (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1950);

Gartenfreuden: Eine Bilderfolge, edited by K. Jud (Zurich: Die Arche, 1950);

Eine Auswahl, edited by R. Buchwald (Bielefeld, Hannover & Berlin: Velhagen & Klasing, 1951);

Bericht aus Normalien: Ein Fragment aus dem Jahre 1948 (Gelterkinden: Lustig, 1951);

Erinnerung an André Gide (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1951);

Zwei Gedichte (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1951);

Aus einem Notizbuch (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1951);

Späte Prosa (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1951);

Die Verlobung und andere Erzählungen (Berlin & Darmstadt: Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, 1951);

Gesammelte Dichtungen, 6 volumes (Berlin & Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1952); enlarged as Gesammelte Schriften, 7 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1957); enlarged again as Gesammelte Werke in Zwölf Bänden, 12 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970);

Herbstliche Erlebnisse: Gedenkblatt für Otto Hartmann (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1952);

Geburtstag: Ein Rundbrief. Juli 1952 (Montagnola: Privately printed, 1952);

Groβväterliches (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1952);

Hermann Hesse als Badener Kurgast, by Hesse, Robert Mächler, and Uli Münzel (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1952);

Lektüre für Minuten: Ein paar Gedanken aus meinen Büchern und Briefen. Zu Ehren des fünfundsiebzigsten Geburtstages von Hermann Hesse (Bern: Stämpfli, 1952);

Rückblick: Ein Fragment aus der Zeit um 1937 (Zurich: Fretz, 1952);

Engadiner Erlebnisse: Ein Rundbrief (Zurich: Fretz, 1953);

Kaminfegerchen (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1953);

Nachruf für Marulla: 1880–1953 (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1953);

Über das Alter (Olten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1954);

Beschwörungen: Rundbrief im Februar 1954 (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1954);

Die Nikobaren (Basel: National-Zeitung, 1954);

Notizblätter um Ostern (Montagnola: Privately printed, 1954);

Rundbrief aus Sils-Maria (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1954);

Aquarelle aus dem Tessin (Baden-Baden: Klein, 1955);

Beschwörungen: Späte Prosa, neue Folge (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1955);

Knopf-Annähen (Basel: National-Zeitung, 1955);

Abendwolken: Zwei Aufsätze; Abendwolken: Bei den Massageten (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1956);

Weltanschauliche Briefe politischer Richtung (N.p., 1956);

Zwei jugendliche Erzählungen (Olten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1956);

Weihnachtsgaben und anderes (Montagnola: Privately printed, 1956);

Freunde: Erzählung (Olten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1957);

Malfreude, Malsorgen (N.p., 1957);

Tessin (Zurich: Verlag der Arche, 1957);

Der Trauermarsch: Gedenkblatt für einen Jugendkameraden (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1957);

Wenkenhof: Eine romantische Jugenddichtung (Basel: National-Zeitung, 1957);

Antworten (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1958);

Klein und Wagner: Erzählung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1958);

Vier späte Gedichte (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1959);

Chinesische Legende (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1959);

Freund Peter (Zurich: Fretz, 1959);

Sommerbrief (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1959);

Ein paar Aufzeichnungen und Briefe (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1960);

Bericht an die Freunde: Letzte Gedichte (Olten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1960);

An einen Musiker (Olten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1960);

Rückgriff (St. Gallen: Tschudy, 1960);

Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920 (Zurich: Arche, 1960);

Stufen: Alte und neue Gedichte in Auswahl (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961);

Tractat vom Steppenwolf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961); translated by B. Creighton as Treatise on the Steppenwolf, with paintings by Jaroslav Bradac (Cremorne: Angus & Robertson / London: Wild-wood House / New York: Paddington Press, 1975);

Aerzte: Ein paar Erinnerungen (Olten: Vereinigung Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1963);

Die späten Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1963);

Geheimnisse: Letzte Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964);

Erwin (Olten: Vereinigung von Freunden der Oltner Liebhaberdrucke, 1965);

Der vierte Lebenslauf Josef Knechts: Zwei Fassungen, edited by Ninon Hesse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966);

Aus Kinderzeiten und andere Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968);

Politische Betrachtungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970);

Lektüre für Minuten: Gedanken aus seinen Büchern und Briefen, edited by Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971); revised as Lektüre für Minuten: Gedanken aus seinen Büchern und Briefen: Neue Folge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975);

Mein Glaube (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971);

Eigensinn: Autobiographische Schriften, edited by Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972);

Die Erzählungen, 2 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973);

Glück: Späte Erzählungen, Betrachtungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973);

Iris: Ausgewählte Märchen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973);

Die Kunst des Muβiggangs: Kurze Prosa aus dem Nachlaβ, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973);

Meistererzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973);

Kindheit des Zauberers: Ein autobiographisches Märchen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1974);

Das erste Abenteuer: Erzählungen, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975);

Die Fremdenstadt im Süden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975);

Legenden, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975);

Eine Literaturgeschichte in Rezensionen und Aufsätzen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975);

Musik: Betrachtungen, Gedichte, Rezensionen und Briefe, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976);

Stunden im Garten; Der lahme Knabe: Zwei Idyllen, edited by Gunter Böhmer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976);

Die Gedichte, 2 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Die Welt der Bücher: Betrachtungen und Aufsätze zur Literatur, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Kleine Freuden: Prosa aus dem Nachlaβ, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Magie des Buches: Betrachtungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Politik des Gewissens: die Politischen Schriften 1914–1962, edited by Michels, 2 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Von Wesen und Herkunft des Glasperlenspiels: Die vier Fassungen der Einleitung zum Glasperlenspiel, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Der Lateinschüler: Geschichten und Erinnerungen aus Kindheit und Schulzait (Berlin: Aufbau, 1977);

Der verbannte Ehemann oder Anton Schievelbeyn’s ohnfreywillige Reisse (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1977);

Die Romane und die Grossen Erzählungen, 8 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Die Stadt: Ein Märchen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1977);

Hermann Hesse als Maler: 44 Aquarelle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Der Zauberer: Faksimile der Handschrift, edited by Bernhard Zeller (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsches Literaturarchiv / Stuttgart: Klett, 1977);

Gesammelte Erzählungen, edited by Michels, 6 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977-1982);

Aus Indien: Aufzeichnungen, Tagebücher, Gedichte, Betrachtungen und Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980);

Hesse as Painter: Painting for Pleasure, translated by Ralph Manheim (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980);

Magie der Farben: Aquarelle aus dem Tessin (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1980);

Ein Jahr voll Freude, text by Hesse, photographs by Sepp Hofer (Frankfurt am Main: Unschau, 1983);

Italien: Schilderungen, Tagebücher, Gedichte, Aufsätze, Buchbesprechungen und Erzählungen, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983);

Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1984);

Casanovas Bekehrung; und Pater Matthias: Zwei Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985);

Der Weltverbesserer; und Dr. Knölges Ende: Zwei Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985);

Emil Kolb: Erzählung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985);

Bilderbuch der Erinnerungen, edited by Fritz Hofmann (Berlin: Aufbau, 1986);

Die Einheit hinter den Gegensätzen: Religion und Mythen, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986);

Die Hölle ist überwindbar: Krisis und Wandlung, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986);

Eigensinn macht Spaβ: Individuation und Anpassung, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986);

Jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne: Lebensstufen, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986);

Wer lieben kann, ist glücklich: Über die liebe, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986);

Bericht aus Normalien: Humoristische Erzählungen, Gedichte und Anekdoten, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986);

Bodensee: Betrachtungen, Erzählungen, Gedichte, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986);

Der Bettler; und Unterbrochene Stunden: Zwei Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988);

Die Marmorsäge; Taedium vitae: Zwei Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988);

Die Welt im Buch: Leseerfahrungen I: Rezensionen und Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1900-1910, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988);

Mit Hermann Hesse durch Italien: Ein Reisebegleiter durch Oberitalien, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1988);

Robert Aghion: Erzählung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988);

Die blaue Ferne: Reisebilder und Naturbetrachtungen, edited by Hofmann (Berlin: Aufbau, 1989);

Beschreibung einer Landschaft: Schweizer Miniaturen, edited by Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990);

Mit Hermann Hesse reisen: Betrachtungen und Gedichte, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1990);

Mit der Refe wird man immer jünger: Betrachtungen und Gedichte über das Alter (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1990);

Tessin: Betrachtungen, Gedichte und Aquarelle, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990);

Im Garten: Betrachtungen, Gedichte und Bilder, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1992);

Lesebuch: Erzählungen, Betrachtungen und Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992);

Jahreszeiten: Betrachtungen, Gedichte und Aquarelle (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1993);

Luftreisen, edited by Michels (Leipzig: Reclam, 1993; expanded edition, Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1994);

Ausgewählte Werke, 6 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994);

Lebenszeiten, edited by Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1994);

Liebesgeschichten, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995);

Freude am Garten: Betrachtungen, Gedichte und Fotografien mit farbigen Aquarellen des Dichters, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996);

Traumgeschenk: Betrachtungen, Tagebücher, Erzählungen und Gedichte über das Träumen, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996);

Farbe ist Leben: Eine Auswahl seiner schönsten Aquarelle, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1997);

Die Welt im Buch: Leseerfahrungen II: Rezensionen und Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1911-1916, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998);

Wunder der Liebe: liebesgedichte, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1998);

Wolken: Betrachtungen und Gedichte, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1999);

Vogel: Ein Märchen, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2000);

Wege nach Innen: 25 Gedichte, edited by Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2000);

Der Zauberer: Fragmente zu einem Roman, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001);

In Weihnachtszeiten: Betrachtungen, Gedichte und Aquarelle des Verfassers, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2001);

Blick nach dem fernen Osten: Erzählungen, Legenden, Gedichte und Betrachtungen, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001);

Über das Glück: Betrachtungen und Gedichte, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001);

Sämtliche Werke, 20 volumes, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001-2005);

Das Leben bestehen: Krisis und Wandlung, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2002);

Das Lied des Lebens: Die schönsten Gedichte, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2002);

Die schönsten Erzählungen, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002);

Liebesgedichte, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2002);

Mit dem Erstaunen fängt es an: Herkunft und Heimat; Natur und Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002);

Tessiner Bilderbuch (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2002);

Nur wer liebt lebendig: Frühe Liebesgeschichten, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2003);

“Verliebt in die verrückte Weit”: Betrachtungen, Gedichte, Erzählungen, Briefe, edited by Ursula Michels-Wenz (Frankfurt am Main & Leipzig: Insel, 2003).

