Soul of the Age

by Hermann Hesse

  You like to imagine there is a wide disparity between the two of us, and I find that rather sad, since I feel you do so out of habit rather than modesty. My aim in life is no different from yours or anybody else’s, but I have had to face up to deeper inner conflicts, and am compelled by my temperament and disposition to create art—i.e., somehow I need to express and shape my inner life. For years (prewar) I was rather complacent about my literary successes and accomplishments, but the war and the catastrophes in my private life have induced me to make drastic changes and, ultimately, start again from scratch. During the war, after the fake German splendor had crumbled, I saw that my intuitive premonitions were accurate, and seeing the young people helped renew my faith. But that was my only positive experience; everything else affected me negatively. I’m ready now to close the books on this matter and begin assuming new tasks. I’m sure very few of my friends will like my current style of writing, and I shall feel as hemmed in and isolated as I did during the war, in both political and human terms.

  I shan’t budge from here as long as I keep making headway with my work. I haven’t been in a railway station or train since April, and haven’t bought a newspaper since the first of July. It’s possible I shall stay isolated for quite some time; that would be delightful, but I cannot swear it will happen.

  Letters are a poor substitute for friendship. On the whole, I must have seemed very passive during our friendship. But when I love somebody I don’t let go easily, and as you can see, I’m forcing myself on you again.

  Red wine still plays a part in all of this, but my work has the lead role. In any case, dear forester and chum, the chestnut trees in the forest reverberate at night to the sound of your friend’s folly.

  If Walter Schädelin ever comes through the Gotthard Pass, I shall have lots to show him, and not just wine bars and watercolors, even though my room is full of the latter.

  TO GEORG REINHART138

  Montagnola, September 8, 1919

  Please accept my sincere thanks for your kind letter!

  At first, I was tempted to accept your kind offer immediately, since my present troubles are, of course, partly financial. Because of the exchange rate for the mark, my income has sunk to a fourth of what it was previously. I probably stand to lose even more of this income, since I have changed tack, and my old readers may not be quite as eager to sample my latest works.

  But, really, the more I think it over, the more I realize that my difficulties extend far beyond those financial concerns, and the prospect of complete financial security wouldn’t necessarily make me happy or relieve my main worries. My family is a great cause of concern, because its well-being depends very much on my wife’s condition. Since she is moving to Ascona this month, I shall probably visit her soon; I haven’t seen her in six months.

  So, under present circumstances, I should like to keep on trying to make ends meet on my own. If you wish to do me a favor and be of some help, you could perhaps give me a small electric heater as a present, since I fear I shall have heating problems this winter. The current is 600 volts.

  My dear Herr Reinhart, could I possibly accept a modified version of your offer? If the worries keep mounting and the situation becomes oppressive, I shall approach you and ask for help. But for now, and let’s hope forever, I feel relieved to have a friend and supporter like you, even if I never need to ask for help. The depression you noticed is largely a reaction against my feverish work habits since last May. I have harnessed that smoldering intensity and manic energy in a short, expressionistic piece, which is full of fantasy. I can show it to you sometime. From October on, I shall be helping to edit a new review in Germany, aimed at young people;139 I don’t have much faith in it, but we had to make an effort. Financially, I don’t stand to gain anything, but since I haven’t put any money in it, I cannot lose anything either.

  TO HIS SISTER ADELE

  October 15, 1919

  I got your kind letter yesterday. There was one from Marulla the day before yesterday. I like to sit alone on the grass in the morning sun. I have chosen a sheltered spot by the wall of the small church at Agra, so I can spend an hour here without freezing; I’m gazing at Italy across a stretch of sea and a flat promontory. I come here along woodland paths, which often remind me of Calw, even though there are no pine trees in this region, only a few beeches, and the ground is strewn with chestnuts rather than pinecones.

  I shall have to accept eventually that I was never destined to experience home and country, wife and children, etc., as anything other than parables and images, and was never meant to tarry there. Someday even the pain of separation and the more serious torments I had to endure during my wife’s illness will seem remote, insignificant, and tranquil, just the way Calw, Basel, and Gaienhofen now appear in the picture album of my life.

  We shall have to find out soon whether anybody is willing to assume the role of guardian for my wife and children, since that is beyond me. Then we shall see what happens. It would naturally be easier for me if one or two of the children went to live in Germany, but I cannot decide that now. I don’t know whether Mia’s brothers and sisters will offer their help or show hostility, since there is going to be a divorce;140 in any case, I have decided that I’m never going to see Mia again under any circumstances. Terrible things await us, since Mia will start clamoring to have the children back the moment she starts feeling better, and we shall probably have to say no. I feel sorry for her, but she and I no longer belong together, and it was she who rejected me, not the reverse. It’s true that this was not the only reason why my marriage failed: I was never a good husband and father, and eventually I arrived at a crossroads where I had to make a decision: I turned my back on bourgeois life, which I had always regarded merely as a mask, and focused instead on the task which I regard as my fate and the very meaning of my life. I shall be venturing onto difficult terrain, but my state of mind will be lighter and freer than heretofore; I never was happy or carefree during the long years of my marriage.

