Overview: Fictional accounts of German student life in three different historical periods center on the relationships among young men and attempts to reconcile the spiritual and the secular.
Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. His best known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) which explore an individual's search for spirituality outside society.
In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Hesse's first great novel, Peter Camenzind, was received enthusiastically by young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country.
Throughout Germany, many schools are named after him. In 1964, the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis was founded, which is awarded every two years, alternately to a German-language literary journal or to the translator of Hesse's work to a foreign language. There is also a Hermann Hesse prize associated with the city of Karlsruhe, Germany.
Tales of Student Life by Hermann Hesse Book Chapter One
viii ) TALES OF STUDENT LIFE the prestigious cloister schools of Wiirttemberg, from which they normally proceeded to the University of Tiibingen for training in an academic or clerical profession. As a result of his performance in the competition, Hesse was accepted at Maulbronn, a former Cistercian monastery, which he entered in September I8g1. At first things seemed to go smoothly, to judge from the enthusiastic letters that the new seminarian wrote home to his parents. Only six months later, however, he ran away from school and had to be brought back by the local constabulary, and a few weeks after that, Hesse's parents withdrew him from Maulbronn. Still cherishing hopes for his education, the dispirited father and mother sent their recalcitrant son from one school to another for the next year and a half. Finally, in October of I8g3, pleading a headache that had persisted for three weeks, Hesse persuaded his family to take him out of school for good. That marked the end of his formal education. Hesse's interest in educational questions resulted directly from his own misadventures. "School ruined me in many respects,'' he continued in the letter to his stepbrother, "and I know of few men of character who did not have a similar experience. All that I learned there was Latin and lying, because you couldn't get through Calw and the Gymnasium without lying." Up to a point, Hesse's concern reflected the spirit of the times in Germany shortly before World War I. For roughly a decade, so many plays and novels were written about school and its discontents that they produced a genre known simply as Schulliteratur: Emil Strauss's Friend Death (I go2), Heinrich Mann's The Blue Angel ( 1 gos), and Robert Musil's The Confusions of Young Torless ( 1906) are among the most familiar examples. But Hesse's concern was more than a concession to a fashionable literary trend. For sixty years his writings-including letters, essays, and autobiographical reflections-return obses-
Introduction ( ix sively to his years in the schoolroom. From the beginning of his career to the end, many of his major works can properly be considered "pedagogical" in one sense or another: either they constitute an indictment of the existing school system, like the novel Beneath the Wheel ( rgo6); or, like the "pedagogical province·· that provides the background for T1ze Glass Bead Game ( 1943 ), they represent an idealized educational system in which the individual is encouraged to develop his unique capacities to the fullest extent. It is hardly surprising. therefore, to find in Hesse's fiction a number of stories that deal with schoolboys. students, and their problems. What distinguishes the three tales collected here-"Friends," "Berthold,'' and the socalled "Fourth Life" -is the liveliness with which they recreate student life at Yarious moments in German history (the fin de sii:cle, the Thirty Years· War, and the early eighteenth century) and the close connection in which they stand to three of Hesse's major novels. Like all of Hesse's fiction, these three stories are heavily autobiographical in substance. In his preface to Gerbcrsau ( 1949), a collection of works dealing with his Swabian homcto\\11, Hesse remarked : "\Vhcnevcr as a writer I speak of the forest or the river, of the meadow valley, of the shade of the chestnuts or the fragrance of the firs , it is always the forest around Calw, the river Nagold, the fir woods and the chestnut trees of Calw that arc meant; and al so the marketplace , the bridge and chapel, Bischofstrasse and Ledergassc, the marsh and the meadow path to I li rsau can be recognized everywhere in my books-even in those that arc not explicitly Swabian.'' It is clear that the heroes of al l three tales grew up in Hesse's hometown. In "Friends," Hans Calwer's name hints at his origin, ami even Erwin Miihletal's name ( Miihletal = mill valley) suggests the narrow valley of the Nagold with its many mills. The attentive reader of
X ) TALES OF STUDENT LIFE "Berthold" and "The Fourth Life" will soon note, moreover, that Berthold's unspecified hometown and Knecht's Beutelsperg, or Beitelsperg an der Koller, are identical: walled towns standing in a narrow valley above a rapid mountain stream, with a splendid cobblestone square flanked by timbered houses and adorned with a fountain, and a Gothic church topped with a provisional wooden tower. The monastery where Berthold becomes a skilled Latinist is modeled after Maulbronn, and Berthold's life in Cologne is based on Hesse's experiences in the pensions where he lived while attending school following his debacle at Maulbronn. Knecht's Denkendorf was in reality another of the famed cloister schools; and the pattern of life there is precisely the same as that at Maulbronn. Hesse never attended a university. In 1895 he wrote to a friend still at Maulbronn that he had no intention of going back to school. "In fact, there has never been a time when the university was more dispensable than it is at present-at least for people like me, who as a matter of principle are not entering any kind of government service." Yet he became intimately familiar with the university in Ttibingen, which is attended both by the students in "Friends" and by Knecht in "The Fourth Life." The University of Ttibingen, especially in conjunction with the famous Stift (the residence for theological students which is mentioned in both stories), was long one of the most influential institutions in German intellectual life. During one glorious period at the end of the eighteenth century, Hegel, Schelling, and Holderlin were fellow students in the Stift. The poet Morike, the theologian D. F. Strauss, and the aesthetician F. T. Vischer are merely a few of the distinguished Swabians who followed precisely the same educational track through the cloister schools to the Stift and the university in Ttibingen. So Hesse was familiar with Ttibingen as an important institution both