Only a few German writers of the twentieth century have enjoyed worldwide acclaim. Undisputably numbered among these are Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Hermann Hesse. Hesse’s major works have been translated into some forty languages. Of all foreign countries, the United States, followed closely by Japan, has been most taken with Hesse. The fifteen million or so books that had been published in the United States by 1987 equaled the number that had been sold in Germany, and exceeded the fourteen million or more that readers had bought in Japan. Only Romain Rolland has attracted more attention in Japan than Hesse. While interest in Hesse in both India and China has been little more than mild, he had by the mid 1970s become the most popular of all foreign writers in South Korea. In the West, Hesse has, since the 1950s, enjoyed his most widespread popularity in the English- and Spanish-speaking countries.

Hesse’s father, Johannes Hesse, was born in Weissenstein, Estonia; his mother, Marie Gundert, daughter of the missionary and Indologist Hermann Gundert, was born in Talatscheri, India. Both branches of the family were given to a severe form of Pietism. Following his studies at the Basler Missionsanstalt (Mission Society of Basel), Johannes Hesse served as a missionary in India. Brought back to Europe by ill health, he settled in Calw, a little town at the edge of the Black Forest, to assist Gundert, then director of the Calwer Verlagsverein, a Pietist publishing house. There he met and married Marie Gundert, and there Hermann Hesse was born on 2 July 1877, the second of six children.

A hypersensitive, imaginative, lively, and extremely headstrong child, Hesse was long a source of annoyance and anxiety. He tyrannized his parents, and school held little attraction for him. In January 1890 Hesse was sent off to the Latin School in nearby Göppingen; in September 1891 he began his studies at the exclusive Protestant church school in Maulbronn, ostensibly in preparation for the pulpit. His stay was unexpectedly brief: the deeply disturbed youngster left abruptly and unannounced in March 1892 and was withdrawn in May, much to the relief of the school authorities, who had begun to doubt his sanity. He fared no better at schools for retarded and emotionally disturbed children in Bad Boll and Stetten or at a secondary school in Bad Cannstatt. Hesse’s parents finally permitted him to return home in the autumn of 1893. He spent the next six months gardening, assisting his father in the publishing house, and reading avidly in his grandfather’s library. In early June 1894, after his father had denied him permission to leave home to prepare himself for a literary career, Hesse became an apprentice machinist in Calw. He believed that this trade would afford him a livelihood that he could someday ply abroad and that would permit him ample time for his literary interests. Fifteen months of grimy labor disabused him of this romantic notion. In October 1895 he began a more appropriate apprenticeship in a bookshop in Tübingen.

Hesse’s four years in Tübingen were relatively tranquil. He continued to be a lonely outsider, applying himself diligently in the bookshop and otherwise preoccupied with his writing and self-education. During his preceding two years in Calw he had steeped himself in the German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in Tübingen he continued his prodigious reading but narrowed its scope drastically. For a time he devoted himself almost exclusively to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Then he fell under the spell of the German Romantics, Novalis in particular. Under their influence and that of the late-nineteenth-century aestheticism, he created his own beauty-worshipping realm of the imagination, a retreat from and substitute for the crass outer world in which he was an unappreciated misfit. Hesse was tolerably content; he had found a niche and a way of life.

According to his mother’s letters and diaries, Hesse had begun to compose ditties before he could even wield a pencil, and at the age of thirteen he had decided to become a poet or nothing at all. In Tübingen, no longer in the shadow of home or school, Hesse was finally able to pursue his literary interests as he pleased. His poems began to appear in a Viennese periodical in 1896; Romantische Lieder (Romantic Songs), his first book of poetry, was published at the beginning of 1899; and Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (An Hour After Midnight), his first book of prose, followed in mid 1899. These early poetry and prose tales, reveries, and monologues display the sweetly scented atmosphere, the muted sounds, and the brilliant colors of an uncontained Romanticism. A lonely and aristocratic outsider indulges in melodramatic fantasies and melodic lament, is morbidly preoccupied with love and death, seeks his retreat in temples and castles, communes with his muse, consorts with ethereal maidens, and burns incense at the altar of beauty far from the profane world. Neither book attracted more than a modicum of attention.

In September 1899 Hesse left Tübingen for more cosmopolitan Basel, where he made a determined effort to escape the loneliness that had begun to plague him. He soon found his way into Basel’s intellectual and art circles and became a frequent guest of some of the most culturally prominent families. Even so, Hesse remained essentially an outsider, distinctly uncomfortable at social gatherings, a loner who preferred the company of nature to that of people. In the spring of 1900–while writing “Lulu,” his fairy-tale paean to Julie Hellmann, whom he had courted hesitantly and vainly while vacationing in Kirchheim unter Teck the previous August-Hesse fell in love with Elisabeth La Roche, the “Elisabeth” of his poems and prose of the time. When the hopelessness of his shyly pursued love became apparent, he began a more successful courtship of Maria Bernoulli, of Basel’s mathematically celebrated Bernoulli family.

Long hours in a bookshop and few holidays left Hesse with neither time nor energy for his literary career and little opportunity for travel. With enough money to tide him over for some months, he quit his job in February 1901, returned to Calw, wrote the first four of his many brief recollections of his childhood, left for northern Italy at the end of March, returned to Calw in mid May, and went back to Basel later in the summer. Hesse’s diary notes, rewritten soon after his return from Italy and published in the Basler Anzeiger that autumn, were the first of his many travel journals.

Aestheticism peaked and began to ebb in the poeticized recollections and ruminations, the diary excerpts, and the poems of Hinterlassene Schriften und Gedichte von Hermann Lauscher: Herausgegeben von Hermann Hesse (1901, Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher: Edited by Hermann Hesse), which Hesse called “Dokumente der eigentümlichen Seele eines modernen Aestheten und Sonderlings” (documents of the peculiar soul of a modern aesthete and eccentric). Three of these “documents” look to the past in both their sentiment and manner, and three are telling intimations of things to come in Hesse’s life and art. “Meine Kindheit” (My Childhood), a recollection of childhood in Bern, anticipates the more realistic narrative style that Hesse soon cultivated, and it is the beginning of what became–and, until Demian (1919; translated, 1923), remained–an obsessive preoccupation with childhood and youth. “Lulu,” a fictionalized recollection of his vacation in Kirchheim unter Teck, foreshadows Hesse’s fairy tales and his novels Demian, Der Steppenwolf (1927; translated as Steppenwolf, 1929), and Die Morgenlandfahrt (1932; translated as The Journey to the East, 1956) in both their blending of the magic realm of the imagination and the commonplace world, and their focus upon the pendulousness between isolation and contact, spirituality and sensuality, and the ideal and the real–the fluctuation that remained the characteristic rhythm of Hesse’s life and the lives of his protagonists. An embryonic Harry Haller (protagonist of Der Steppenwolf), just discernible in the allegory of “Lulu,” assumes a clear outline in “Tagebuch 1900” (Diary 1900), another of the “documents.” Lauscher emerges a potential Steppenwolf, like Haller a sensitive misfit, an observer of life and not a participant, an extreme individualist dedicated to the ideal and disdainful of the real.

Gedichte (Poems), a second volume of romantic poetry, appeared in 1902. Hesse made another trip to northern Italy in April 1903; following his return on 24 April, he gave the finishing touches to his first novel. Hesse had begun Peter Camenzind (translated 1961) in November 1901 but had progressed slowly until the end of 1902. With the novel scheduled to be published in January 1904, Hesse decided in September 1903 to quit the bookselling trade and become a full-time author.

Peter Camenzind marks the beginning of the second stage in the evolution of Hesse’s writings. His preceding shorter prose characteristically reflects the author-protagonist’s inner self almost to the exclusion of any interaction with the physical world, and his prevailing aesthetic concerns find appropriate expression in an ornate narrative manner. Peter Camenzind, in contrast, mirrors both inner and outer circumstances, and Hesse’s incipient cultivation in Bern of the art of life and of love finds expression in the blending of Romanticism and realism. The shades and airy worlds of the earlier works yield to living people involved in real events. Emotive adjectives and adverbs become less profuse, abstractions less common, imagery less choice, and narrative less punctured by rhetorical questions and exclamatory outbursts. But Hesse’s characters and settings continue to be felt rather than seen, and nature continues to be for Camenzind the mirror for moods and the setting for protracted reflection that it has always been for Romantics. Nor did a writer of vignettes suddenly emerge a full-fledged storyteller. Camenzind’s spotty memory, unevenly developed recollections, and propensity for rumination make his story less a smooth continuum of evolving action firmly anchored in space and time than a series of loosely juxtaposed reminiscences with liberally interspersed self-contemplation, nature description, and social comment.

Camenzind, an embittered loner, frustrated writer, misanthropist, and caustic sociocultural critic, seeks solace in wine and a refuge in nature. He finds a new ideal in the love and service exemplified by St. Francis of Assisi, then returns to his native Alpine peasant village prepared, though still in his prime, to turn his back upon life, to shelve his writing, and to become a simple innkeeper. Relenting enough to resume what had for him become a “miserable métier,” Camenzind tells his narratively frail story. In his unhurried musing, he recalls his idyllic childhood, dwells sentimentally and at length on his love of nature, alludes to his early interest in books and writing, skims his formative years in high school, then turns his attention to his errant ambling through life and his disenchanting exposure to the cultural world. This story is Hesse’s own veiled literary self-disclosure, prompted by his psychological need to dwell on his attempted new adjustment to life in Basel, to account for its failure, and to lend approbation to his decision to forgo any further efforts to socialize. The gauche and inhibited misfit Camenzind is what Hesse was in the years 1901 to 1903; his affable, happy, and carefree friend Richard is the man of the world Hesse aspired to become. Richard’s death is Hesse’s symbolic realization of the hopelessness of this aspiration. Except for his successful courtship of Maria Bernoulli (to whom he became engaged in the spring of 1903), Hesse might indeed, like his protagonist, have sought his comfort in solitary withdrawal.