  I was delighted to receive the card with Finckh. He is a good fellow, and probably not all that satisfied now with his war poems about the Lord, who always happens to side with the most powerful cannons. I have no faith in his God, and never believed in his cannons, but those were external differences.

  TO HELENE WELTI

  Montagnola, November 7, 1919

  Many thanks for your wonderfully kind letter! I couldn’t agree with you more, since I never expected you to be enamored of my painting and of recent artistic style in general! So I’m pleased that you are courageous enough to want to go along with it, even if only a bit of the way. And now to the question you raised: why is nature stylized this way rather than that? I don’t consider the question mysterious, although I do find it hard to articulate my ideas on the subject. I believe that the stylistic shifts in art are intimately related to the flux in other areas of life, such as in fashion. There is a dark, unconscious instinct underlying those fluctuations, and like the changing fashions in clothes each season, the most recent art acts as a very fine, sensitive barometer of the nervous impulse of our age. I don’t believe anybody is obliged to participate in all these changes and fluctuations, or praise them to the heavens, and I for my part refuse to do so. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that there is a deeper meaning behind all of this and, should the Expressionist tide sweep across Europe from Barcelona to Moscow, then we cannot simply attribute the phenomenon to a strange “coincidence” or to the whims of a few individuals. The entire younger generation has decided that it doesn’t like “Impressionism,” a word which they pronounce in a hostile manner; I don’t share their sudden antipathy and still feel exceedingly fond of Corot and Renoir. But I find their reaction understandable. Impressionism allowed one area of painting to develop fully; the delicacy and subtlety of that art ushered in a sophisticated form of high culture, and young people suddenly began to rebel against it. It was too one-sided for them; they wanted to hear new sounds, having grown tired of a st
yle that wouldn’t allow them to convey their own needs and feelings. Of course, none of this impairs the quality of any good work produced by the previous generation; one ought not take the revolutionary antics of a portion of the younger generation too seriously, except in one respect: they have a deep need to find new ways of expressing worries and emotions that are indeed new.

  By the way, I feel a certain kinship with Kreidolf.141 My watercolors are a sort of poem or dream; the “reality” which they convey is but a distant memory, and subject to the vagaries of one’s needs and feelings. Kreidolf does much the same thing. But, of course, I never forget that he is a master of the art of drawing, and also has the gentle, highly trained hands of a consummate craftsman, and I realize that by comparison I’m just a dilettante.

  So I’m not tempted to laugh or get angry at you, as you half feared! On the contrary, I’m glad that you at least like my way of combining colors. But I think you will find my new literary works much more accessible (with a few hitches again) than the little pictures.

  You have sensed the essence in both cases: you don’t necessarily appreciate or condone the means of expression, but you sense that my work is the serious product of a certain inner necessity.

  You ask about my wife, who is in the Clinic for Nervous and Emotionally Disturbed Patients in Kilchberg near Zurich. Her sisters want to have her transferred to Meilen, where they think she will be a little better off. I haven’t heard anything directly from her, and have no intention of reestablishing contact myself, but am sure she would be very happy to hear from you. Please don’t pay any attention if she starts asking for money or the like.

  I wish you all the best at the start of winter. It saddens me to hear you describing yourselves as old people who live mostly in the past. Compared to my own solitary, burrowlike existence, your lives are lively and varied, especially considering all the wonderful people you know. Of course, I have my life all to myself, and my motor runs smoothly, purring along amid tranquil days of uninterrupted work.

  TO LUDWIG FINCKH

  Montagnola, January 17, 1920

  Dear Ugel,

  Your questions about life here are so detailed that I have drawn you a sketch of the palazzo where I live, with its steep mountain garden and protruding conifers and palm trees. It’s a very large, ostentatious house.

  The family was wealthy at one time, but has come down in the world, and there are quite a few tenants living here. My windows are to the right. Each morning since October, a little old widow from the village has been coming to tidy up the place and do the cooking, mending, and washing. Natalina—that is her name—never disturbs me; she knows that I need peace and quiet and she respects that. But once a month I listen to her talking about Nino, her only son, who died a couple of years ago, at the age of around ten or eleven. She is always going to his grave. Nino behaved like a saint, drew like Michelangelo, sang like a nightingale, and impressed everybody. But he looks very different in the photographs she shows.

  So that is what my life is like here, and contrary to your suggestion, I have no need of anybody else to set me laughing, crying, and so on.

  You’re wrong to think that I have disowned my previous work. It can stay the way it is. But I discovered one day that I couldn’t continue in that vein. I have no idea whether my present work is more significant or not; I just know that I have to write like this. Yes, I realize that the language of my earlier efforts was highly cultivated and rather musical. But because of the war and everything else, I now realize that we were just turning ourselves and our potential into the stuff of popular literature.

  I find the best consolation in painting. I have quite a few holes in my shoes and socks, the hole in my wallet is to blame for that, and hope I can earn a penny or two through my painting, since there is unfortunately no way one can make any money from literature in Switzerland. I’m having my debut: the art gallery in Basel (where I haven’t set foot in fifteen years) is holding a small exhibition of my watercolors, and I shall know by the end of January whether the reviewers can abide me, or just want a good laugh, indeed whether there is any interest at all in my work. Hanging in one corner of my large study is a beautiful fifteenth-century Italian Madonna, which I cherish, having bought it in Brescia in the spring of 1914, that year of grace. My small pictures are the only other things on the wall, so I’m sitting here surrounded by my dreams. That can be quite nice.