Introduction ( xi from the history of his native \Vtirttemberg and from the biographies of some of his favorite writers. Beyond that, he spent four years in Ttibingen-from the autumn of 1895 through the summer of 18gg-as an apprentice and then as a stock clerk in Heckenhauer's bookstore. To be sure, he did not lead the idle student's life described in "Friends": after working from 7: 30 A.M. to 7:30 P.M. six days a week, he spent most of his evenings writing his first literary works (notably the poems of Romantic Songs and the poemes-en-prose of An Hour beyond Midnight) and reading his way systematically through German literature of the Romantic period. However, through his association with former seminary friends now in Ttibingen, Hesse was i�wited from time to time to participate in affairs at the Stift and the university, where he had frequent opportunity to observe the student fraternity life that he depicts with such irony in "Friends." As he subsequently wrote to a correspondent who mistakenly assumed that he had studied at the university: "Neither have I eYer been a student, nor have I ever been sympathetic to student life. For the most part students-both the serious and the boisterous ones-are an abomination. I found the whole university business foolish and consider it a shame that such a large segment of the younger generation regards studying as the only respectable and proper career choice. In Ti.ibingen, where I lived for four full years and spent a lot of time with students, I got my fill of the whole business." Yet these four years enabled I I esse to include in "Friends" a vivid and detailed portrayal of student life in Germany around the turn of the century. The drama of friendship that is acted out against the background of university life in Ti.ibingen is virtually archetypal for Hesse's fiction: a relationship, with pronounced homoerotic overtones, between two young men.
xii ) TALES OF STUDENT LIFE one a leader with a strong craving for consciousness and independence, the other a talented but weaker follower, who is jolted out of his childlike innocence by his friend, but who longs to return to the security and approval of society. In a number of works Hesse has explored this relationship in its various configurations; but both archetypal figures represent aspects of his own character. "Friends" could be designated in one sense as a response to Hesse's immediately preceding novel. Beneath the Wlzeel ends when Hans Giebenrath, unable to endure the pressures of the academic system, drops out of school and commit� suicide, while his stronger friend, Hermann Heilner (the first of many characters with Hesse's own initials) survives. In "Friends" the situation is balanced: Erwin lVIi.ihletal is awakened from innocence by Hans Calwer. Unable to follow his friend into an alienated independence, he at first sinks into profligacy, but then recovers and, with the approval of his fraternity brothers, becomes engaged and settles down to his medical studies, while Hans Calwer, forsaking his fruitless attempt to emulate the peasant philosopher Heinrich Wirth, moves on to another university to pursue his quest for knowledge. This ambivalent resolution reflects Hesse's personal dilemma at the time he wrote the story. In 1907, at age thirty, Hesse underwent a profound emotional crisis following several months of illness. The success of his novel Peter Camenzind ( 1904) had enabled him to get married and to settle down in Gaienhofen, a remote village on the German shore of Lake Constance with-as Hesse wrote to Stefan Zweig-"no trains, no shops, no industry, and not even a pastor of its own." Since there were no craftsmen in the village, he had to manage all the repairs on his house; since there was no butcher, he had to row across the lake to the nearest Swiss town to purchase every sausage. For several years Hesse enjoyed the image of
Introduction ( xiii himself as a happy homeowner. But by 1907 he was already beginning to feel restricted and to believe that the very independence he sought was causing him to subside into precisely the kind of philistinism he had tried so desperately to avoid. This dilemma is reflected in the two leading figures of "Friends." Erwin l\Itihletal represents the concessions to wife, family, and career that Hesse had made when he moved to Gaienhof en; but Hans Calwer betrays Hesse's unsatisfied longing for freedom and, above all, for consciousness. Hesse returned to this archetypal configuration when he wrote Demian (published in 19 19), and the parallels between the early story and the novel are unmistakable. Uke Erwin l\Itihletal, Emil Sinclair is led out of childhood into the realm of adult consciousness and responsibility by his bolder friend; and after their break he first longs to find his way back into the lost paradise of childhood innocence before he succumbs to the lure of profligacy. Hans Calwer. in turn. anticipates Demian's rather elitist contempt for the "herd people" as well as his religious quest for truth. And Calwer's friendship with Heinrich Wirth anticipates the crowd of religious seekersvegetarians, Buddhists, utopians. Tolstoyans-who surround Demian. Bu t the conclusion of the novel is wholly different. At the end, it is :\lax Demian who has perished, while Emil Sinclair remains behind to continue the work of the young man who had been his friend and leader. In other words, the archetypal relationship is identical with the one in "Friends" and Bcncatl1 tl1c \VI1ccl, but the balance is shifted experimentally in each work. Hesse once remarked that he considered the religious impulse the "decisive characteristic" of his life and works. So it is hardly surprising that the common interest that brings llans Calwer and Heinrich Wirth together should be their study of religion and that the central figures of "Berthold" and "The Fourth Life" are students of theology.
