Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, a small town on the edge of the Black Forest, into a devout Pietist household steeped in missionary work and in a library of world literature. The theological seminary at Maulbronn was meant to set him on the path to the ministry; instead he fled it within a year, and an adolescence of rebellion and despair followed. An apprenticeship in a Tübingen bookshop gave him the discipline of self-education, and the success of Peter Camenzind in 1904 allowed him to live by his pen.

The First World War broke the settled life he had made on Lake Constance. Living in Switzerland, he opposed the nationalist fervour of the day, was attacked for it in the German press, and underwent psychotherapy with a follower of Carl Jung. Out of that crisis came Demian (1919), published under a pseudonym, and the books on which his reputation rests: Siddhartha, with its Indian setting; Steppenwolf, a fractured portrait of a man at odds with bourgeois culture and with himself; Narcissus and Goldmund; and finally The Glass Bead Game, a utopian novel of an intellectual order. Across them runs one question — how a person might become fully themselves — pursued through the tension between spirit and the senses, solitude and community, Western thought and Eastern wisdom.

Hesse settled in Montagnola in Ticino in 1919 and took Swiss citizenship in 1924. The Glass Bead Game appeared in Zurich in 1943, while his work was out of favour in Nazi Germany, and the Nobel Prize followed in 1946. He spent his last years in Montagnola, writing letters, essays and poems, and died there in 1962. A decade later his novels found an unexpected second life among young readers in America and beyond, a readership that has never quite dispersed.