Individual and Society in Hesse

The Individual and Society in the Work of Hermann HesseAuthor(s): Walter NaumannSource: Monatshefte, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Jan., 1949), pp. 33-42Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30164782 .Accessed: 05/02/2014 00:47

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THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY IN THE WORK OF HERMANN HESSE

WALTER NAUMANN University of Wisconsin

Hofmannsthal, in a letter to Carl Burckhardt,' described the Ger- man mind, as he liked to do, by comparing it with the French mind. He had seen Paul Valbry and remembered

sein Gesicht und die Bewegung seines Mundes beim Sprechen. Es ist das hochmiitige und verzweifelte Geschick des franzbsischen Geistes darin ausgedriickt, alles h i e r ausfechten zu miissen, wie der Herzog von Guise gegen seine Morder focht, zwischen dem Kamin und der Wand - kein Schritt weiter war ihm gegeben; uns aber ist immer der Schritt durch die Wand ins Driiben gegeben. The validity of this statement can be observed in three quite recent

great German novels. Each one-of them has a utopian or a historically remote world for its subject, which in an ideal situation gives the author's answers to the most pressing needs of our present day world. Thomas Mann, in Joseph und seine Briider (the last volume of which was published in 1943), finds in the tales of the biblical mythology the eternal conditions of human life. With Der Tod des Vergil (i945), Hermann Broch portrays a time which, like ours, has lost all absolute values and which ardently hopes for the new revelation. The third of these great novels is Hermann Hesse's most important novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (x943).

The action of the Glasperlenspiel, or the game of the glass beads, takes place in Europe a few hundred years from now. People have real- ized that Western culture can be preserved only by a heroic effort. They have succeeded in preserving it because they have renounced all individual creative additions to that culture and are simply handing down from generation to generation the accumulated heritage. The mass of human achievement in knowledge and art, however, has been worked through, cross-relations have been established between all fields, and finally a homogeneous pattern of all activities of the human mind has been reached. The game of glass beads is a symbol of the meditative approach to this highest realization of the mind; it is a kind of worship of the human mind. A special district, a "pedagogical province" of which Goethe once dreamed, has been set aside for the training of those who uphold the spiritual tradition, namely, the bead players, the individual research workers, and the elite of the teachers who direct the education throughout the country. These men are organized in an order, renouncing possessions and family. The book tells the life of one of them, Joseph Knecht, whose name significantly designates a laborer and a servant.

x of August z, 192z6: Carl J. Burckhardt, Erinnerungen an Hofmanntmhal, Verlag Benno Schwabe & Co., Klosterberg, Basel, n. d., p.78.


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Knecht's adult life, in which no woman plays a part, is spent almost completely in the secluded "province", from the moment he first feels called, to the time of his service in the highest office as master of the game of the glass beads. Although Knecht represents the spirit of Castalia at its best, he knows that the province of the mind is not the whole of life. His character is complemented by that of Plinio Designori, his lifelong friend. Designori, as his name shows, is a member of the nobility of power and wealth. From him, and from the teachings of an eminent historian, Father Jacobus, Knecht learns that beyond and beneath the stable order of the mind there are the dark and ever-changing realities of the world. He learns that even the most perfect spiritual tradition will be swept away one day by the revolutions of the dark forces. Man and his history belong to both realms, to the mind and to the world, to that which is and to that which changes. Knecht acts upon this perception of the truth. He gives up his position in the spiritual hierarchy and seeks an anonymous place in the world of change. His duty in his new life is to pass on from one generation to the next an inspiration which prompts man to a full awareness of his situation in life. With Knecht's death, this inspiration is awakened in the soul of a young boy who had been entrusted to his guidance.