While Hesse spent the autumn of 1903 and the winter and spring of 1904 in Calw writing the novel Unterm Rad (1906, Beneath the Wheel; translated as The Prodigy, 1957) and monographs on Giovanni Boccaccio and St. Francis of Assisi, his fiancée scoured the countryside around the Bodensee for an appealing rural retreat. Both had had their fill of sophisticated city life. She found an old farmhouse for rent in the secluded and picturesque village of Gaienhofen on the German side of the Untersee. They were married on 2 August 1904, moved immediately to Gaienhofen, and began a Rousseauesque experiment in simple living.

Hesse continued to cultivate the poetic-realistic narrative manner of Peter Camenzind in his three remaining pre-World War I novels. Unterm Rad is more realistic than poetic; Gertrud (1910; translated as Gertrud and I, 1915) is as realistic as it is poetic; and Roβhalde (1914; translated as Rosshalde, 1970) is again more realistic than poetic; and all three, like Peter Camenzind, remain more study than story. Autobiography continues to be the matrix of Hesse’s narration; psychological need is still the creative thrust; and protagonists remain reflections of the discontented loner Hesse had become.

Unterm Rad was Hesse’s contribution to the tendentious literature fashionable in German letters at the turn of the century. Like most of these school novels and dramas, it is a severe indictment of the adult world. Parents, teachers, and pastors are upbraided for their lack of understanding, neglect, and victimization of their wards, and for their smugness, incompetence, and hypocrisy. Only the thick-skinned children escape relatively unscathed by their mistreatment; the sensitive and gifted are brushed aside or ground under. Hesse’s acrid social satire is an overstatement less intent on exposing and reforming social institutions than on purging painful memories and venting latent anger.

Hesse’s first son, Bruno, was born in December 1905. In the autumn of 1907 the family moved into a larger and more comfortable home on a knoll overlooking Gaienhofen and the lake. A second son, Heiner, was born in March 1909.

Gaienhofen marked a new chapter in Hesse’s life, a new period in his career, and a new phase in his writing. With the publication of Peter Camenzind in 1904, an unknown aspirant suddenly became a celebrity. That same year his maiden novel was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize of Vienna, the first of many literary awards. Before Gaienhofen, Hesse’s poetry and prose were intimately personal and highly lyrical. With his marriage and increased concern with everyday life, he became less obviously personal and more prose conscious, and he began to cultivate a more down-to-earth literary style. The novella became his favorite medium of expression.

The writing of Unterm Rad not only purged Hesse of painful school recollections but also evoked treasured memories of Calw. His birthplace, which he renamed Gerbersau in his work, became a persistent preoccupation that gave his art fresh impetus and new direction. This little provincial community was his wonderful world of childhood, where he had been part of a social complex and not yet the lonely outsider. In Gaienhofen, this Heimat (home) transfigured in Hesse’s memory became the setting of his art: a mythicized community reminiscent of Gottfried Keller’s Seldwyla. Together with Unterm Rad, Hesse’s three volumes of Gerbersau tales-Diesseits (1907, In This World), Nachbarn (1908, Neighbors) and Umwege (1912, Byways)–represent the Swabian period of his career, when he chose to look to the past and tell traditional stories.

Hesse’s traditional stories were not confined to his Swabian tales. While still in Basel, fascinated by both Boccaccio and St. Francis of Assisi, he had begun to write stories in the manner of the Italian novella and legends in the manner of traditional hagiography. He continued this practice in Gaienhofen. Many of these Italianate tales and legends were republished in Fabulierbuch (1935, Book of Fables). His literary essays, personal ruminations, nature sketches, diary-like recollections, and travel reports were published in newspapers and magazines and republished in such miscellanies as Aus Indien (1913, From India), Bilderbuch (1926, Book of Pictures), and Betrachtungen (1928, Observations). In Gaienhofen, Hesse also continued to write his romantic poems, but in drastically reduced number. Some of these appeared in Unterwegs (1911, Under Way) and Musik des Einsamen (1915, Music of the Lonely One).

Hesse’s third novel, Gertrud, written in the winter of 1908–1909, was as much a self-appraisal as Peter Camenzind had been. In Camenzind’s story Hesse was primarily intent upon accounting for his brief asocial withdrawal after his futile efforts in Basel to become sociable; in Gertrud he was eager to account for his passive adjustment to life in Gaienhofen. The inner world of the violinist-composer Kuhn, like that of Camenzind, remains intimately autobiographical; and Kuhn’s outer world, albeit decidedly more fictive than Camenzind’s, draws freely upon the personal for its filler detail. Kuhn starts out as the person Hesse had been in Basel, the lonely misfit-observer, and he becomes Hesse the disenchanted artist-bourgeois of Gaienhofen, desperately intent upon making self-acceptance possible and life palatable. To this end, Kuhn embraces a fatalistic philosophy, evolves a Nietzschean theory of art, argues a Schopenhauerian conception of love, and advocates, as had Camenzind, a St. Francis of Assisi adjustment: fate is responsible for the unalterable circumstances of life; loneliness and suffering are the sine qua non for creativity; love between man and woman is essentially a flighty, brutal, and painfully demeaning passion; and social love, with its commitment to service, is man’s ultimate solace. That Hesse himself was as little convinced by Kuhn’s assessment of, and adjustment to, life as he had been by Camenzind’s is clearly reflected in the last of his prewar novels, Roβhalde.

As the novelty of marriage and his new way of life wore off, Hesse became convinced that he had given up too much for too little. He and his wife, who was not only nine years his senior but just as strong willed and self-preoccupied as he, began to drift apart. Hesse’s growing discontent became chronic wanderlust, which culminated in September 1911 in a trip to the East.

Accompanied by the Swiss painter Hans Sturzenegger, Hesse visited Ceylon, Malaya, and Sumatra. He vaguely expected to find the wisdom of India, a more innocent community, and answers to his personal problems, but found only appalling poverty and depressingly commercialized Buddhism. Disenchanted, suffering from dysentery, and exhausted by the oppressive heat, Hesse left for home in December without visiting India proper. Nine months later the Hesses settled in a spacious and elegant seventeenth-century country house on the outskirts of Bern. Remote Gaienhofen had lost its attraction and was no place for schoolchildren, and Hesse and his wife hoped that a return to Switzerland would be salutary for their crumbling marriage.

Roβhalde, written between July 1912 and January 1913, is a depiction of the climactic stage of an infelicitous marriage, and it drew as heavily on Hesse’s life as had each of his preceding major works. Veraguth, a painter, is the temperamental, lonely romantic who lives in dreamy anticipation, is quickly sated by realization, and carefully nurtures his chronic disillusionment. His wife, Adele, staid and humorless, possessive mother and unresponsive wife, is patterned after Maria Hesse. Veraguth’s decision to terminate his marriage and to begin life anew, on a different basis, and alone, anticipates Hesse’s separation from his wife and children; and his planned interim trip to India with his carefree friend Burkhardt recalls Hesse’s own flight. Roβhalde is Hesse’s frank confession not only of the failure but even more of the folly of his attempt in marriage to achieve an intimate relationship with life and to find a place for himself in society. Hesse had become convinced that the artist was essentially an observer and a creator, and that to try to be a participant in life was to play a role and not to live as oneself. For the artist, therefore, marriage was a mistake. Like Hesse, Veraguth had only compounded his error by long resigning himself to it. Unlike Lauscher, who had settled for aestheticism, Camenzind, who had settled for nature, and Kuhn, who had settled for resigned retirement, an embittered Veraguth decides belatedly to settle for nothing less than the self.

This resolve is supported by a new concept of fate. Until Roβhalde, Hesse’s protagonists characteristically assume that everything happens or does not happen to them; adjustment to circumstances is their primary concern, and minimal involvement is their ideal. Until his decision to leave family, home, and false identity behind him, Veraguth belongs to these timorous bystanders. Convinced finally that fate is not intrusive but inherent, he becomes determined to seek his own medium and to try only to be himself. He now recognizes that he is by nature an outsider and an observer, that art is his destiny and not just his consolation, and that loneliness is his element and not something to be feared. Reluctant acceptance of circumstances yields to joyous self-acceptance, and bitter renunciation will become self-realization. On this note Veraguth’s story, like Camenzind’s and Kuhn’s, ends abruptly and inconclusively. A new and more meaningful way of life is proposed but left untested. Hesse again took his protagonist no farther than the point he himself had reached.

Hesse’s move to Bern in the hope of resolving his personal and family problems proved to be as abortive as his trip to the East. Unable to cope with their extremely irritable youngest son, Martin, following his severe illness in the spring of 1914, Hesse and his wife put the boy into a foster home. The outbreak of World War I left an already unsettled Hesse badly shaken. His initial ambiguous political stance–he was nationalistic enough to sympathize with Germany and to hope for German victory, but he also argued for internationalism and abhorred war–at first attracted only scattered suspicion, but by the autumn of 1915 it elicited not only denunciation by militarists but also rebuke by pacifists. That Hesse had volunteered his services to the German embassy in Bern and was collecting books and coediting two weeklies for German prisoners of war did little to dissuade his detractors. The death of Hesse’s father in March 1916 added an acute sense of guilt to his growing despair. Exhausted, Hesse sought help in psychoanalysis. From the end of April 1916 to November 1917, he had some seventy-two sessions with Dr. J. B. Lang, who had become one of Carl Gustav Jung’s students. This encounter with psychoanalysis provided Hesse with the incentive to appraise himself and his adjustment to life and afforded him the insights necessary to begin his long Weg nach Innen (inward path), that tortuous road that he hoped would lead to self-knowledge and ultimately to greater self-realization.

