Soul of the Age

by Hermann Hesse

  Spring is always very difficult for me, especially the gout in my hands and feet, and yet it can still be very beautiful. May it also bring you some warm, beautiful days!

  TO OTTO BASLER

  Easter 1945

  Thanks for your last letter. I hope that this is really your last stint of military service.

  Unfortunately, that Easter poem343 does not merit your enthusiastic response. Of course, the sentiments are all fine and good, but the how lacks the true blossom or intangible quality that alone makes a poem worthwhile. It is well meant, but nothing more.

  Since I have occasionally mentioned my poor friend and publisher Suhrkamp, I have copied the latest news about him for you.344 It’s doubtful he is still alive. Those apes in England have suddenly become furious at all of Germany, as if the German people had really perpetrated the abominations in the camps, but nobody is saying a word about the thousands of quiet stoics and heroes who, like Suhrkamp, repeatedly confronted a superior force, thereby risking life and liberty, and nobly represented the German people in its most difficult hour. The English have only just discovered the abominations in the camps, even though magazines in Prague were already describing them in 1934, sufficient grounds, one would think, for the English diplomats in Berlin to distance themselves from Hitler and stop genuflecting, such apes! Nobody says a word about that nowadays. And in Italy the Allies have to this day kept many people imprisoned who were persecuted by the Germans and fascists and are commonly regarded as courageous anti-fascists.

  TO GÜNTHER FRIEDRICH

  Montagnola, June 18, 1945

  Thank you for your letter, which arrived the day before yesterday. I am sorry I cannot send you anything apart from these lines.345 Until recently, I could at least send an occasional present of books to German émigré friends in England, but since the so-called end of the war that has also ceased; the post office will not accept anything apart from letters. And we have had no contact at all with Germany since the capitulation: I haven’t heard anything about my sisters and friends or about my poor, faithful publisher, who was incarcerated for a long time in Gestapo prisons—I don’t even know whether he is still alive. So I can’t tell you anything about your people, but there is no cause for worry, although there will most likely be food shortages in Germany soon and they will probably be better off if they don’t happen to live in one of the larger cities.

  In your letter you say that it would have been better if Hitler had died in that assassination attempt. That is correct, since Germany would indeed be in a slightly better situation were that so. But Germany accepted Hitler, and invaded and plundered Bohemia, Austria, Poland, Norway, and, finally, half the world, slaughtering millions of people and plundering one country after another; those sad facts would still be true if Hitler had died earlier. Germany’s misfortunes and disgrace are rooted not in its current suffering and defeat, but in the continual abominations that it perpetrated for years. Even prior to 1939, we used to grit our teeth in anger when we heard your recruits striking up the song: “Today Germany is ours, tomorrow the whole world,” and we are now saddened by the thought that your people has only a limited awareness of what it has wrought.

  Enough of that. It’s just that I didn’t want to gloss over this issue in my first letter to you.

  May your fate be tolerable and may you yet live to witness some of the reconstruction.

  TO MARIANNE WEBER

  [ca. August 1945]

  Your letter and one from the Engels reached me at Rigi, where I have been trying to make sure my wife gets some rest. Today I can only acknowledge having received it. I shall soon be back home, but am not doing well, have no energy. My wife was ill and completely run-down; at least she is recuperating now.

  You take C. G. Jung, etc., far too seriously. Since the end of the First World War, Germany has been behaving suspiciously and making itself hated in the eyes of the whole world, and has ended up destroying half the world in an almost diabolical manner; so the entire world naturally hates the Germans, and does not stop to ask each and every individual whether he might not have been an opponent of Hitler’s. And, ultimately, there is a small kernel of truth underlying this comprehensive hatred and guilt. Why, for instance, in all those years since 1923, did a nation of eighty million people not produce a single individual with the courage to shoot the huge beast?

  You ought not to expect a world that has been robbed, besmirched, and destroyed by the Germans to display much interest in the sufferings of the more decent Germans. There are gaping wounds everywhere, over here as well. I have some too.

  I would add: While your anger at professors such as Jung is understandable, it’s also rather pointless. You people need to learn how to stop taking those admonitory sermons personally; any other kind of response betrays a vestige of nationalism.

  TO CARL GEMPERLE

  August 22, 1945

  Thanks for your letter. I do not have sufficient energy to respond adequately. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed by H. Bischoff, and would just like to add that I have never complained about a dearth of readers in Germany, and never had any occasion to do so. Hitler (or rather Goebbels and Rosenberg) wiped me out over there, and even he needed some help from American bombs.