In order to understand the ideas of this book, their genesis in the author's mind as well as their place in German letters, it is necessary to recall the more important events of Hesse's life. Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, a small city in the state of Wiirttemberg. The headquarters of the publishing branch of the Basel Mission were in Calw. Both the poet's maternal grandfather and his father worked for this mission, one of the important Protestant missionary societies of continen- tal Europe. The grandfather, Hermann Gundert, who had been a missionary to India, was an authority on Indian languages. Together with his father, who came from a Baltic German background, Hermann Hesse was naturalized in Switzerland as a child. Subsequently in his boyhood he acquired German nationality in order to obtain a scholarship in the preparatory theological schools of his Swabian home-country. As a man he became a Swiss citizen again. The important crisis of his youth was provoked by the conflict between his aspirations to be a poet and the bourgeois life planned for him by his parents. He ran away from school, started to learn a manual craft, earned his bread as a book dealer's employee at Tiibingen and Basel. At the age of twenty-six, he was successful enough as an author to live on the income from his writings. The first World War brought another crisis. Hesse could not participate in the national exaltation and hatred, but was led to ask himself what responsibility he, as an individual, had for the general chaos. Since the end of that war he has lived in the village of Montagnola near Lugano in Southern Switzerland.

The youthful conflict which led to Hesse's running away from


Hermann Hesse 35

school is to be regarded as the most important event of his life, whether one maintains that a first experience determines a life, or that a strong character reveals itself in its first fundamental experience. The event determined Hesse's attitude toward society. Hesse's rebellion did not take the usual shape of the conflict between father and son. It is true that in several places he depicts the inadequacy of the middle class family to guide a child in his difficulties. The major rebellion, however, is directed against the hierarchy of the transmission of knowledge and forms. It is directed against the school and the teachers as representatives of all authority. At the age of fifty, Hesse still spoke indignantly of the "cowardly use of power made by teachers." One novel, Unterm Rad (1905), treats this conflict alone. It was written as an outcry against the spirit and the system of the state boarding schools. In other novels he either resentfully dwells on the suffering of the child in school, or he glorifies the runaway.

Hesse's heroes are also in conflict with their contemporaries in human society. They are, almost all of them, standing apart, outcasts of society. They are unable to master their lives. A stigma is fixed on them: one, for instance, is crippled, others lack polite education, are shy and clumsy. But the stigma can also be exalted by sentimental sympathy: Knulp (1919), the tramp, ignores society absolutely - he does not allow himself to be caught in its net, even if it were to save his life.

The experience of being at odds with society has, at the same time, another aspect. The stigma which makes the individual an outcast is also the sign of election. Those characters of Hesse's early novels who are failures in ordinary life are at the same time artists: poets, musicians, paint- ers. Hesse's basic experience, while confronting him with society, made him at the same time strongly aware of his being selected, his being called. He felt removed from the others. His was a higher responsibility. Using a term from Nietzsche, who at one period strongly influenced him, Hesse speaks of the others as of "Herdenmenschen". The elected individuals, however, belong together, they form a group, they wish for a binding link. This idea becomes more and more clear in the progress of Hesse's work. It is the reverse of his breaking away from society: it is the longing for community, and even for authority. The characters of the novels look for leaders. They find them in personally trusted individuals, mostly in somewhat older comrades. There is a continuity in his world, a continuity from person to person. Following the developed master there is always the younger successor who will grow in his turn.

On the other hand, the elected individuals of the same generation are linked together. They are a kind of nobility of the mind. The idea of an order of the elected appears several times in Hesse's works before it is carried out with all details in the Glasperlenspiel. The members of these orders embody the highest responsibilities of their times. They show the way to the others. They submit; they obey the necessary de-


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mands of their hour. In Demian (I919), written during the first World War, they were to lead mankind to new experiences, to feel out an unknown destiny. In the Glasperlenspiel, the order is strictly conservative, intent on saving the intellectual heritage. But in both cases the personal wishes of the individual are minimized, the individual disappears before a higher will, the will of the destiny of the human race. In the earlier novel, this will is not known to the characters; they have to discover it through their lives. It has, in the Glasperlenspiel, taken shape as the intellectual tradition.

