Soul of the Age Read Free

dissatisfaction manifested itself in the increasingly frequent trips that took him away from Gaienhofen for weeks at a time—to the alternative community of “nature healers” at Monte Verità near Ascona (1907), for “nude rock climbing” on the Walensee (1910), on lecture trips through Germany and Austria, and annual tours to Italy with various friends. His nomadic urge was not satisfied by these relatively short excursions. In September 1911—barely a month after the birth of his third son—Hesse embarked on the North German Lloyd steamer Prinz Eitel Friedrich on a three-month voyage to the East with the painter Hans Sturzenegger. Hesse imagined this trip as an archetypal return to family origins and to the mysteries of the Orient represented by his “Grosspapa” Gundert. In fact, though he climbed the highest mountain in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), explored Singapore, and visited Sumatra, Hesse never set foot on the subcontinent itself or the Malabar Coast where his grandfather and both his parents had been active. And, as he admitted in a letter to his friend Conrad Haussmann (November 1911), he did not find a people of paradise but only “the poor remnants of an ancient paradisiacal people, whom the West is corrupting and devouring.” Only the Chinese won his admiration.
    Immediately after his return to Europe, Hesse gave up the house and his life in Gaienhofen and moved his family back to Switzerland, where they lived until April 1919 on the outskirts of Bern. Their house, owned until his death by the painter Albert Welti, provided the setting for Hesse’s next work, the artist-novel Rosshalde (1914), which eerily foreshadowed the circumstances of the disintegration of Hesse’s own marriage. The other major work emerging from these years before World War I comprised the three stories featuring Knulp (1915), whose light-hearted surface masks the underlying quandary of Hesse’s early heroes, who long for freedom while they are constrained by the bonds of society and its responsibilities.
    World War I shattered the last vestiges of the Gaienhofen idyll. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Germany and France, Hesse was appalled by the war and the militaristic mentality that had permeated Europe. At the same time, his loyalty to the country of his birth produced a conspicuous ambivalence in the widely circulated essays (collected in the volume If the War Goes On  …) in which he exhorted his countrymen to pacifism and to a cosmopolitan humanism transcending all crude nationalistic fervor—most conspicuously in an essay of November 1914 that borrowed as its title the famous words from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!” ( “O Friends, not these sounds!” ). Although his efforts attracted the attention of a few like-minded Europeans—notably Romain Rolland in France—his essays antagonized many former friends and readers, who denounced him as “a viper nourished at the breast” of an unsuspecting audience. The most vivid example was the “Cologne Calumny” of 1915, in which Hesse was attacked as a draft-dodger hiding out in Switzerland to avoid his patriotic duty. (See the letter “Pro Domo” of November 1, 1915.) In fact, Hesse dedicated himself selflessly to German affairs. Turned down for active service for medical reasons (poor eyesight), Hesse put himself at the disposal of the German Embassy in Bern, where he worked for a relief agency for German prisoners of war, editing two newspapers as well as a series of twenty-two volumes for German prisoners of war in France, England, Russia, and Italy.
    Then in 1916, while Hesse was under the strain of his relief work as well as the attacks in the German press, his father died, and Mia succumbed to a gradually worsening schizophrenia that eventually necessitated her institutionalization. As a result of these pressures Hesse