By the beginning of 1916 Hesse was so distressed by the criticism of militarists and pacifists and by the futility of his own protests that he stopped writing about the war. The lull that followed was a period of reconsideration and incubation, the beginning of what Hesse later called his Erwachen (awakening) and his Wandlung (transformation). In the middle of 1917 Hesse began again to address himself publicly to politics, excoriating proponents of war and pleading for immediate peace. He continued his berating and exhorting in the immediate postwar period, shifting gradually from international and national politics to the individual and from the outer to the inner world. Hesse’s words were primarily directed to youth: a challenge to emulate Friedrich Nietzsche in an acceptance of the self and of life’s inherent loneliness and suffering, and an invitation to undertake the self-scrutiny and self-realization he himself had just embarked upon.

Hesse concluded that to “live the self” would involve emancipation from traditional religion and morality and the cultivation of a personal ethos. Heeding his Eigensinn (self-will) and not the Herdensinn (herd-will), Hesse was determined to follow Nietzsche’s path of individuation, prepared not only to accept but to extol loneliness and suffering in the manner of the Nietzschean elect. This world was of and for the Herdenmensch (herd man), a dated society. A better world could be ushered in by an enlightened few girded for a Nietzschean transvaluation of values. Christianity became the focal point of this transvaluation for Hesse, just as it had for Nietzsche. Because of Christianity, the here and the beyond had become an unnecessary and trying duality of incompatibles. A religion with a deity who was both God and Satan and a morality beyond absolutist good and evil, a credo appreciative of wholesome self-love and tolerant of self-expression and self-realization, would be more in accord with the nature of things. The old would give way to the new: a new God, a new morality, a new man, and a new world.

This Nietzschean sentiment found its immediate expression in Demian, written in September and October 1917. The novel depicts emancipation from traditional belief and thought and the crystallization of his own ethos, ascribed to precocious Emil Sinclair in his passage from youth to young manhood. The ten-year-old Sinclair is the sensitive and unruly youngster Hesse had been; his home and family are modeled on Hesse’s; his helle Welt (light world) is Hesse’s cloistered world of childhood; and this childhood paradise ends for Sinclair, as it had for Hesse, with a growing awareness of and painful involvement with seductive and profane life at large, die dunkle Welt (the dark world). Sinclair’s first encounter with evil in the person of the young blackmailer Kromer, his own first lies and theft, his awareness of sin and torment by guilt, his unhappy and dissolute school years, his despair and thoughts of suicide, his distant worship of an older girl, his disenchantment with academia, and his attraction to Nietzsche had all been Hesse’s early experiences. The mystagogic Pistorius’s tutoring of Sinclair in gnosticism and the interpretation of dreams reflects Hesse’s indebtedness to his psychiatrist. Sinclair’s belief that war is the birth pangs of a new and better age had also been Hesse’s.

Nevertheless, Demian, like all of Hesse’s preceding tales, is not strictly autobiography. Hesse’s past and present were only the matrix of his art; his recollection was always selective, and his imagination remained vivid. Max Demian, Sinclair’s mentor, and Demian’s mother, Eva–the two most important figures except the protagonist–were products of this imagination: pivotal points around which Hesse structured a tale in which psychic experiences are rendered visible and actuality is conceptualized. Demian and Frau Eva are multidimensional symbols. Demian is Sinclair’s Socratic daimon, his admonishing inner self, but he is also a Jungian imago, Sinclair’s mental image of the ideal self, and is also the reflective, culturally unconditioned alter ego Sinclair must become before he can begin to “live himself.” Frau Eva is Sinclair’s Jungian anima, the soul, the unconscious with which his conscious mind must establish rapport in the process of individuation, and also life in all its fullness, heaven and earth, an actualized Magna Mater, mankind’s origin and destiny. Demian’s and Frau Eva’s actions and Sinclair’s interactions with them are primarily psychic experience externalized. Hesse was awarded the Theodore Fontane Prize of Berlin for Demian’m 1919.

Hesse’s six and a half years in Bern were quite productive. His essays on war and politics, sundry recollections, literary studies, travel reports, congratulatory articles, and general observations on the human condition written during the period were collected in Kleiner Garten (1919, Small Garden), Wanderung (1920; translated as Wandering, 1972), Sinclairs Notizbuch (1923, Sinclair’s Notebook), Bilderbuch, and Betrachtungen. He edited thirty-nine books and two weeklies and maintained a continuous flow of book reviews. He also added considerably to his fiction: besides Roβhalde and Demian, he published Knulp: Drei Geschichten aus dem Leben Knulps (translated as Knulp: Three Tales from the Life of Knulp, 1971) in 1915, and Märchen (Fairy Tales), seven stories written between 1913 and 1917, in 1919. Many of the poems written in Bern became part of the second edition of Unterwegs (1915), of Musik des Einsamen, and of Ausgewählte Gedichte (1921, Selected Poems).

After Maria Hesse became psychotic in October 1918, Hesse put Bruno and Heiner into a boarding school. When he was released from his wartime job in March 1919 he immediately left for the canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland. Domesticity had not agreed with Hesse: his Rousseauesque adventure in Gaienhofen had ended in tedium and frustration, and his life in Bern had become a nightmare. Neither his early aestheticism nor his rise into the bourgeoisie had served Hesse well. In Ticino he was determined just to be himself, come what may.

By the beginning of May, Hesse had settled in a Spartan apartment in the Casa Camuzzi, a baroque country house in Montagnola, a village on the outskirts of Lugano, where he lived until August 1931. From 1919 to 1923 Hesse emerged rarely and only reluctantly from his retreat. Since his postwar royalties from Germany had little monetary value in Switzerland, he was compelled to give sporadic public readings of his works. While in Zurich for this purpose in May 1921 he had a few analytic sessions with Jung. After 1923 his lecture tours were extended to Germany and continued until the late 1920s. The generosity of Fritz Leuthold, a wealthy friend, enabled Hesse to spend his winters from 1925 to 1931 in a small apartment in Zurich.

Hesse first turned to painting in the summer of 1916, when writing became distasteful to him and music unbearable. A modest beginning in Bern became a passion in Montagnola. He painted hundreds of little watercolors in the summer of 1919 and hundreds more during the following summers. In Hesse’s writing he explored life’s shadows, but in his painting he exposed its lively colors. The paintings are for the most part pastoral scenes: peacefully cluttered houses either graphically detailed or skimpily outlined, mountain landscapes, scattered dwellings surrealistic in their distortions, and placid lakes, gardens, trees, and wayside chapels, all depicted in a disarmingly naive manner. Rural Ticino was transfigured by poetic license. Hesse’s new, therapeutic pastime remained a lifetime pursuit. Many of these watercolors have been internationally exhibited, and many have been made public in pamphlet publications and postcard reproductions.

Hesse had hardly settled in Montagnola before he became acquainted with twenty-two-year-old Ruth Wenger, daughter of the Swiss writer Lisa Wenger, who lived in nearby Carona. Hesse terminated his marriage in July 1923 and married Ruth Wenger on 11 January 1924. His second marital misadventure was short-lived: distraught and ill, Wenger returned to her parents in April 1924. Hesse’s efforts to achieve a reconciliation were futile, and Wenger was granted a divorce in April 1927. A shy outsider, most at home in his study, in the concert hall, and in nature, Hesse became a desperate frequenter of Zurich’s bars and dance halls. By late 1926 this sensual eruption had run its course. Early that year, while in Zurich, Hesse had met Ninon Dolbin, née Ausländer, a longtime devotee of his writing and a native of Czernowitz, Rumania. She joined him in the Casa Camuzzi in June 1927, although she remained married until September 1931.

Politically, the period from 1919 to 1931 was no less discouraging for Hesse than the preceding years in Bern. Persuaded that a disenchanted postwar Germany would be susceptible to changes for the better, he helped to found and edit Vivos Voco, a periodical devoted to social reform, pacifism, and internationalism. Quickly disabused of his hopes by resurgent nationalism and spreading communism, Hesse terminated his association with the monthly in the autumn of 1921,

only two years after its first issue. By then he had again become a favorite target of invective, and public self-defense was again futile. Continued indignities and waning faith in Germany’s political future persuaded Hesse to become a citizen of Switzerland in November 1924 and to resign from the Prussian Academy of Art in November 1930.

Hesse’s twelve years in the Casa Camuzzi were the most exciting chapter of his life and the most productive period in his art. In his relentless quest for himself, his writing received fresh impetus and assumed new directions. A traditionalist before the war, he emerged an innovator. Hesse’s fictive documentation of his self-quest started with “Klein und Wagner” (Klein and Wagner), begun immediately after he arrived in Montagnola and completed by mid July 1919; it was serialized in Vivos Voco from October to December 1919. “Klingsors letzter Sommer” (translated as Klingsor’s Last Summer, 1970) was ready for publication by the beginning of September. It was published together with “Klein und Wagner” as Klingsors letzter Sommer: Erzählungen (1920). The first eight chapters of Siddhartha (1922; translated, 1951) were written from December 1919 to the end of July 1920, the last four from March to May 1922. Kurgast: Aufzeichnungen von einer Badener Kur (1925, Guest at a Spa: Notes of a Water Cure in Baden), the ironic psychologizing and philosophizing of an embittered rheumatic, was written in October 1923, and Die Nürnberger Reise (1927, The Journey to Nuremberg), acerbic memoirs of a reading tour, in the late autumn of 1925. Der Steppenwolf, a surrealistic self-exposure that began to preoccupy Hesse in November 1924, was finished at the end of 1926. Níarziss und Goldmund (1930; translated as Death and the Lover, 1932), begun in mid 1927, was completed by the end of 1928, and Die Morgenlandfahrt, started during the latter half of 1929, was finished by April 1931. These major works were accompanied by Hesse’s usual stream of poetry, most of which was included in Krisis (1928; translated as Crisis, 1975) and Trost der Nacht (1929, The Solace of the Night), and by his continued output of shorter tales, literary essays, and recollections, many of which were brought together in his miscellanies. During these years Hesse also managed to edit sixteen books and to continue his prolific reviewing.