These two attitudes toward authority, the one that rebels against any authority, the other that seeks after an authority, Hesse sees in man everywhere. They are the two typical aspects of human character in general. The part of man that rebels, that looks for freedom, is the part of "nature", of impulse, the drive. No society has the right to restrain this natural man; he must be antisocial, immoral. No codes are valid for him. He must live through everything. He can accept no teaching, were it even from the highest religions, since nothing can replace for him the value of what he has experienced himself. The heritage of Protes- tantism, and even of German classicism, is apparent in this attitude. Here Hesse gets the strength of his descriptions of nature, of life in consonance with the rhythm of nature, the life of the child or of the vagabond. He speaks of "awakening" each time a new reality strikes him with the experience of its full immediacy. To be able to live like this, however, a person must give in to the "nature" of his own self, that is to say, he must not restrain himself by an act of the will dictated by social considerations. His impulses, his dreams and sexual cravings must materialize themselves. Hesse calls it the mother side of life. It is the side of the "dark", the revolutionary forces of life, of greed, sex and death, godlike in their primitive strength. Especially in the novels written during and after the first World War, like Demian, Steppenwolf (1927) and others, he makes a gospel out of the experience of all conscious and subconscious phases of life. Like a number of Germans of that period, he sees his time confronted by chaos, and believes, being influenced by Dostoiewski, that only by accepting the downfall of the present civilization, only by a full experience of chaos, something new can be found, a new life made possible. What the heroes of these novels seek is Hesse's everlasting problem, how to master life. They want to be artists in the art of living. The only one who lives this natural life to perfection, Goldmund in Narziss und Goldmnud (193o), is at the same time an artist in the proper sense of the word, a sculptor. This character shows clearly the origin of the emphasis on life, on new experiences, in Hesse's world. Here is Hesse the poet, who wishes to realize his aspirations, his impulses completely in order to be a perfect artist.

Opposed to the mother side of human character there is the father


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side, the mind. In Hesse's childhood, his grandfather and the world of Indian wisdom which he represented gave him a conception of the place of mind in life. The old, wise, saintly teacher occurs in the Glasperlen- spiel and in earlier novels. By election he is father to the young student. There is an attitude of unquestioning obedience and reverence in all re- lationships based on spiritual values. The mind is wholly apart from life. Confronted with it, life and the individual lose their importance, they become an illusion. This is the influence on Hesse of the teachings of Eastern, Indian and, later, Chinese philosophy and literature. The mind finds its perfection and its contentment in contemplation. Hesse's characters practice meditative exercises after the Indian model. He depicts one form of a perfect life in the Indische Legende, the third of the imaginary autobiographies of Josef Knecht, which are attached to the Glas- perlenspiel. Here a young prince flees from his enemies, and in a sudden spell he sees everything that could happen, he becomes king, he is happy, but also he experiences downfall and unhappiness. He realizes the necessity of these changes, sees that life is but "maja" (illusion), and joins the hermits in the woods.

The ever-recurring revolutions of life become apparent, as from a distance, once that part of us which belongs to life and to impulse, and which is nothing but the individual in us, has spent its force or is ready to surrender its claim. Then the human being tends to be assimilated into the universe; he becomes a part of it, just as the ferryman in Siddharta (1922) becomes one with the river on which he lives. The person tends to be an "it", he approaches the impersonal, as Hesse interprets the old Goethe. He attains wisdom by transcending individuality. Here the wise seer in Hesse is speaking, in antithesis to the creative artist.

Throughout his works, Hesse has tried to find a union between these two fundamental aspects of human life, the irresponsible urge and the detached mind. Even in his early novels, like in Unterm Rad, we find two characters who complete each other because they embody these opposite tendencies. These antagonists are always two men, two friends. Friendship in Hesse's world resembles the role of marriage in the world of Hofmannsthal, where an individual is educated in the highest sense through a person who is destined for him and inescapably linked to him. Even if the main character strives to fulfill both sides, the natural and the spiritual, as does Siddharta for instance, he has, at his side, his friend, who represents his own weaker possibility. This friend, sometimes called a "shadow", clings to only one interpretation of life. He is wrong and weak, while the hero, living both sides of life, is right and strong. In no book are the two characters so clearly set off against each other as in Narziss und Goldmund. Narziss is the introspective, self-contained mind, living in a monastery. Goldmund is the artist, agreeable to women, a man of the world. The novel, characteristically, treats almost exclusively of the exploits of the worldly man. And such is the case in almost all the


