Soul of the Age Read Free Page B

coedited with Richard Woltereck from 1919 until 1921, Hesse continued the cultural criticism that had occupied him during the war, attacking among other things the resurgent anti-Semitism that, to his dismay, he noted in postwar Germany. The creative lull that interrupted the progress of his novel Siddhartha was finally overcome in 1921 by two new factors: his growing attachment to the singer Ruth Wenger, and a series of therapeutic interviews with C. G. Jung, whom Hesse visited in Küsnacht. In 1922 Siddhartha was completed and published. In early 1924 Hesse was awarded the Swiss citizenship for which he had applied the preceding summer (see his letter of July 26, 1923)—technically, for a restoration of citizenship he had given up as a child—on the grounds that his three sons were Swiss and that the experience of the recent war had taught him that his loyalties lay with his elective country. His divorce from his first wife was granted in the summer of 1923, freeing him for marriage to Ruth Wenger, which took place—despite a growing reluctance evident in the letters of 1922 and 1923—in January of 1924.
    While Ruth had been the muse of such works as Klingsor’s Last Summer, Siddhartha, and the charming fantasy Pictor’s Metamorphoses, Hesse’s marriage to the much younger woman seemed misbegotten from the start. Although Hesse was content to spend his winters in Basel and then in Zurich, where Ruth pursued her career and her social activities, his regular return to Montagnola meant long periods of separation, leading in 1927 to a second divorce. During this period, despite all the complaints in his letters about his life of hermitlike solitude, Hesse was actually engaged in a frenzy of activity. His annual trips (since 1923) to the spa at Baden for the treatment of his sciatica (where he always stayed at the hotel Verenahof) and a lecture tour to Germany generated two of his most brilliantly ironic autobiographical accounts, At the Spa (1925) and The Journey to Nuremberg (1927). He wrote a number of essays, edited works of his favorite writers—Jean Paul, Novalis, Hölderlin, and others—and translated medieval Latin tales into German. In 1926, in another of his characteristic bursts of creative activity, he completed Steppenwolf, which appeared the following year simultaneously with a biography by his friend Hugo Ball that had been commissioned for his fiftieth birthday. Yet the mood of despondence that characterized those years was blatantly evident in the bitter poems published in 1928 under the title Crisis: Pages from a Diary.
    In 1927 Hesse immediately set to work on his next novel. That same year he met an admirer with whom he had been corresponding since her teens, the art historian Ninon Dolbin, née Ausländer (1895–1966). Narcissus and Goldmund (1930) became Hesse’s most successful work during his own lifetime. And in 1931 Hesse married Ninon and moved with her into a new house in Montagnola, built for them by his friend and patron Hans C. Bodmer, where they were to spend the remainder of their lives. The fruit of Hesse’s new happiness and security was the story The Journey to the East (1932), in which he paid cheerful tribute to his friends (“Ninon, known as ‘the foreigner’” [her maiden name: Ausländer], “Louis the Terrible” [Louis Moilliet], “Longus” [J. B. Lang], and others), to his cultural icons, and even to figures from his own works.
    Hesse’s last novel, The Glass Bead Game, was originally to have been the story of “a person who lives through the great epochs of human history in several reincarnations,” as he put it in a letter to Rudolf Pannwitz (January 1955)—a series of parallel lives beginning in prehistoric times, running through the Golden Age of India, the patristic period of early Christianity and eighteenth-century Pietism in Germany, and ending in a pedagogical province in the