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Hermann Hesse As Ambivalent Modernist Theodore Jackson Washington University in St Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) January 2010 Hermann Hesse as Ambivalent Modernist Theodore Jackson Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Jackson, Theodore, "Hermann Hesse as Ambivalent Modernist" (2010). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 167. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/167 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Dissertation Examination Committee: Lutz Koepnick, Chair Matt Erlin Paul Michael Lützeler Stamos Metzidakis Richard Ruland Stephan Schindler HERMANN HESSE AS AMBIVALENT MODERNIST by Theodore Saul Jackson A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2010 Saint Louis, Missouri copyright by Theodore Saul Jackson 2010 Acknowledgements I am indebted to the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures as well as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for providing funding for this project in the form of a dissertation fellowship for the 2009–2010 school year, and for continuous funding throughout my graduate career. Special thanks are in order for my advisor, Lutz Koepnick, and the rest of my research advisory committee for reading drafts and providing valuable feedback during the writing process. I would also like to thank the German-American Fulbright Commission for providing me with a year in which I could complete valuable research on Hesse’s life and on the organizations of the German youth movement. My heartfelt thanks are due to Volker Michels, Hesse’s editor at Suhrkamp, for welcoming me into his home for an afternoon of lively discussion about my project and his generous gift of books pertinent to my work. ii for everyone who believed this was possible iii Contents Acknowledgements . ii Introduction . 2 1 Hesse and the European Tradition of Philosophical and Literary Walking . 17 2 The “Hesse before Hesse”: The Constellation of Movement and Youth Culture in Peter Camenzind, Unterm Rad and Knulp ................................. 72 3 Der Steppenwolf : Hesse’s Ambiguously Modern Autobiography . 129 4 Die Morgenlandfahrt and Das Glasperlenspiel: Two Paths to Individuation . 185 Concluding Remarks . 216 Works Cited . 221 1 Introduction Genesis When I began this project, I was primarily interested in finding out what kind of literature, if any, was associated with German youth groups around the turn of the century. These groups perplexed me. Though often politically conservative, they seemed in other ways completely liberal by my twentieth-century American standards. Instead of discovering literature loved by the Wandervogel movement, I found an author who was, throughout his life and work, enamored of and loyal to the most enduring ideals of the Wandervogel: the experience and respect for nature, finding time for self-renewal, and finding oneself. These values are partly responsible for the blossoming popularity Hesse’s works enjoyed when they began to be read on a widespread basis by American youth in the 1960s and 1970s, for these adolescents and young adults found themselves many times in the same situations as those of the Wandervogel: old enough to make their own decisions but forced to carry out the decisions of their parents. Though the young Hans of Hesse’s second novel, Unterm Rad, was practically forced into a regional seminary and then relegated to an apprenticeship in a clockworks shop when his theological studies failed, he felt 2 himself caught under the weight of his parents and teachers as many of the generation that was “born to be wild” did.1 As Ingo Cornils notes in the introduction to the recent Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, the generation of Americans who ravenously consumed Hesse’s work “are reaching retirement age.” Furthermore, “their idealism has become jaded, their legacy uncertain” (1). Since the years of the “Hesse Boom” as Joseph Mileck put it in 1978, scholarly interest in Hesse has declined dramatically although his books remain popular. My interest in Hesse does not stem from his popular success in the United States or the lack thereof. Instead, I became interested in Hesse as an author who thoroughly examined the communal aspects of contemporary life (that is, that time in which he lived) and its state and process of ongoing technological development. Hesse constantly questioned the implications of the increasing influence of technology on the lives of individuals. While other authors writing at the same time as Hesse embrace these quickly-developing technologies, Hesse depicted in his first 1Theodore Ziolkowski’s essay, “Saint Hesse Among the Hippies,” outlines some reasons why American youth might be drawn to Hesse. In general, he rejects more traditional forms of academic criticism of Hesse’s works, at least as far as they provide explanation for Hesse’s success. He asserts that “it is . certain that the sneering critics of the literary Establishment reveal little but their own provincialism in the failure to understand the forces that move the post-modern generation and the reasons for Hesse’s appeal” (23). Ziolkowski posits that “[y]outh respects individualists who have come to terms with themselves despite the turmoil and confusion of the world: men, in the idiom of the day, who do their own thing without selling out to the Establishment” (20). Hesse, of course, is one of these individualists “who embedded in his life and works the rejection of a dehumanizing technological society for the sake of personally meaningful values” (20–21). He also suggests that Hesse might serve as a link between political action and the growing practice of meditation. He cites one student who suggests that “meditation in Hesse leads to action and commitment” (23). 3 two novels, Peter Camenzind and Unterm Rad, the lives of individuals who were, in fact, not helped by technology but in some cases, done injustice by it. What soothes the stress of these books’ protagonists, rather, is usually akin to a walk in the woods or an afternoon of fishing. These depictions, though, are not cheaply escapist; they offer, as all of Hesse’s novels do, examples of psychological rejuvenation from the stresses of modern life. As Hesse’s writing changes over the years, the theme of walking and wandering takes on an increasingly metaphorical role. In the early novels, especially Unterm Rad, walking is directly representative of the rebellion that Hesse’s protagonists feel towards the injustices done to them by society, school, and parents. The bourgeois, indoor world of the novel focuses on the improvement of the individual through traditional academics; readiness for the seminary entrance exam will secure the young Hans a respected position in society as a pastor. This preparation is grueling, though, and must be undertaken at the expense of Hans’s free time spent outdoors doing activities like wandering freely. Eventually, Hans steals back what has been taken from him by fleeing school. The first two chapters of this dissertation focus on aspects of walking and wandering as a physical antidote to the difficulties of the protagonists’ lives. The first chapter examines the literary roots of wandering in Rousseau and Nietzsche while the second is a more direct examination of wandering in Hesse’s early novels. By Der Steppenwolf (examined in the third chapter), wandering no longer 4 stands in for the purely physical freedom of being able to change locations as the protagonist sees fit. Quite to the contrary, Harry Haller has chosen to make his life as an academic and freely spends large amounts of time indoors, in his “nest” surrounded by books, manuscripts, and empty wine bottles. The problem now is that Haller has not spent enough time away from books to feel like he can interact with the rest of the world. Moreover, he is troubled by what he perceives as his failed ability to be neither fully man nor fully wolf. In the case of this novel, it is at first Haller’s seemingly aimless walking that brings him to the location where he can transcend the man/wolf dichotomy—first, to a bar where he meets his alter ego, Hermine, and then to the Magic Theatre. Hermine teaches Haller to dance, which is for him a key to interacting with other individuals. Walking later allows Haller to navigate the hallways of the Magic Theatre. The various doors in the Theatre are labelled with fantasies that Haller can experience by merely walking through them. Walking thus gives him the ability to tease out the intricacies of this interior journey in a somewhat more orderly fashion than having to face a deluge of emotions all at once. In the fourth chapter I show that the role walking plays in Die Morgenlandfahrt and Das Glasperlenspiel is even more removed from Hesse’s original method of using wandering to signify a reclamation of freedom. Yet, a reclamation of freedom is exactly what Josef Knecht achieves when he leaves the community of glass bead game players in order to become a private tutor. Walking 5 in Hesse’s final novel represents not his escape from a stifling intellectual environment (such as that depicted in Unterm Rad in which the students have no academic freedom), but rather an intellectual environment in which theory sees itself as superior to practice and where academic freedom is seemingly unending. Knecht, having spent his entire career and personal life in the perfection of a theoretical game, though, thirsts for experience in and of the real world.
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