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earlier novels. It was a failure in life that started Hesse writing. He strove, through his novels, to learn the art of living. Not until the Glasperlenspiel is the accent placed wholly on spiritual questions. In this most mature work of Hesse's the destiny of the individual is determined by the spiritual health and the welfare of a larger body of which he forms a part. This is true for Knecht and the group in which he lives, where an organized discipline of the mind prevails, and where any quest for unrestricted self-realization is suppressed. It is also true for his antagonist Designori, the representative of nature, who does not live for his own enjoyment either. The latter has, for the first time, however insignificant it may appear, a necessary place in society, a social function.

Thus, in Hesse's work, the individual is either inflated, living only for himself, and wishing for complete self-assertion; or he is deflated. Even in early novels, individualism is represented as an illness of the time. Something more valuable is sought, a symbol to which the individual can subject himself, annihilating his personality. But nowhere is the individual treated in his every-day conditions. Married life, for instance, which for Goethe and Hofmannsthal is a symbol for human society, does not exist in these books. Women are there only as objects to serve for the satisfaction of the hero. No character in his work is linked with a national situation, or determined by national traits. Nations, for Hesse, are not essential. Between the individual and humanity there is no break. Even in their own time, his characters are out of place. Up to the first World War, his novels dealt with failures in life and society. In the novels written after that war, his heroes try to gain a place in their epoch. Demian does so by feeling out a mystic spirit of the future. Steppenmolf is the one who most resolutely embraces the kind of life that his own time requires. But that time is chaos. It is laid upon him. He has to live through all the states of mind that the chaos induces, to live them out of the way, so to speak, before he can hope to find his own personality and to live according to its needs. Because of this state of affairs, our time is so terrible: only an existence as a wolf of the steppe is possible in it. A better existence can be found only in Utopia. Therefore the settings of Hesse's last two novels are imaginary societies. In Narziss wnd Gold- muni it is a romantic utopia, a historical utopia of the Middle Ages, when, to be sure, life was rude; but it was the real outright life, where every wish corresponded to something in reality, to something readily obtainable. Thus one could live on's life to the full and be a real artist. The utopia of the Glasperlenspiel was not established to make enjoyment easy. It is there to make service easy. It is a demand upon the future, to find forms again that will take away from the individual the weight of the confusing complexities of our time, so that he can consecrate himself unequivocally.

There is nowhere any real society in Hesse's work. Neither the


Hermann Hesse 39

family, nor the nation, nor his time are realities that mean anything to the individual. The individual is alone, on the one hand, but always in search of an ideal condition, of something universal that belongs to him. He seeks to locate himself in a living-space which is larger than himself, but with which he can identify himself and thereby recognize his duties and his place in life. This living-space of the individual has for Hesse from the very beginning a social as well as a philisophical aspect. In Peter Camenzind (1904), the first of his novels, the hero feels at home in a vague pantheism, but he also likes to think that he is situated within the continuous sequence of generations in his home village. In Hesse's middle period, Demian, for instance, tries to find a mystic union with the whole of the universe, with the dark as well as with the light forces, but at the same time this new religious feeling is identical with the spirit of the coming age, of future society. The problem is completely solved in the most perfect work of art that Hesse has ever produced, Der Regenmacher. This story constitutes one of the three imaginary autobiographies of the hero of the Glasperlenspiel. The weatherman in the society of a stone-age village knows everything that is known to his time; the universe as it appears to his generation is his living-space; it corresponds exactly to his needs. He has only a narrow circle of conscious knowledge, but beyond that he has a magical power of inspired union with the whole of nature. The weather is the symbol of this magic correspondence: he can make the weather, but on the other hand the revolutions of nature are menaces for him and lead him to death. At the same time, through his place in the whole of nature, he also has his place in the center of society. He interprets nature to his community, he serves their religious needs. His extraordinary position as seer, as one who stands in a mystical relationship to the universe, is accepted as a function by his society. It is a function, because it is not an individual merit. The weatherman is only "an unknown link in the chain"; he re- ceives the whole of what he knows, trying to enlarge it a little perhaps, and hands it on through the ages, from person to person. In this utopian story, Hesse introduces society, because he has found his justification for it. Society must correspond to an essential need in the individual. What is essential for Hesse is not of a moral character. Other people really do not exist for him. The essential problem is for him an intellectual problem, the question of situating himself. Society is for him not a moral but an intellectual necessity.