  We have been having summery weather for the past few days, the sun is extremely warm and there’s a lukewarm breeze; I’m going out walking again today, sketchbook in hand, for a few hours. That allows me to wait until evening before lighting a fire, so I can save a lot of wood.

  My dear friend, I can sense what you’re going through, and there is one thing I would like to say to you: We tend to overemphasize the objects of our love; no matter what we choose, family, fatherland, or whatever, the objects themselves are of secondary importance. We are endowed with love so that we can love and suffer, and I myself feel a much greater, if rather uncomfortable affection for poor, defeated Germany, and feel more personally moved by its suffering, than I did when it was throwing its weight around. After all, I was being told at the time that I wasn’t much good, that my previous work was unimpressive. Everybody was saying so, my friends at home, the newspapers, officialdom. I discovered there was no understanding in official circles for the ideals I was trying to uphold, a situation which hasn’t changed one bit. But the experience has taught me to cherish those ideals all the more.

  TO JOSEF BERNHARD LANG142

  Montagnola, January 26, 1920

  Dear friend beyond the Gotthard!

  I should indeed have written ages ago, and am glad that you were so kind as to think of me. I haven’t been ill, but am feeling jaded and depleted, and my work on the new review143 is rather mechanical. But I have also been doing some painting again—e.g., a picture of a small golden “ichthys,” an early Christian fish, which will hang on a wall in my lodgings. As you can see from the enclosure, I had an exhibition in Basel this month. I had vaguely hoped I might sell something, and although I didn’t, I shall probably come to Zurich in the late spring for an exhibition.

  I should either start another serious artistic project or else go back to analysis, but that is something I, unfortunately, cannot do on my own. For a while, I was behaving like a blockhead, reading like crazy and writing mechanically for the new journal. I feel freer now, although I have frequent attacks of anxiety, and am not nearly as committed as I should be. Art cannot be created halfheartedly; a man who wants to write or paint has to catch fire everywhere. I myself am gradually becoming an old man, with some gray hairs and a constantly dripping, pointy nose—well, to hell with it! I’m still feeling the repercussions of those upheavals that occurred during the last few months. Fortunately, there was a lot of sunshine in January; I spent a lot of time outdoors, and didn’t have to start a fire until the evening.

  For now, I’m managing to make ends meet: a friend is helping a bit, but the situation is pretty ridiculous. If I work really well for a few days, I earn a hundred marks, for which I get eight francs. But somehow I’m surviving.

  I’m hoping you can come to stay with me for a week in the spring. I can pay for the ticket so that you don’t have any expenses, and I can probably offer you some fees for analysis. Think about it [ … ] Demian has begun to sink in. There are indications that the identity of the author may not be a secret for much longer. It will come out eventually, and that saddens me, since I would have preferred to remain anonymous. I would prefer to edit each new work under a new pseudonym. After all, I am not Hesse, but in the past have been Sinclair, Klingsor, Klein, etc., and there are others to come.[ … ]

  I had a friend make small frames according to my specifications, and now there are paintings of mine hanging all over the apartment. I think I shall start playing my violin again in the evening, for the first time in many years. That will afford me a pleasant half hour, and I feel that I shall keep sendin
g more flares up into the dull heavens of this world, thus affording my friends a little solace and pleasure.[ … ]

  My dear friend, I often think of you fondly. Ultimately, both of us regard the entire world as a purely psychogenetic phenomenon and thus don’t have to take things too seriously all the time.

  TO GEORG REINHART

  Montagnola, August 14, 1920

  [ … ] Things have been going badly for months. I feel tired and irritable and am up to my neck in trouble.

  Literature is thriving! Some people in Germania, including the very young and the revolutionaries, have begun to realize that I’m one of their few leading spirits. Unfortunately, as with all wishes fulfilled in life, this is happening too late for me to feel particularly exhilarated. This has always been true: I got everything in life that I desired and seriously pursued, only to find it losing its value right away, and slipping out of my hand to make way for some new striving. I had the same experience with literature, getting married, having a house and garden, children and marriage, journeys, successes, insights. Someday, art itself may lose the significance which I now attribute to it, so that there will be space for something new to unfold.

  I feel no connection with Germany, the literature it produces, or the youth over there; the notes that I hear sound false and strange, even though they are also flattering. There was only one thing I really liked: In his Travel Diary,144 the cleverest German book in years, Keyserling recommends as an ideal for our future the doctrine of God-within-the-self, which I have been presenting under all sorts of guises for the past three years (Demian, Zarathustra, etc.). Keyserling’s philosophy derives from India and from Bergson, and reaches conclusions virtually identical to mine. I think that is why books like Demian have a strong impact, even though few people understand them. Quite intuitively, progressive people sense the existence of the goal, which those books seek to evoke obliquely through language and other covert means.