Roβhalde boldly proclaims a new way of life: the protagonist will be what he is and live as he was meant to live. Demian depicts the emancipation from traditional religion and morality necessary for this new style of life. “Klein und Wagner” proceeds from the brash manifesto of Roβhalde and the optimistic celebrations of Demian to an actual venture, one that is a faithful rendition of Hesse’s separation from his family in the spring of 1919, his trip, and the mental and emotional anguish of his first few weeks in Ticino. Klein is a respectable member of society, a conscientious employee, a faithful husband, a good father, and a reliable provider. He is also a man who has never taken the trouble to find himself. Disillusionment, frustration, and resultant murderous impulses compel him to bolt. He embezzles, forges documents, procures a revolver, and flees. Distraught, he tries desperately to assess himself and his actions, to ponder life and morality, and to become an authentic human being. His belated efforts to establish his own identity, to fashion his own values, and to “live himself” are futile. Long hours of excruciating thought, a bout of gambling, and a whirl of sex only add to his agitation. The blissful moments when he is at peace with himself and with life are too few and too elusive to sustain him. Guilt and anxiety plague him; his new way of life leaves him wallowing in self-contempt, and destructive impulses once more become urgent. Klein begins to falter, and flight again becomes imperative. Since life no longer holds any attraction for him and since his own inner resources are depleted, just one week after his flight he succumbs to his long-nurtured passion for suicide.

Klein’s attempt to emancipate himself from the Christian-bourgeois ethos as Sinclair does, and to “live himself” as Veraguth proposes to do, fails. Whereas actual experience had almost persuaded Hesse–as it does persuade Klein–that this new ideal was more pipe dream than possibility, a surge of faith in the essential oneness, eternity, and meaningfulness of life convinced Hesse to the contrary. This faith finds its expression in the epiphanic concluding moments of Klein’s life. Given this faith, the individual has only to “sich fallen lassen” (let himself fall), to surrender himself to himself and to life, fully and with no regard for consequences. Of Hesse’s major tales, Klein’s encompasses the shortest span of time, involves the smallest cast, and presents the most concentrated treatment of theme.

Autobiography was mythicized in Demian and dramatized in “Klein und Wagner”; it is fantasized in “Klingsors letzter Sommer.” Klingsor’s story, decidedly more portrait than narrative, is a memorial to the summer of 1919, Hesse’s first in Ticino. Klingsor, born on 2 July, forty-two years old and unattached, painter, poet, philosopher, and hypochondriac troubled by the thought of death, possessed by a passion for life and art, and given to revelry and depression, is obviously Hesse. The setting is clearly Lugano and its vicinity; actual place-names are only playfully distorted. Klingsor’s July excursion to Kareno with his coterie of friends to meet the Queen of the Mountains is Hesse’s fantasized depiction of his first visit to Carona to meet Ruth Wenger. A night with Jup der Magier, a night given to revelry and morbid preoccupation with cultural decline and death, is based on Hesse’s frequent night bouts of alcohol and argument with his astrologer friend Josef Englert.

The splintered structure of the tale and its lack of homogeneity mirror and highlight Klingsor’s inner discord and the chaotic structure of his lifestyle. The hectic flow and rhythm of the sentences reflect Klingsor’s alternately frantic and ecstatic inner state. Nature, evocatively depicted and excitingly animated by garish color and brilliant sound, becomes an accentuating mirror for frenzied thoughts. Hesse’s language assumes a vitality that lends Klingsor’s story gripping immediacy. This work represents Hesse’s intuitively controlled artistry at its best.

Klingsor’s emancipation, unlike Klein’s, is complete. He has left society and his socialized self behind without any moral compunctions. But he has not come to terms with death: he tries to blot out the reality of death by rushing headlong into an oblivion of intoxicating experience. But sex, alcohol, and painting prove to be ineffectual weapons against death. He is not capable of letting himself “fall into life” until he is finally able to come to terms fully with both life and death. Klingsor’s painting of his self-portrait symbolizes his confrontation with–and his resultant affirmation of–the self, life, and death. He is now in accord with all, no longer suffers from anxiety, and is finally able to let himself fall into life. At this critical juncture, Hesse’s narration terminates in its usual abrupt manner: Klingsor dies mysteriously soon after putting the finishing touches on his self-portrait.

What had become a passionate ideal for Hesse finally received its full expression in Siddhartha. Just as for Klein and Klingsor, life for Hesse’s new standard-bearer consists primarily of two areas of experience: Geist, the world of the mind and thought, and Natur, the world of the body and physical action. Klein is at home in neither realm; Klingsor lives in the intoxication of each; Siddhartha exhausts both possibilities and, in their exhaustion, transcends them and finds himself miraculously in a third realm: that of the soul, the ultimate stage of being in which the individual lives in complete accord with himself and life, when he is finally able, fully and not just for chance moments, to experience the essential oneness and meaningfulness of everything. After his encounter with the Buddha, and with his subsequent awakening to the realization that the incidental “I” of his senses is no less he than the incidental “I” of his thoughts, Siddhartha, the Brahmin once dedicated to ritual and speculation and the Samana (ascetic) once given to self-denial, leaves the realm of the mind behind. Through his affair with Kamala the courtesan; his partnership with Kamaswami the businessman; his reveling in wealth, power, and sloth; his constant self-disgust; and his attempt to commit suicide, he leaves the realm of the flesh behind. And after his return to the river and Vasudeva the ferryman, his encounter with his son, and his last bout with anxious love and fearful concern, Siddhartha emerges transfigured, a wise, saintly figure given to his fellow humans in love and service; paradoxically, he has achieved self-transcendence through self-realization.

Hesse’s ideal is an exemplary Western approach to life, opposed to the exemplary Eastern approach advocated by the Gautama Buddha. To accord his literary credo something of timeless, mythic validity, Hesse locates his tale in remote India of a time long past. To enhance the gospel quality of the tale, Hesse cultivates an antiquated, liturgical mode of expression reminiscent of both Pali scriptures and the Bible. And to stress his equal concern with, and approbation of, each of the three areas of human experience, Hesse carefully adjusts manner to matter. Structurally, the tale is a balanced tripartite, in keeping with Siddhartha’s balanced progression from the realm of the mind, through that of the body, to that of the soul. This triadic structure is extended to the very mechanics of expression: to sentences, clauses, phrases, words, and paragraphs. And in keeping with this three-beat pattern, Hesse even extends his customary projection of the actual self and one alternative to the actual self and three possibilities. Siddhartha is Hesse’s fictionalized self, and Govinda, Buddha, and Vasudeva are the possibilities: Govinda is the self-effacing, institution-oriented person Siddhartha should not become; Buddha represents a laudable but undesirable life-denying model; and Vasudeva is an exemplary life-affirming ideal. And when Siddhartha becomes this ideal, Vasudeva leaves the scene, just as Demian vanished when Sinclair became his ideal self. Just as “Klingsors letzter Sommer” is intuitively controlled artistry, Siddhartha is conscious craftsmanship.

The third major crisis in Hesse’s life began when he and Wenger separated at the end of March 1924. Withdrawal, bitter self-hatred, a lusting for both death and raw life, and an experiencing of the bars and dance halls of Zurich in early 1926 were followed in mid 1926 by a return to Montagnola, his art, his ideals, and his solitude. During this crisis, the most radical of Hesse’s characteristic swings from spirituality to sensuality and back, Der Steppenwolf was created. Harry Haller’s story and Krisis, its poetic counterpart, are also the most painfully honest of Hesse’s literary renditions of these sporadic ordeals. Krisis, in particular, is a brutally sincere reflection of Hesse’s attempted drowning of the self in sex, jazz, and alcohol, and of his agonizing recognition that he would always be an outsider. Hesse has his prose counterpart recount his experience in less strident detail and buffered by a touch of fantasy.

In Der Steppenwolf, Haller–intellectual, writer, and uncompromising idealist, too long ascetically devoted to mental pursuits–becomes emotionally unhinged. His aloneness has become a torment, his freedom repugnant, and all his interests and ideals questionable. He is unable to continue in his estrangement, is tempted but not prepared to commit suicide, and will not compromise and join the throng. He has no choice but to relax, to emerge from his isolation, and to seek relief in the world of the senses. Late one night, Haller meets Hermine, a well-groomed prostitute who responds sympathetically to his plight. At the outset of their involvement she informs him that she will make him fall in love with her, then will order him to kill her and will expect him to comply. In the interim she teaches Haller to dance, laugh, and live. She introduces him to handsome young Pablo, a jazz-band saxophonist, and arranges a bedroom friendship for him with the sensual Maria.

At a masked ball only four weeks after their first meeting, Haller and Hermine dance a passionate wedding dance and then accept Pablo’s invitation to his quarters for a climactic drug party, an introduction to his Magic Theater. Awakening slightly from his drug-induced fantasizing and finding Pablo and Hermine side by side, exhausted from their sexual intercourse, Haller hallucinates that he plunges a knife into Hermine’s heart. Slipping back into a deep daze, he imagines a conversation with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then a trial in which he is sentenced to eternal life for his imagined murder of an imaginary figure. Sober again, Haller is prepared to resume the game of life, to suffer its agonies and senselessness once more, hopeful that he will someday be able to distinguish between ideas and appearance and to rise above it all and laugh. Thus, like every major Hesse tale before it, Der Steppenwolf ends abruptly and on a note of optimism. And like each of the tales beginning with Sinclair’s, Haller’s is yet another of Hesse’s experiments in narrative possibility, a surrealistic admixture of psychological realism and symbolism, fantasy, and hallucination.