In the philosophy at which Hesse finally arrived, he sees man in the universe, surrounded by what he now calls reality. It is a demonic, lawless, changing reality; it is the divinity. Man's first reaction is fear, and his duty is to change this fear into reverence, piety, and finally into knowledge, into mind. Mind is born out of fear, its function is to react against reality. Mind is the other divine element in Hesse's world, the divine in man. This polarity, between mind and reality, pervades the


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whole universe. It is the polarity between being and becoming. At the moments of inspiration, man experiences a magic union with reality. He "awakens", as Hesse says, to a new reality. He is lifted to a new "step", either as an individual in the experience of his life, or as one who, like the rainmaker, embodies in himself the whole experience of society and thus takes a step ahead in knowledge, in human civilization. But otherwise the nature and the duty of the mind is to remain, to be preserved. In the ideal case, in the stone-age village, the tradition is unendangered, since one man, enjoying an established function in society, transmits the heritage to another. In a complex civilization, like ours, mind, over- developed, is isolated in a province; lawless, changing nature enters society itself and will one day engulf and completely destroy the province. There is no reason for despair, even in that case. That is the intended teaching of the final scene of the Glasperlenspiel. There will always be a new beginning, like that of the young boy whom Knecht tutors. There will always be man's adoration of nature, like the boy's dance before the rising sun, and there will always be another human, like Knecht, to transmit a sense of responsibility to the younger generation.

Hesse envisages the possibility of the destruction of our civilization, but he is far from welcoming downfall and chaos. In the realm of the mind, it is our duty now to preserve what we have. We have to do this, even at the expense of the individual. The individual does not count. He serves the tradition impersonally. And in comparison with the collec- tive riches of the mind in a higher civilization, his person is of no importance. Of course, he wants to step into the center of all the possible spiritual experiences of his time. Only then the mind will fulfill its religious function for him. The game of the glass beads was developed for that reason. It embraces all the spiritual possessions of its time in a unity, and thus calls forth religious awe before the experience of mind as such (the "Urwissen", as Hesse says in one place). Only a few, however, will serve in this center, the bead-players and their master. The others will take part in the ceremonies of the bead game only as they would in religious services. The mind of a developed civilization has many departments; in each one of them perfection can be reached. Hesse's novel, Das Glasperlenspiel, shows a number of saintly wise men who have given up their individuality in the anonymity of service to one particular province of our heritage.

In this service the person must be assisted. Organized bodies within society must take away from him the burden of having to determine as an individual the conditions of his life. An individualism which is un- limited master of its intellectual and material living conditions can never keep up a true tradition. From this insight stems Hesse's pref- erence for religious orders, like the Benedictines, for primitive com- munities, and finally his idea of a secular order in the Glasperlenspiel. These organized forms within society, however, are linked with and are


Hermann Hesse 41

sustained by the old religious wisdom of mankind. In Hesse's order, this wisdom is carried on in a secularized form: there is discipline, obedience for its own sake; there are exercises of mediation, as there was prayer in a god-centered society; there is even sacrifice, the sacrifice of the highest, the one who embodies the unity of the mind, for the sake of the con- tinuation of the whole.