  The average Swiss takes pride in his democratic virtue, even though almost half the governing National Council was still pro-fascist only yesterday. When he sees one of those horror films about German camps, he often forgets that it is not just the Satans and chief devils who are Germans, but also the majority of their victims. And these Germans, who have suffered for years, not just since 1939 but also for years beforehand under Hitler, lost everything, their positions, honor, freedom, and the chance to have any impact; they suffered and starved in prisons and camps, and today they are perhaps the wisest and most mature people in Europe. I have many friends among them.

  TO HIS COUSIN FRITZ GUNDERT

  October 23, 1945

  You wrote some time ago saying that a poem of mine, “Toward Peace,” had been printed in a Stuttgart newspaper and that the final two lines, which were also the most important ones, had been omitted.346 I protested to the press office of the American Army, more as a matter of principle than with any real hope of receiving an answer. I complained about the unauthorized use of the poem and also about its having been mangled. I have just received a less than beautiful reply. I’m enclosing a copy for your information.347 I have not yet decided how (or whether) to respond. I don’t feel I should have to answer in any way to a man capable of writing such a stupid and nasty letter; I am not a vanquished Germanic slave in the occupied area and am not inclined to explain my actions to some little officer. If there is no possibility of a diplomatic approach, our authorities could perhaps lodge a complaint at the American Embasssy, but it’s not clear that they will actually do so, and I may have to respond publicly. In any case, you now know why you will never again come across anything of mine in those newspapers. This affair hasn’t done me any harm; I don’t believe that I shall ever get another penny from Germany. But we heard some good news yesterday, not firsthand, but from a reliable source: Suhrkamp is still alive, and people are trying to get him into Switzerland (I have also tried to be of some help).

  There was a nice letter from Wilhelm Schussen348 in Tübingen. Mergenthalerstrasse, where he used live, is now proudly called Ebertstrasse. That would be fine if the entire German “Republic” had not voted so unanimously for old Hindenburg!

  How often I think of you!

  TO BISHOP THEOPHIL WURM

  Montagnola, November 3, 1945

  Thank you for your letter, which I received the day before yesterday.349 I was extremely sorry to hear that they have not yet given you permission to travel. My experience corroborates what you say about the disinclination of powerful people to think in differentiated terms, etc. As a result of Hitler and Goebbels, I was deprived of the proceeds and resonance of my life’s work, and now the person entrusted by the occupying forces with
the task of reconstituting the German press informs me that I belong to a group of people who will never again be allowed to speak out in Germany. The man may be malicious, but it is more probable that he is just not well enough informed and too complacent to remedy that deficiency. This whole thing is certainly disgusting, yet we are glad that Germany has been defeated and that the daily killing and torturing of thousands of people has finally come to an end. My wife is Jewish and comes from Bukovina; she hasn’t had any news of her only sister for a year, and has lost almost all her relatives and close friends in the gas ovens at Auschwitz, etc. It is certainly true that we are still very much shaken by these events.

  I had no difficulty adopting Swiss citizenship after seeing virtually all of Germany sabotaging its own republic in the early years after the first war and thus showing clearly that the country hadn’t learned anything at all from the war. I hadn’t managed to take that step during the war, in spite of my denunciations of the aggressive tactics of the Germans. As a kind of warning, in one of my books I anxiously sketched the specter of the coming second war, but people just laughed that off politely. So I bade farewell to political Germany. Nowadays I receive many letters from Germans who were still young in 1918; they say that the tone of my essays from those years still rings in their ears, and they wished they, and everybody else, had taken those warnings more seriously at the time.

  Well, it was easier for me than for others not to be a nationalist. Our family was very international, which, of course, accorded well with the mission to the pagans, and I came under the influence early on not just of Luther and Bengel but also of the Indian world. People like my grandfather Gundert and my father had no reason to be nationalists, but another generation needed to emerge before that position was completely clarified. And now we are confronted with such terrifying new situations and tasks! I agree with you that penal measures and the principle of revenge will be of no great use, and that those who are suffering the most at present are precisely the ones who must free themselves from that way of thinking. I often feel glad that I am so old and rickety. But I cannot abandon hope when I think of all that thoughtfulness, goodwill, and insight acquired by dint of suffering; I find traces of that in some of the letters from German friends and readers, especially those in POW camps in England, America, Italy, France, Egypt, etc.

