Hermann Hesse was born on the second of July 1877 in Calw, Württenberg. His father was a Protestant missionary from Estonia and his mother the daughter of a Württemberg Indologist, and they had first met at a mission in India. His grandfather Hermann Gundert ran a publishing house in Calw, and his large library was at the disposal of the avid young reader. In 1891 Hesse was sent to the Seminary at Maulbronn Abbey, which he mentions in the passage entitled Autumnal Experiences, but he ran away, and after bitter conflicts with his parents he tried to commit suicide in May 1892.
By working in a bookshop in Tübingen, Hesse became financially independent, and in 1898 he published a small volume of poetry called RomantischeLieder (Romantic Songs), followed in 1899 by a novella called Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (One Hour After Midnight). Both works were failures. In 1900, he was rejected for military service because of eye trouble and this, together with various nervous disorders, was to plague him throughout his life. The novel Peter Camenzind, published in 1904 by Samuel Fischer, was a major breakthrough, and from then on he was able to live on his writing.
In 1904 he married Marie Bernoulli, and they lived in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, where she bore him three sons. It was here that Hesse renewed his earlier interest in Buddhism and theosophy—an interest which was to lead much later to one of his most famous works, Siddhartha (1922). However, his marriage was soon in difficulties, and a long trip to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, followed by the family’s move to Bern, Switzerland, in 1912 did not help matters. During the First World War, as a staunch pacifist he made many enemies in Germany by publishing an essay attacking nationalism, and his personal crisis deepened when in 1916 his father died, his son Martin became very ill, and his wife’s schizophrenia became a matter of serious concern. His own mental condition deteriorated, and he had to undergo psychiatric treatment.
By 1919, the marriage had broken down irretrievably, and Hesse moved to Ticino, where he rented rooms in Montagnola. In 1924 he married the singer Ruth Wenger, but this marriage also broke down. By now he was a naturalised Swiss citizen, and shortly after the publication and worldwide success of his novel Steppenwolf, he married Ninon Dolbin, née Ausländer, an art historian. In 1931 he designed the Casa Hesse, near Montagnola, where he was to spend the rest of his life.
He observed the rise of the Nazis with great concern, and in 1933 helped Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann on their journeys into exile. He was bitterly opposed to anti-Semitism (his third wife was Jewish), and eventually his work was banned in Nazi Germany. In 1946 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and although he continued to write stories, reviews and poems, he devoted much of his remaining time to painting watercolours and attending to a vast correspondence. He died in his sleep of a brain haemorrhage on the ninth of August 1962, and is buried in Montagnola at the San Abbondio cemetery.
Volker Michels has calculated that Hesse’s literary works comprise some 14,000 pages, while he wrote about 35,000 letters, and painted about 3,000 watercolours. He once talked of his “lifelong failure to acquire a talent for idleness”.
DHW 2011