Hesse, with these ordered units within society, wants to win back forms of human life which guarantee permanence. The necessity of such organisms of a lasting character was one of the great insights of Nietzsche. Hesse thus places himself in a line with what Hofmannsthal called the "conservative revolution" of the modern mind. It is, says Hofmannsthal, a movement which, during the past centuries, simulta- neous with but contrary to the main current of ideas which sought the freedom of the individual, tries to find and to win back binding links for the individual. In German romanticsm, and again in contemporary literature, this tendency can be clearly observed. Hesse himself states it with similar words in the introduction to the Glasperlenspiel. Only he defines it more precisely in his own terms. The new authority which he seeks is an authority coming out of the mind alone, adequate to it, and legitimiz- ing the mind's freedom. It is the authority of a humanism, since the mind, for Hesse, is nothing but human, always bound to man. This humanism is not based on any particular past experience of mankind which might have value as a model. The model, and with it the authority, is implied in every stage of the history of the human mind. That is the intended meaning of the three autobiographies attached to the Glas- perlenspiel, each of which takes place in a different era of human history. Hesse's humanism places man in the middle between nature and mind. The mind is never above nature. Every function of the mind, in the Glas- perlenspiel for instance, is embodied by man: the true transmission of the heritage does not take place in the anonymity of books, but from man to man; a man's calling comes to him in youth by means of another human. This humanism answers a need of our epoch. It tries to find a new measure for man. Man has been freed from an outside authority, that of the Christian church. However, the idea seems no longer acceptable that he is entirely free to choose his own path and to model his own image. This idea is a heritage of the liberal movement in history, of Protestantism and Romanticism. It has led many modern writers to set themselves up as a measure for men. To be sure this meant proffering themselves in their best qualities, in their highest experiences, i. e. as artists. The artist, in a large part of modern literature, is the measure of man. In the modern conception, the artist is the one who is responsible only to himself. His ability to experience and to create sufficiently justifies his life. His pur- suit is to perfect his individuality. In Hesse's utopia the artist is dis- avowed and suppressed. In quite a similar way, Hofmannsthal, in his principle work, the tale Die Frau ohne Schatten, rejects the artist as the


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valid image of man. Both writers arrive at a similar conclusion from quite different positions. For Hofmannsthal, it is the moral claim which the others have against the individual that leads him to disavow the artist's self-sufficient life. For Hesse, the intellectual necessities of society, the preservation of the heritage, make the dissapearance of the individual- istic artist imperative. They have this in common; they both try to find a measure for man in the community, through other men. Since no ex- emplary measure of man, the measure of the great, the divine personality, is acknowledged any more, society - society taken in its moral aspect in Hofmannsthal's case and in its intellectual in Hesse's - shapes the new measure of man.


Article Contentsp. [33]p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37p. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41p. 42

Issue Table of ContentsMonatshefte, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Jan., 1949), pp. 1-63Volume Information[Photograph]: Anonyme Radierung nach Schmoll (1777/78)Der Erstdruck des Faustfragments [pp. 1-18]Zur Gruppenbildung der Faustgestalten [pp. 19-29]The Content and Administration of the Methods Course for Teacher Training [pp. 30-32]The Individual and Society in the Work of Hermann Hesse [pp. 33-42]Personalia for 1948-1949 [pp. 43-56]News and NotesEditorial Note [p. 57-57]Weimarer Nationaltheater [p. 57-57]E. T. A. Hoffmann [p. 57-57]Oberschefflenz ehrt Professor Dr. Roedder [pp. 57-58]Erklrung [p. 58-58]Foundation Plans Major Event to Observe Goethe Bicentennial [pp. 58-60]New American Goethe Editions [p. 60-60]Theodor Storm Gesellschaft [p. 60-60]Max Scheler Gesellschaft [pp. 60-61]Der Stand der Arbeiten am Deutschen Wrterbuch [p. 61-61]Weitere Unternehmungen der Deutschen Kommission [pp. 61-63]

[Illustration]: Frankfurt am Main zur Zeit von Goethes GeburtBack Matter

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