By the beginning of 1927 Hesse’s crisis had run its course, and in the relative tranquility that followed he looked to the past and reviewed his thoughts. The embittered Haller was forgotten, and the dramatic tempo of Der Steppenwolf yielded to the more epic flow of Narziss und Goldmund. Just as in Siddhartha’s exotic tale, also written during a period of relative equanimity following considerable agitation, there is little in the outer detail of Goldmund’s medieval world that is discernibly autobiographical. Goldmund’s schooling, friendships, experiences in the Mariabronn monastery, and eventual stealthy departure from the monastery are a colorful reflection of Hesse’s sojourn in and flight from the monastery in Maulbronn. All that follows– Goldmund’s restless peregrinations from forest to forest and village to village; parade of brief sexual encounters; restrictive years of sculpturing under the tutelage of Master Niklaus; happy return to the open road; exposure to the horrors of the plague; last dangerous dalliance; apprehension; rescue from death by his boyhood friend and mentor Narziss, now abbot of Mariabronn; return to the monastery; dedication to his art; last worldly sally; and self- but not life-affirming death–was born of Hesse’s imagination. On the other hand, Goldmund’s thoughts, feelings, basic problems, and aspirations, like Siddhartha’s, are no less self-projections than those of all of Hesse’s other protagonists. Like most of Hesse’s tales, Narziss und Goldmund juxtaposes and scrutinizes two human possibilities, the ideal possible and the dubious actual: Goldmund is the possible and Narziss the actual.

In December 1928, while putting the finishing touches on Narziss und Goldmund, Hesse began again to experience sharp qualms about himself, life, and art. This new attack of doubt and Hesse’s usual determination to find order and meaning in apparent chaos provided the impetus and matter for Die Morgenlandfahrt. Protagonist H.H.’s acceptance into the Order of the Eastern Wayfarers, his year of probation, his initiation, his participation in the order’s Journey to the East, his defection after a few months, his ten-year period of lonely suffering and suicidal despair, his months of grueling effort to recall and record his association with the order, and his culminating readmission into its ranks extend over some twelve years. This time frame represents Hesse’s twelve years of quest, despair, and new hope following his departure from Bern in the spring of 1919. H.H. is what Hesse was during the years from 1919 to 1931, undisguised even in name. His background, friends, interests, aspirations, and conflicts reflect Hesse’s own life; however, H.H.’s relationship with the supreme head of the Eastern Wayfarers and his ceremonious admission and readmission into the order are not fictionalized actuality but psychic process externalized in pure fantasy and playful mystification. H.H. and Leo are another of Hesse’s double self-projections: the distraught individualist he actually was, and the confident master-servant he hoped he might become. Like Demian and Hermine, Leo is both the admonishing and enlightening daimon and the more ideal alter ego, rendered visible. Hesse’s focus of interest had shifted from his characteristic self-concern and adjustment to oneself to self-justification and adjustment to a community, a transcendent world. With this shift Hesse’s renascent aestheticism, a blending of Lauscher’s Romanticism and Haller’s Platonism, was complete.

In the summer of 1931, after four years together in their inadequate quarters in the Casa Camuzzi, Hesse and Dolbin moved into a house built nearby for their lifelong use by Hans C. Bodmer, a wealthy patron. They were married on 14 November 1931. Hesse’s third marriage afforded him the comfort and contentment that neither of his previous marriages had. His life began to revolve almost ritually around his writing, reading, extensive correspondence, music, painting, and gardening. With Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Hesse quickly became host and benefactor to a steady flow of German and Austrian refugee artists and intellectuals.

Hesse had permitted World War I to divert him from his conviction that an artist should divorce himself from politics, tend to his art, and nurture his humanitarian ideals; but his political activism had been of no advantage to himself, his art, or Germany. He remained more mindful of his better judgment during the political mayhem of the 1930s and World War II. Because of his public silence, Hesse’s works continued to be published freely in Germany until he began to feature Jews, as well as Catholic and Protestant writers in bad standing, in his reviews. Newspapers and periodicals throughout Germany suddenly lost interest in his literary comments. In 1935, when he began to publish (in Sweden’s Bonniers Litterära Magasin) surveys of contemporary German literature in which he continued to feature writers who had become silenced undesirables in Germany, he was assailed by the thoroughly Nazified journal Die Neue Literatur as a Jew-loving traitor. A letter written to the journal in self-defense only attracted more invective. While Nazis in Germany maligned Hesse for promoting the cause of Jewry in literature, émigré German Jews in Paris took him to task for abetting National Socialism by allegedly writing for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Hesse’s public statement that he had stopped contributing to the paper when Hitler came to power was ineffectual, and he again lapsed into silence. As a result of this silence, some of his older and politically innocuous works continued to be published throughout the war; but after the war broke out in 1939, rationed paper was suddenly no longer available for his new books.

What had been novelty and abundance in the Casa Camuzzi became primarily recollection and collection in the Casa Bodmer. Hesse’s production of tales, poetry, essays, and reviews slowed. From 1931 to 1945 new books appeared at regular intervals but consisted largely of earlier prose and poetry: Vom Baum des Lebens (1934, From the Tree of Life), Fabulierbuch (1935), Gedenkblätter (1937, Commemorations), Neue Gedichte (1937, New Poems), and Die Gedichte (1942, The Poems). During these fourteen years Hesse added to his fiction only a fairy tale, “Vogel” (1932, Bird), and the last of his novels, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943, The Glass Bead Game; translated as Magister Ludi, 1949). He received the Gottfried Keller Prize of Zurich in 1936.

In 1927 it had first occurred to Hesse that a narrative in which a protagonist experiences the great epochs of history in several reincarnations, a biography both individual and archetypal, might give apt expression to the stability in life’s flux, to the continuity of man’s spiritual-intellectual tradition. Die Morgenlandfahrt expressed Hesse’s unqualified extolment of and commitment to this timeless realm of the soul and the mind. Returning to his originally envisaged series of biographies soon after completion of Die Morgenlandfahrt in the spring of 1931, and almost immediately questioning and modifying his unconditional homage and dedication of 1931, Hesse proceeded slowly and tenaciously through the most challenging of his many literary ventures: Das Glasperlenspiel, which was completed in 1942. The book, purportedly written in the year 2400, comprises an introductory history of the Glass Bead Game; a biography of Josef Knecht, the celebrated Master of the Game in the educational province of Castalia circa 2200; a cluster of his poems; and three of his conjectural autobiographies, official assignments preceding his admission to the Order of the Glass Bead Game.

Hesse’s life and personal problems, interests, and convictions never ceased to be the stuff of his art. In Das Glasperlenspiel, the final installment of his serial projection of the self, autobiography furnished the matter for a world of tomorrow. Das Glasperlenspiel not only highlights a particular period of Hesse’s life but also draws heavily upon all of the preceding years. Young Knecht at the Latin School in Berolfingen, then at Castalia’s elite school in Escholz, receives Hesse’s schooling at Göppingen’s Latin School and at Maulbronn’s exclusive church school. The little town of Waldzell owes its physical profile to Maulbronn; the Benedictine abbey Mariafels is indebted for its history and structural detail to Maulbronn’s former Cistercian monastery; and Castalia and its order are derived from Hesse’s impressions of Maulbronn and its monasticism. Knecht’s ten years of independent study and preparation for admission into the order equate with Hesse’s journeyman years as a writer, from Peter Camenzind to Roβhalde. Knecht treasures seclusion during this period in his career as much as had Hesse; the game becomes the passion for him that writing became for Hesse, and he achieves the fame that Hesse gained before World War I. The three to four years after Knecht’s admission to the order and before his elevation to Castalia’s most exalted magistery correspond to World War I in Hesse’s career. This interim is for Knecht the hiatus of sociopolitical involvement it had been for Hesse: Knecht commits himself to a reconciliation of Castalia and the Catholic Church, just as Hesse had committed himself to the cause of peace. The eight years between Knecht’s investiture and his resignation and departure from Castalia correspond to the period in Hesse’s life from the end of the war to the mid 1930s. These are for Knecht the years of dedicated application, major achievements, severe conflict, and drastic decision, as they had been for Hesse. Knecht now dedicates himself wholeheartedly to the bead game as Hesse had devoted himself to his writing: his seven grand annual games are counterparts to the seven major tales published by Hesse from Demian to Die Morgenlandfahrt.

Success notwithstanding, the polar possibilities of life gradually became for Knecht the crucial and disturbing concern they had become for Hesse. He is caught between isolation and contact, reflection and involvement, and the mind and the body, just as Hesse had been. He, like Hesse, is left convinced that he has become an artist but not a human among humans. He also becomes convinced that Castalia is less than the impeccable ideal he had believed it to be, just as Hesse had lost his unqualified faith in the timeless realm of art and thought courted in Der Steppenwolf and extolled in Die Morgenlandfahrt. The novel is one more of Hesse’s appraisals of the self and life, the last stage of his preoccupation with self-realization, and the climax of his serial quarrel with the real world.

With their protagonists located in widely dispersed times and places, but similarly engrossed in thought and moved by ideals, the novels from Demian to Die Morgenlandfahrt were an unwitting expression of a growing interest and deepening belief in a universal spiritual-intellectual continuum. What is only intimated by this series of separate works and symbolically expressed by the timeless and widespread membership of Haller’s Immortalia and H.H.’s Order of Eastern Wayfarers, is clearly illustrated and deliberately argued by Hesse’s organized cluster of concluding tales with their common protagonist, Knecht, who in several reincarnations experiences some of the major epochs of human history from the Stone Age to a distant future, and who in each reincarnation partakes of an appropriately different but analogous spiritual-intellectual tradition. In Das Glasperlenspiel, Hesse adds a philosophy of history to the psychology of history that he had proposed in the essays in Blick ins Chaos (1920, A Glance into Chaos) to account for what he believed to be the inevitable and imminent cultural collapse of Western Europe.

The final seventeen years of Hesse’s life were relatively uneventful and tranquil. He gave his mornings and afternoons to gardening, painting, and his enormous correspondence, and his evenings to books, music, and writing. He left Montagnola as infrequently as he had in the 1930s; and then only briefly, and never for places beyond Switzerland, not even when awarded the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt am Main and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. The citation for the Nobel Prize read: “for his inspired writings which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style.”

With the collapse of National Socialism in 1945 and Hesse’s Nobel Prize in 1946, German scholars and Germany’s reading public suddenly rediscovered Hesse. For the next decade he enjoyed both political and literary approval as never before. His works could not be printed fast enough, and the swell of books, pamphlets, dissertations, articles, and reviews surpassed by far, in both quality and quantity, all the secondary literature of the preceding four decades. An undesirable German of questionable literary merits had become a man of insight, foresight, and humanity, an heir to the noblest heritage of the German people, a guide and inspiration for his fellow humans, and a worthy addition to Germany’s pantheon of illustrious authors. Contrary views were almost as rare and muted as those of Hesse’s defenders had been during the preceding twelve years.

