Hermann Hesse

‘I think that reality is the last thing one needs bother oneself about, for it is, tiresomely enough, constantly present, whereas it is the more beautiful and necessary things in life that really demand our attention and care. Reality is something that one ought not under any circumstances to be content with and which one should not on any account worship and revere, for it is accidental, the leftovers of life.’

In his writing, Hesse tenaciously always defended the spiritual dimension whilst also expressing inner turmoil. Part of this ongoing inner turmoil resulted from his highly religious background and upbringing which drove him from later childhood and adolescence onwards to near breakdown. Both his mother and father came from a long family tradition of Pietism – a movement within Protestant Lutheranism that combines biblical doctrine and teaching with individual piety, and living a holy Christian life. Pietism was an evangelical revivalist movement believing that the way of the world leads to death and damnation, and the Pietist route to God, paradise, and blessedness. The way to get to heaven was through strict discipline and rules. In the January posts Dennis McCort disentangled himself from the aftereffects of a strict Roman Catholic upbringing with its long shadow of guilt; Hermann Hesse found it extremely hard to do the same from his Pietist upbringing.

He writes that his parents lived piously, not indulging in any vices ‘and demanded a great deal of themselves in their daily lives, they had likewise devoted themselves and their lives to the service of God.’ Finding the 6-year-old Hesse a handful, the parents decided to send him to a strict mission house to board, where after 6 months his mother wrote: ‘he came home looking pale and thin and cowed’ but ‘he is far easier to deal with now, thank God!’

However, resistance to attempts to break him were born by this experience. He wrote: ‘I only needed to hear the words “Thou shalt …” and my whole being changed and I became as stubborn as a mule.’ So, childhood became for Hesse a battle to protect his inner person from the crude intervention of the outside world. By adolescence the struggle against the rules and regime of Pietism deepened. When at 14 he ran away from the strict seminary he had been sent, to his mother wrote:

‘At first I was worried that Hermann had committed some dreadful sin and been disgraced, and I was in awful torments imagining that something especially terrible must have preceded his disappearance, so I was very relieved when I finally got the feeling instead that he was in God’s merciful hands, and had already died and gone to meet his maker. Perhaps he’d drowned in one of the lakes he was so fascinated by?’

Better to be dead than to sin. Hesse asking for understanding from his father received a letter in reply reminding the boy:

‘Our highest purpose in life is to please God and to serve Him in His kingdom. If that was to become your purpose too, we would find true communion … if we meet one another in this spirit, then we shall be united for all eternity, since it will be under the auspices of the Everlasting God.’

In the absence of God, the boy seemed to count for nothing, which outraged him. As punishment, he was kept in detention with only bread and water while decisions were made about how to bring Hesse back to ‘right’ path, and where he could be sent to expedite this.