xiv ) TALES OF STUDENT LIFE To be sure, the nature of this interest in the stories mirrors Hesse's mood at the time of composition. When he wrote "Friends" and "Berthold" (around 1907-8) the thirty-year-old writer was still in the throes of his rebellion against what he considered the narrow sterility of the pietism of his youth. As a result, we find the religious impulse manifesting itself as a fascination with other and specifically non-Protestant forms of religion. In "Friends" Hesse alludes to the spectrum of religious sects that sprang up in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century, including notably an interest in Buddhism and other Oriental religions. Hesse had grown up in a home inspired with the spirit of India, for both his parents as well as his maternal grandfather had been missionaries there. "From the time I was a child," he later wrote, "I breathed in and absorbed the spiritual side of India just as deeply as Christianity." And this impulse led him, in 1911, to make the trip to India which resulted, years later, in the novel Siddhartha (I 922). When Hans Calwer explores Buddhism and attends lectures on Oriental studies, he is acting out Hesse's own preoccupations. The background of "Berthold," in contrast, is Catholic. In 1903, in one of the frequent letters that he wrote home in a calculated effort to shock his devout family, Hesse observed that no theology could be too radically modern for independent thinkers, but he knew of no more "brilliant model" of a people's religion than Catholicism. Hesse's genuine admiration for the ritual, symbolic, and aesthetic aspects of Catholicism lasted to the end of his life, manifesting itself in such works as his early biography of St. Francis of Assisi ( I 904) and the chapter in Tlze Glass Bead Game that portrays the life of the Desert Fathers. In "Berthold," then, Hesse retraced his symbolic autobiography as it might have been had he grown up a Catholic during the time of the Thirty Years' War. Again we note many of the same fictional components that oc-
Introduction ( XV cur in "Friends," but here they appear in a different pattern. Here, too, the homoerotic friendship between student friends leads to the indoctrination into sex by a girl from the lower classes, the turmoil and confusions of youthful growth, and the loss of childhood innocence regarded as the fall from paradise into consciousness and guilt (an image that occurs as a leitmotiv in Hesse's fiction). For reasons that remain unclear, Hesse never completed this story of the renegade seminarian who kills his best friend and then vanishes into the excitement of the Thirty Years' War. Quite possibly Hesse decided that the pronounced sexuality of the theme was too explicit for the rather prudish tastes of Kaiser \Vilhelm's Germany. However, the fragment (which wa8 not published until 1945) contains most of the narrative elements that went into the novel Narcissus and Goldmund ( 1930 ), written some twenty years later. In that novel the time has been shifted back from the seventeenth century into an unspecified but still monolithically Catholic era in the late Middle Ages. (It is not unlikely that Hesse wanted to focus on tensions within a unified Catholic world and not on the wholly different conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism which would have been inevitable during the Thirty Years' War.) Like Berthold, Goldmund grows up without a mother and is sent by his father into the monastery. Both Berthold and Goldmund arc strong, handsome young men, inexperienced in the ways of the world but inordinately responsive to sensual pleasures; for both, the life of the senses begins when they arc seduced by older and experienced girls. Berthold's closest friend at school is Johannes, the professional-albeit cynically Machiavellian-churchman who has the name that Narcissus adopts after his investiture as a priest. The most conspicuous physical characteristic of Johannes-Narcissus is a thin ascetic face with soulful eyes and long black eye-
xvi ) TALES OF STUDENT LIFE lashes. It is Johannes-like Narcissus later-who first awakens his younger friend to the realization that monastic life is not his true calling, while he himself is happily reconciled to the life of a prince of the church. In both works a major crisis is precipitated by a girl named Agnes. There are of course conspicuous differences: notably, the early fragment breaks off when Berthold kills Johannes, while in the novel Narcissus becomes the abbot of the monastery and finally rescues Goldmund from execution. "Berthold" ends when the protagonist flees Cologne to enter the Thirty Years' War, just as Goldmund leaves the monastery and becomes involved in the worldly events of his age. Yet "Berthold," apart from its Catholic and seventeenth-century variation of the student archetype in Hesse's fiction, is clearly the model that Hesse had in mind for two decades until he finally reshaped it into one of his most popular novels. The so-called "Fourth Life" was undert
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