This reverential acclaim peaked in the mid 1950s, then declined rapidly. By the early 1960s, Hesse was again relegated to the limbo of spent writers. Only a relatively small following of enthusiasts continued to read him, and there was just as sudden and sharp a decrease in scholarly attention. Yet, another wave of interest in Hesse began to spread in Germany in the early 1970s, occasioned in part by America’s Hesse boom of the 1960s. His books again became best-sellers, and he again received intense and appreciative scholarship and was publicly celebrated throughout Germany. But by the early 1980s, despite the vigorous promotion of his publisher, this wave of popularity had receded.

By 1946 only three of Hesse’s major works had been translated into English. Reviews had been politely condescending or by and large superciliously negative, and none of the books found a reading public. When Demian appeared in 1923, it was brushed aside in the Boston Transcript of 14 April as “a nightmare of abnormality, a crazed dream of a paranoiac.” In Bookman (October 1929), Steppenwolf was dismissed as “a peculiarly unappetizing conglomeration of fantasy, philosophy, and moist eroticism.” Death and the Lover (Narziss und Goldmund) elicited polite praise in 1932 but, like the other two books, for decades did little more than gather dust in a few bookshops and warehouses. Little wonder that the English-speaking world raised its eyebrows when Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize. Few knew who Hesse was, and to most of these few he was just another odd and suspect German writer. For the next fifteen years the critics were generally unimpressed, and the reading public apparently had better things to do than to read Hesse, Nobel Prize winner though he was.

Publishers, however, alerted to a potential market by the prize, began to scramble for translations. Magister Ludi (Das Glasperlenspiel) appeared in 1949, Siddhartha in 1951, Gertrude in 1955, The Journey to the East in 1956, The Prodigy (Unterm Rad) in 1957, and Peter Camenzind in 1961. Despite this commercial priming of Hesse’s pump, his works continued to sell relatively poorly until the beginning of the Hesse boom in America during the mid 1960s, when, suddenly, what had long been inconsequential became acutely relevant. Book after book became best-sellers, and their author was a sensation, by far the most popular of foreign writers.

Unprepared for this sudden swell of interest in Hesse, with no backlog of unpublished translations, publishers had to make do with the nine novels available in English by 1961. Hesse’s remaining novels, as well as many short stories, essays, poetry, and letters, did not appear in English translation until the 1970s; fourteen volumes of this material were published from 1970 to 1976. By 1976 the tide that had begun to sweep across America in the mid 1960s and that had peaked in 1970 had spent itself. The deluge was over, but not before almost fifteen million copies of Hesse’s works had been sold within a single decade–a literary phenomenon without precedent in America.

American Hesse scholarship followed in the wake of the general public’s attraction to and the publishers’ financial interest in Hesse after the Nobel Prize. Before 1946 the scholarly field was oblivious to Hesse; in the years following, it gradually picked up momentum with the appearance of half a dozen books and pamphlets, twenty-seven dissertations, and some sixty articles. Scholarly activity accelerated in the mid 1960s and crested in the mid 1970s, a few years after the reading community had already begun to lose interest in Hesse. As many dissertations, more articles, and four times as many books and pamphlets were written from the mid 1970s as in the preceding two decades. This activity then tapered off to become a slow but steady flow. By the turn of the century, American Hesse scholarship was second in quantity only to its German counterpart and had in quality surpassed it.

With the national and international recognition that accompanied the Nobel Prize, Hesse became the dean of German letters, a celebrity feted in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria upon the occasion of his seventieth birthday and on every fifth anniversary thereafter. He was awarded the Wilhelm Raabe Prize of Braunschweig in 1950 and was appointed a member of the Friedensklasse des Ordens Pour le Mérite in 1955. That same year, he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. But Hesse was far less elated by this official and popular acclaim than he was troubled by gradually declining health. Though quite fragile by the late 1950s, he continued to paint and to write.

For the septuagenarian Hesse, the world of memory gradually became the fascination and consolation that the world of the imagination had been at the beginning of his career. Remembrance of things past produced a steady flow of memorials, congratulatory articles, reminiscences, ruminations, and circular letters. Many of these were brought together in such miscellanies as Krieg und Frieden (1946, War and Peace), Späte Prosa (1951, Late Prose), and Beschwörungen (1954, Conjurations). No fiction was written during these final years, and only some fifty poems, some of which appear in Stufen (1961, Stages) and Die späten Gedichte (1963, The Late Poems). The last period of Hesse’s life was also one of literary entrenchment. A lifetime of work was sifted (and occasionally, but not often, revised) and made more readily available in many reprints, in new editions, and particularly in such collections as Traumfährte (1945, Dream Trail), Frühe Prosa (1948, Early Prose), and the Gesammelte Dichtungen (1952, Collected Writings).

This lively publication of old and new material became even livelier following Hesse’s death from leukemia on 9 August 1962. A new edition of his collected works appeared in 1970, another in 1977, other collections in 1982 and 1994; and Sämtliche Werke, the most comprehensive and most scholarly edition of collected works, was published from 2001 to 2005 (twenty volumes). These publications were complemented by more than a dozen volumes of letters and dozens of volumes of miscellanies in the series Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Insel Taschenbuch, and Bibliothek Suhrkamp.

The Nobel Prize briefly reawakened an earlier interest in Hesse in Denmark, France, Holland, and Sweden; America’s Hesse boom had brief cultish reverberations in Denmark, Holland, Sweden, and Finland as well as Germany in the early 1970s; and in the late 1970s the international celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Hesse’s birth occasioned a broad and again brief Hesse renaissance. Worldwide interest in Hesse continued to simmer up to and beyond the turn of the century. The success of the biennial Internationales-Hermann-Hesse-Kolloquium in Calw (1977 - ) is reflective of this continued interest. The eleventh meeting of the colloquium in May 2002 attracted the usual crowd of committed laymen and scholars. This continued active interest in Hesse was confirmed in 2002 by an impressive spurt of republications and new publications by and about Hesse and by the plethora of varied worldwide celebrations upon the occasion of the 125th anniversary of his birth.

Hermann Hesse excelled in the depiction of personal crisis and private agony; such literature seems to be particularly popular during periods of cultural crisis, which accounts by and large for Hesse’s idolization in Germany immediately after two devastating wars no less than for his similar idolization in America during the politically and socially chaotic 1960s and 1970s. Similar swells of popularity at future times are not unthinkable. Hesse’s fortunes will probably continue to rise and fall with the times, and this ebb and flow is likely to secure his place in both German and world literature.

Letters

Briefe (Berlin & Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951; expanded editions, 1959, 1964); expanded further as Ausgewählte Briefe (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1974);

Ein Handvoll Briefe (Zurich: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1951);

Hermann Hesse/Romain Roland: Briefe (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1954);

Kindheit und Fugend vor Neunzehnhundert: Hermann Hesse in Briefen und Lebenszeugnissen, 2 volumes, edited by Ninon Hesse and Gerhard Kirchhoff (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966, 1978);

Hermann Hesse/Thomas Mann: Briefwechsel, edited by Anni Carlsson (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968; expanded edition, 1999);

Hermann Hesse/Peter Suhrkamp: Briefwechsel, edited by Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969);

Hermann Hesse/Helene Voigt-Diederichs: Zwei Autorenporträts in Briefen, edited by Bernhard Zeller (Düsseldorf & Cologne: Diederichs, 1971);

Hermann Hesse/Karl Kerényi: Briefwechsel aus der Nähe, edited by Magda Kerényi (Munich & Vienna: Langen-Müller, 1972);

Gesammelte Briefe, 4 volumes, edited by Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973, 1979, 1982, 1986);

Briefe an Freunde: Rundbriefe 1946-1962, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Hermann Hesse/R. J. Humm: Briefwechsel, edited by Michels and Ursula Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977);

Christian Wagner/Hermann Hesse: Ein Briefwechsel, edited by Friedrich Pfäfflin (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Dr. Cantz’sche Druckerei, 1977);

Herman Hesse/Heinrich Wiegand: Briefwechsel, edited by Klaus Pezold (Berlin & Weimar: Aufbau, 1978);

Der kuriose Dichter Hans Morgenthaler: Briefwechsel mit Ernst Morgenthaler und Hermann Hesse, edited by Roger Perret (Basel: Lenos, 1983);

Hermann Hesse/Hans Sturzenegger: Briefwechsel, edited by Kurt Bächtold (Schaffhausen: Meili, 1984);

Die Antwort bist du selbst: Briefe an junge Menschen, edited by Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2000);

Ninon Hesse: Lieber, lieber Vogel: Briefe an Hermann Hesse, edited by Gisela Kleine (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000);

Stufen des Lebens: Briefe, edited by Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2002);

Hermann Hesse: In Calw daheim: Briefwechsel und Begegnungen mit Calwer Bürgern und Freunden der Schwarzwald Stadt, edited by Siegfried Greiner (Frankfurt am Main: R. G. Fischer, 2002);

Hermann Hesse: Briefwechsel 1921-1927 mit Hugo Bell und Emmy Bell-Hennings, edited by Bärbel Reetz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).

Bibliographies

Horst Kliemann and Karl H. Silomon, Hermann Hesse: Eine Bibliographische Studie (Frankfurt am Main: Bauersche Giesserei, 1947);

Martin Pfeifer, Hermann Hesse: Bibliographie der im Gebiet der DDR seit 1945 erschienenen Schriften (Leipzig: VEB, 1955);

Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse and His Critics: The Criticism and Bibliography of Half a Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958);

Helmut Waibler, Hermann Hesse: Eine Bibliographie (Bern & Munich: Francke, 1962);

Hermann Hesse: Ein Gesamtverzeichnis seines Werkes im Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962);

Otto Bareiss, Hermann Hesse: Eine Bibliographie der Werkeüber Hermann Hesse, 2 volumes (Basel: Maier-Bader, 1962-1964);

Hans W. Bentz, Hermann Hesse in Übersetzungen (Frankfurt am Main: H. W. Bentz, 1965);

Pfeifer, Hermann-Hesse-Bibliographie: Primär- und Sekundär-schriftum in Auswahl (Berlin: Schmidt, 1973);

Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography, 2 volumes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977);

Hesse-Magazin: Bücher, Termine, Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen im Hesse-Jahr 2002 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Insel, 2002);

Michael Limberg, Hermann-Hesse-Literatur, 9. Jahrgang 2002 (Stuttgart: Staatsanzeiger Verlag, 2002).

