Soul of the Age Read Free Page A

decided, toward the end of that year, to put himself in the care of Dr. Josef B. Lang, a young disciple of C. G. Jung, in a sanatorium near Lucerne. The experience of psychoanalysis, which extended through some sixty sessions into 1917 and led to Hesse’s acquaintance with Jung himself, struck Hesse less as a revelation than as a systematized confirmation of insights he had gleaned from the great works of literature. (He analyzed his attitude carefully in several essays collected in the volume My Belief: Essays on Life and Art. ) Above all, Hesse learned through psychoanalysis to rise above the conventional notions of right and wrong that had oppressed him ever since his Pietist childhood and to acknowledge the legitimacy of all human impulses. Instead of forcing his thoughts and emotions into patterns prescribed by society, he learned to accept what he called the “chaos” of his own consciousness, where the boundary between good and evil did not seem so clearly defined as in Judeo-Christian ethics. The immediate product of this psychic release was the novel Demian, which Hesse wrote in a few weeks late in 1917. The radical ethical ideas of the novel were formulated more systematically in his two essays on Dostoevsky included in the volume In Sight of Chaos (1920). Lang remained Hesse’s friend until his death in 1945 and crops up in Hesse’s letters and narratives under the pseudonyms “Longus” and “Pistorius.”
    Demian (1919) was published shortly after the war under the pseudonym of its narrator-hero, Emil Sinclair, because Hesse did not wish to be identified with what he now called his “sentimental-bourgeois” works. The deception was so effective that the book received the Fontane Prize for first novels. When the deception was exposed Hesse returned the prize—but not before he had succeeded in winning a new audience with his new authorial persona. By the time the novel appeared Hesse had made a radical break with his own past. In October 1918, just two weeks before the end of the war, he was finally forced to put Mia in a mental hospital. The following April, having wound up his affairs in Bern, he left his sons in the care of friends and moved to southern Switzerland—in order, as he wrote a correspondent that summer, “to survive and heal my private collapse and to attempt on a small scale what Germany must accomplish on a large scale: to accept what has happened, not to shove the guilt onto others, but to swallow it and say yes to destiny.” Here in the Casa Camuzzi, a Baroque hunting lodge in the village of Montagnola, above Lugano, where Hesse was to spend the rest of his life, he experienced what he later regarded as the happiest and most productive year of his life. In a surge of activity he wrote several important essays, including “Zarathustra’s Return” (an appeal to German youth, calling for spiritual rebirth and published under the pseudonym of Emil Sinclair), two of his finest novellas— Klingsor’s Last Summer and Klein and Wagner —and began the novel Siddhartha. In the company of the artists who now constituted his main society—Louis Moilliet, Karl Hofer, Hans Purrmann, Cuno Amiet, and others—he even toyed with the idea of becoming a painter. In any case, watercolor painting became an increasingly important avocation and, indeed, a significant source of income in the twenties (see the letter to Cuno Amiet of January 5, 1919), when the inflation of the German mark forced Hesse for several years, despite the success of his writings, to live from hand to mouth.
    The year that followed the liberating euphoria of 1919 was “probably the most unproductive of my life, and thus the saddest,” Hesse noted in his “Diary of 1920.” In the lull that followed the frenzy of creativity he filled his time with other and more routine activities. With the monthly journal Vivos Voco, which he founded and