Man of mystery and mysticism

Nobody has ever quite known what to do with the German-language novelist Hermann Hesse. Born in 1877 and living until 1962, he rather deliberately refused to experience most of the traumatic events of his culture.

His tiny home town was Calw, in the Black Forest, and he lived mostly in backwaters, and latterly for decades in Switzerland. He only visited Berlin once, and hated it. His work strenuously avoided making any comment on the larger events of the time, insisting on a kind of neutrality. Some readers took him for a mystic Nazi; others for an enemy of German culture; others still for a communist. He was a substantial bestseller in his lifetime, though many more elegant writers, such as the Austrian Robert Musil, thought him simply terrible. After his death, his fame spread beyond the German-speaking world, and the LSD guru Timothy Leary introduced him to America as the author of Steppenwolf, an anticipation of the psychedelic experience and advocate of dropping out. What on earth to make of him?

Hesse was, it seems to me, a perfect example of the autodidact. His childhood was disturbing in the extreme. His family were strict Pietists — his mother had important missionary experience in India. In this moral atmosphere, debate about what was wrong with Hermann started early. His parents were the sort who saw disaster wherever they looked. When they moved house, Marie Hesse said perfectly seriously that their parrot had been made so melancholy that it had started to suffer seizures. Her son was observed with the same beady eye for possible catastrophe. A number of schools were tried. At 15, Hermann ran away with a stolen revolver, threatening suicide. (Promises of suicide went on being made by Hesse throughout his life.) A mental asylum was found. Hesse’s father wrote a number of letters to potential patrons, explaining that his son was suffering from ‘moral insanity’.