Biographies

Hugo Ball, Hermann Hesse: Sein Leben und sein Werk (Berlin: Fischer, 1927; revised edition, Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1947);

Edmund Gnefkow, Hermann Hesse, Biographie (Freiburg im Breisgau: G. Kirchhoff, 1952);

Bernhart Zeller, ed., Hermann Hesse: Eine Chronik in Bildern (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1960);

Zeller, Hermann Hesse in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963); translated by Mark Hallebone as Portrait of Hesse: An Illustrated Biography (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971);

Volker Michels, ed., Hermann Hesse: A Pictorial Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975);

W. Staudenmeyer, Hermann Hesse und Calw (Calw: Kreissparkasse Calw, 1977);

Michels, ed., Hermann Hesse: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979);

Gisela Kleine, Ninon und Hermann Hesse: Leben als Dialog (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1982);

Herbert Schnierle-Lutz, Literaturreisen auf den Spuren Hermann Hesses von Calw nach Montagnola (Stuttgart & Dresden: Klett, 1991);

Uli Rothfuss, Hermann Hesse privat: In Texten, Bildern und Dokumenten (Berlin: edition q, 1992);

Thomas Feitknecht, Hermann Hesse in Bern (Bern: Hans Huber, 1997);

Schnierle-Lutz, ed., Hermann Hesse: Schauplätze sienes Lebens (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1997);

Alois Prinz, “Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne”: Die Lebensgeschichte Hermann Hesses (Weinberg & Basel: Belz, 2000);

Wilfried Setzler, Hesse in Tübingen (Tübingen: Silberberg, 2002);

Michael Limberg, Hermann Hesse: Leben Werk Wirkung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).

References

Ursula Apel, ed., Hermann Hesse: Personen und Schlüsselfiguren in seinem Leben, 2 volumes (Munich & London: Saur, 1989, supplement, 1993);

Winifred Babcock, Jung, Hesse, Harold (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1983);

Jan Badewien and Hans-George Schmidt, eds., Hermann Hesse: Dichter der Suchenden (Karlsruhe: Herrenalber Forum, Band 36, 2003);

Günter Baumann, Der archetypische Heilsweg: Hermann Hesse, C. G. Jung und die Weltreligionen (Rheinfelden: Schäuble, 1990);

Baumann, Hermann Hesse: Dichter und Weiser (Berlin: Schäuble, 1997);

Mark Boulby, Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1967);

Friedrich Bran and Martin Pfeifer, eds., Begegnungen mit Hermann Hesse (Bad Liebenzell: Gengenbach, 1984);

Bran and Pfeifer, eds., Hermann Hesse und die Religion (Bad Liebenzell: Gengenbach, 1990);

Bran and Pfeifer, eds., Hermann Hesse Glasperlenspiel (Bad Liebenzell: Gegenbach, 1987);

Bran and Pfeifer, eds., Wege zu Hermann Hesse: Dichtung, Musik, Malerei, Film (Bad Liebenzell: Gengenbach, 1989);

Kyung Yang Cheong, Mystische Elemente aus West und Ost im Werk Hermann Hesses (Frankfurt am Main & Bern: Lang, 1991);

Ingo Cornils and Osman Durrani, eds., Hermann Hesse Today / Hermann Hesse Heute (Amsterdam & New York: Amsterdam Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik, 2005);

Eugen Drewermann, Das Individuelle gegen des Normierte verteidigen. Zwei Aufsätze zu Hermann Hesse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995);

Helga Esselborn-Krumbiegel, Hermann Hesse: “Der Steppenwolf” (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985);

Robert Farquharson, An Outline of the Works of Hermann Hesse (Toronto: Forum House, 1973);

Kurt J. Fickert, Hermann Hesse’s Quest: The Evolution of the “Dichter” Figure in His Work (Fredericton, N.B.: York Press, 1978);

G. W Field, Hermann Hesse (New York: Twayne, 1970);

Ralph Freedman, Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis (London: Cap, 1979);

Güntner Gottschalk, Hesse-Lyrik-Konkordanz: Mit Wortindex und Wortfrequennzlisten (Munich, London & New York: K. G. Saur, 1987);

Siegfried Greiner, Hermann Hesse: Jugend in Calw (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1981);

Richard C. Helt, A Poet or Nothing at All: The Tübingen and Basel Years of Hermann Hesse (Providence, R.I. & Oxford: Berghahn, 1996);

Adrian Hsia, Hermann Hesse und China (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974);

Walter Jahnke, Hermann Hesse: Demian: Ein Erlesener Roman (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1984);

Walter Jens and Hans Küng, eds. Anwälte der Humanität: Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll (Munich: Kindler, 1989);

Claudia Karstedt, Die Entwicklung des Frauenbildes bei Hermann Hesse (Bern & Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1983);

Andreas Kiryakakis, The Idea of Heimat in the Works of Hermann Hesse (New York & Bern: Lang, 1988);

Beate Kory, Hermann Hesses Beziehung zur Tiefenpsychologie: Traumliterarische Projekte (Hamburg: Kovac, 2003);

Annette Kym, Hermann Hesses Rolle als Kritiker: Eine Analyse seiner Buchbesprechungen in März, Vivos Voco, und Bonniers Litterära Magasin (Bern & Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1984);

Birgit Lahann, Hermann Hesse: Dichter für die Jugend der Welt: Ein Lebensbild (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002);

Judith Lieberman, ed., Hermann Hesse: A Collection of Criticism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977);

Michael Limberg, ed., Hermann Hesse in seinen Briefen (Bad Liebenzell: Gengenbach, 1994);

Limberg, ed., Kunst als Therapie: Hermann Hesse und die Psychoanalyse (Bad Liebenzell: Gengenbach, 1997);

Limberg, ed., Zwischen Eigen-Sinn und Anpassung (Bad Liebenzell: Gengenbach, 1999);

Hans Jürg Lüthi, Hermann Hesse: Natur und Geist (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1970);

Carlee Marrer-Tising, The Reception of Hermann Hesse by the Youth in the United States (Bern & Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1982);

Volker Michels, ed., Materialen zu Hermann Hesses “Demian,” 2 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, 1997);

Michels, ed., Materialen zu Hermann Hesses “Siddhartha”, 2 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975, 1976);

Michels, ed., Materialen zu Hermann Hesses “Das Glasperlenspiel,” 2 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973, 1974);

Michels, ed., Materialen zu Hermann Hesses “Der Steppenwolf” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972);

Michels, ed., Über Hermann Hesse, 2 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976-1977);

Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Between the Perils of Politics and the Allure of the Orient (New York: Peter Lang, 2003);

Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978);

Mileck, Herman Hesse: Life, Work, and Criticism (Fredericton, N.B.: York Press, 1984);

Anna Otten, ed., Hesse Companion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977);

Georg Patzer, Hermann Hesse: Unterm Rad (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004);

Martin Pfeifer, ed., Hermann Hesse und die Politik (Bad Liebenzell: Gengenbach, 1992);

Pfeifer, ed., Hermann Hesses weltweite Wirkung: Internationale Rezeptionsgeschichte, 3 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977-1991);

Pfeifer, ed., Hesse Kommentar zu samtlichen Werken (Munich: Winkler, 1980; revised and expanded edition, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990);

Herbert W. Reinchert, The Impact of Nietzsche on Hermann Hesse (Mount Pleasant, Mich.: Enigma Press, 1972);

Edmund Remys, Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel: A Concealed Defence of the Mother World (Bern & Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1983);

David G. Richards, Exploring the Divided Self: Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” and Its Critics (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996);

Richards, The Hero’s Quest for the Self: An Archetypal Approach to Hesse’s “Demian” and Other Novels (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987);

Ernest Rose, Faith from the Abyss: Hermann Hesse’s Way from Romanticism to Modernity (New York: New York University Press, 1965);

Hans Jürgen Schmelzer, Auf der Fährte des Steppenwolfs: Hermann Hesses Herkunft, Leben und Werk (Stuttgart: Hohenheim, 2002);

Klaus von Seckendorff, Hermann Hesses propagandische Prosa: Selbstzerstörerische Entfaltung als Botschaft in seinen Romanem vom Demian bis zum Steppenwolf (Bonn: Bouvier, 1982);

Eugene L. Steltzig, Hermann Hesse’s Fictions of the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988);

Lewis W. Tusken, Understanding Hermann Hesse: The Man, His Myth, His Metaphor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998);

Siegfried Unseld, Begegnungen mit Hermann Hesse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975);

Unseld, Hermann Hesse: Werk und Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985);

Klaus Walter, Hermann Hesse (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 2002);

Kurt Weibel, Hermann Hesse und die deutsche Romantik (Winterthur: Keller, 1954);

Uwe Wolff, Hermann Hesse: Demian–Die Botschaft vom Selbst (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979);

Helmut W. Ziefle, Hermann Hesse und das Christentum (Wuppertal & Zurich: Brockhaus, 1994);

Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965);

Ziolkowski, Der Schriftsteller Hermann Hesse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979);

Ziolkowski, ed., Hesse: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973).

Papers

Hermann Hesse’s extensive Nachlaβ (literary remains) is housed in the Hermann-Hesse-Archiv of the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. Significant additional Hesseana is housed in the Hermann-Hesse-Museum in Calw and in the Hermann-Hesse-Höri-Museum in Gaienhofen, Germany. Some seventeen thousand letters and postcards sent to Hesse are located in the Hermann-Hesse-Briefarchiv in the Schweizerische Landesbibliothek, Bern, Switzerland.

Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature, Part 2