{"id":113555,"date":"2018-07-02T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=113555"},"modified":"2018-06-28T18:38:54","modified_gmt":"2018-06-28T17:38:54","slug":"hermann-hesse-2-jul-1877-9-aug-1962-revolt-and-enlightenment-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/hermann-hesse-2-jul-1877-9-aug-1962-revolt-and-enlightenment-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Hermann Hesse (2 Jul 1877 \u2013 9 Aug 1962): Revolt and Enlightenment"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Herman Hesse
Credit: Poetry Verse<\/p><\/div>\n

Hermann Hesse was born into a German Protestant missionary family which had worked particularly in India.\u00a0 His mother was born in India, and his maternal grandfather had translated Christian scriptures into\u00a0 Indian languages and later in his life developed a German- Indian languages dictionary.\u00a0 His father had also been a Protestant missionary in India, but by the time Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 had returned to Germany to the Black Forest area where he founded a small publishing house to publish Protestant books.\u00a0 Hermann’s father thought that he should follow the pattern of both sides of his family, become a Protestant minister and perhaps go and preach in Asia.<\/p>\n

However, in a theme which he takes up in his main novels, he revolted early against family authority, and so his father sent him away to a boarding school.\u00a0 In fact, he went to several different boarding schools where he remained in revolt against school authority. He finally finished secondary school and started university. However German universities of his time were as authority-bound as were secondary schools, and he quickly dropped out.<\/p>\n

He first thought of becoming a painter and then decided to be a novelist while earning his living in odd jobs, his father having cut off all financial support.\u00a0 In the years prior to the First World War, he wrote a number of novels in the romantic style of the time.\u00a0 He started to earn money from his writing and editing.\u00a0 In 1911, he went to India but not to convert Indians to Christianity but to learn about Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese philosophy. Hesse’s Indian experience set the stage for his awareness that true freedom must be an inner one.<\/p>\n

The outbreak of the First World War had a heavy negative impact on Hermann Hesse, a pacifist who believed that an avenue to peace was to build bridges between cultures.\u00a0 As he was already living in Bern, Switzerland, he refused to return to Germany for war service.\u00a0\u00a0 He lost his earlier popularity among German readers who were, for the most part, caught up in the war spirit.\u00a0 He was denounced in the press as”a viper nourished at the breast of an unsuspecting audience.”\u00a0\u00a0 By 1916, his marriage and family fell apart, and he was under great mental strain, his wife confined to a mental institution and his son seriously ill.<\/p>\n

Thus, in 1916-1917 he undertook a psychoanalysis supervised by C.G. Jung. Through Jungian psychoanalysis he developed the idea of a correspondence between an inner state of being and its expression in the outer world.\u00a0 The war was not only raging on the battlefield but also within the spirit of a generation whose values had collapsed.\u00a0 He wrote Demian <\/em>in 1917. His hero says “The world wants to renew itself.\u00a0 There is a smell of death in the air.\u00a0 Nothing can be born without first dying”. Demian dies on a Flanders battlefield unable to develop a new system of values.\u00a0 The book was taken up by youth in the years following the end of the war when many came to wonder if the outcome was worth the sacrifices.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Rebellion against established structures, the quest for personal values and a religious impulse are all elements in Siddhartha,<\/em> published in 1922, perhaps his most widely-read book.\u00a0 Hesse reworks the early quest of the Buddha into a life-long process.\u00a0 In the novel, Siddhartha, son of a Brahman, has been brought up a faithful observer of his father’s religion.\u00a0 At 18, deciding that he cannot find true fulfillment in conventional Hinduism, he sets out in search of an even more austere religion.\u00a0 Three years of asceticism brings him to the realization that extreme and exclusive concentration on the spirit cuts him off from the world of nature and thus takes him even further from the harmony he seeks.<\/p>\n

In a reversal, he devotes himself for 20 years to a life of the senses, becoming a successful merchant and finding sensual love.\u00a0 However, he understands that a life of matter has brought him no closer to tranquility.\u00a0 Thus he abandons his wife and his possessions. He spends 20 years as a ferryman on a river.\u00a0 He listens to the whisperings of the water and in the company of a sage, he achieves a harmony of being. As Hesse writes “From that hour, Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny.\u00a0 There shone on his face the serenity of knowledge of one who is no longer confronted with the conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things.”<\/p>\n

It is not clear that Hesse found the harmony of enlightenment in his own life.\u00a0 In his last major work The Glass Bead Game<\/em> (1943) he describes what might be an ideal Buddhist monastery devoted to the discovery, preservation and dissemination of knowledge.\u00a0 The chief monk leaves and goes out into the world where he quickly dies.\u00a0 Hesse stresses his faith in a society that treasures the traditions and culture of the past while remaining open to the future.\u00a0 This is the Middle Way, the core value of the Buddhist view of Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Ren\u00e9 Wadlow is a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation\u2019s Task Force on the Middle East, president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens, and <\/em>editor of <\/em>Transnational Perspectives. He is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebellion against established structures, the quest for personal values and a religious impulse are all elements in Siddhartha, published in 1922, perhaps his most widely-read book. It is not clear that Hesse found the harmony of enlightenment in his own life. In his last major work The Glass Bead Game (1943) he describes what might be an ideal Buddhist monastery devoted to the discovery, preservation and dissemination of knowledge. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":94694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[214],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biographies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}