The seminary at Maulbronn

The ‘punishment’ for running away from the seminary, was that Hesse was placed in an insane asylum run by a pastor where Hesse worked mainly in the gardens, and was given a diagnosis of ‘melancholy’. The family urged the teenage boy to practice moderation as a way of ‘exorcising all the evil demons’, but Hesse saw trusting in God as displayed by his family as a reprimand and a provocation. Begging to return home, he lasted there for 17 days before being re-incarcerated again at the request of his parents for his bad behaviour. He put his experience into this rhyme:

‘Now freedom’s just run out on me,

it always was illusory,

Sent to the “bin” by mum and dad

For all they know, I might be mad!’

Hesse was fighting against those, who with a clear conscience before God, wanted to break him and divest him of his self-will. He wrote to his parents as his ‘jailors’:

‘You deliver all your sermons, urging people to “Turn to God, and to Christ, etcetera, etcetera!” But though you might curse me a hundred times over for saying so, I can see in this God of yours nothing but a delusion, and in this Christ nothing but a man’.

His parents could not understand why Hesse didn’t comply with the basic rules of coexistence – he was either ill or stubborn – obdurate, and the answer to that was further strictness. With illness they just had to wait. Hesse, by the age of 15 began to realise that he was in danger of remaining incarcerated, and somehow found a way of dispassionately explaining himself and asking:

‘Is it right for a young man who, apart from a slight weakness of the nerves, is pretty healthy, to be packed off to a “mental home for the feeble-minded” and forcibly rob him of his belief in love and justice, and hence in God? … You are Christians, and I – I am just a man.’

And: ‘If I was a Pietist rather than a human being, if I could turn all my inclinations into their opposites, then I could get on harmoniously with you. But I cannot …’ His father’s response urged him to acquiesce, but what Herman Hesse was learning was, that, as his biographer, Gunnar Decker puts it:

‘… revolt was not always advisable when faced with a dangerous environment. He would learn what everyone who becomes an outsider quickly learns: namely, to conceal yourself from the world in order to preserve your individuality.’

The hospital inspector felt that Hesse suffered from ‘a moral infirmity’ and needed strict discipline: that he needed to be disabused of the idea that ‘a person could get through life just by playing the fiddle and writing fiction.’ Hesse, knowing he wanted to leave the asylum and become a writer, wrote to his parents that he couldn’t live at home, but did love them deeply, and eventually, and fortunately, he was allowed to move away from the family, and board with a pastor and return to education. His childhood experiences provided both the impetus for his writing and his lifelong spiritual searching – he thought only those who could carry their childhood into adulthood could become a creative writer – where childhood was a dream of a succession of summits between which deep abysses opened up. As in fairy tales good and bad lived side by side there.