  TO FRANZ GHISLER

  January [ca. 15] 1946

  My wife has just been reading me some selected letters from the heap of still unread mail; she read out a long, moving letter from Dr. Hans Huber in Heidelberg, and I immediately began thinking about my reply. Your letter, which was next because of the postmark, brought very painful tidings of the termination of our forwarding arrangement.350 That will really impede many of my efforts, and it is also happening at a sad moment, since my elder sister351 is hopelessly ill in Korntal.

  The other question, about the street name in Constance,352 fits in with everything else one hears about the concerns and actions of the victors. Let them go ahead and name that little street after Eisenhower, Truman, or somebody else! I really couldn’t care less.

  I’m reluctantly enclosing the Rigi Journal for that officer of yours. If you had not recommended this course, I would never even have made a token gesture indicating any degree of compliance with the victors. But let’s go ahead now.

  I found it odd that one of my crimes, according to America (or rather Herr Bekessy), is that I wasn’t delighted when the German cities were destroyed. The people who come up with ideas like that! Actually, it’s a great exaggeration to call them “ideas.” I have never criticized the way the Americans conducted the war, either in private or in public, but have always fully supported it, even though I was not sufficiently blind to miss the fact that American’s entry into the war was, to some extent, a good economic move. No, I welcomed every Allied victory. But this is the first time anybody has ever demanded that I should be delighted by the by-products of these victories: the destruction of so many cities and cathedrals, libraries and publishing houses (including my entire life’s work).

  No, I shall not get involved, and if America insists, it can go ahead and ban me for the next fifty or a hundred years. The intellect cannot prevail against force, just as quality cannot compete with quantity. We want to die without ever having made even the slightest concession to those surface currents in world history.

  So I shall keep sending you some printed matter occasionally; I would like to send a lot of people a copy of the New Year speech.

  TO THE AMERICAN EMBASSY

  [never sent]

  Montagnola, January 25, 1946

  As you know, in the fall of 1945 a certain Captain Habe, who was at the time managing editor of several newspapers published by the American Army, wrote to me stating that I didn’t deserve to be heard and shouldn’t be allowed to play any literary role whatsoever in present-day Germany. I never answered that strange letter; Herr Habe’s tone was so arrogant and hostile that I couldn’t possibly have responded, especially since he apparently knows nothing of my work, political convictions, and public impact. Moreover, I have no particular ambition to write for the current German press.

  Some references to this ridiculous affair have appeared in a portion of the Swiss press—due to the efforts of some friends to whom I had mentioned Habe’s letter—to the effect that America has placed me on a “blacklist” or forbidden my works in Germany. At that point I wrote to the newspapers that had insisted on leaping to my defense, saying that they should let the matter rest at that, and through a few telephone calls, I was able to prevent several papers, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in particular, from running a story about this incident.

  I received another letter recently from Herr Habe, and I am enclosing a copy. He takes it for granted that I “launched” those press commentaries, and then proceeds to engage in further invectives against me.

  In any case, I wish to insist that I had nothing to do with the decision certain Swiss papers made to speak out on this matter. I have never regarded the attacks of this Herr Habe, whom I have never answered, as official American pronouncements, and merely see them as an expression of that gentleman’s impertinence.

  I sent my friend Thomas Mann a copy of Habe’s first letter, in which he accused me of not having bombarded Hitler with articles and radio talks the way Thomas Mann did, and enclose Mann’s answer, but would like to add that this letter is purely for your information and should not be passed on or publicized in any way.

  I am not expecting an answer or statement from you; I merely wished to inform you about this matter.

  Respectfully

  TO ERNST MORGENTHALER

  Montagnola, February 1, 1946

  [ … ] As regards Richard Strauss,353 I fear that your hunch will turn out to be true: no matter what you do, you will end up regretting your decision. That is one of the disgusting things about the present situation. All the fronts overlap, and so just after having done the right thing, one keeps on asking oneself: Have I made the wrong decision? That happens to me too.

  Strauss was in Baden when I was there, and I carefully avoided making his acquaintance, even though I felt he was a fine old gentleman, very much to my liking. Once, after I had arranged one evening to see the Markwalders at a certain time, they told me that would be fine, since Strauss was going to be there at the same time and was looking forward to meeting me. I withdrew, saying that I did not wish to get to know Strauss. Naturally, he was not told in quite that way; they came up with some sort of excuse for my absence.

  The fact that Strauss has Jewish relatives is, of course, neither a recommendation nor an excuse. The existence of those relatives should have prevented him from accepting any advantages and homages from the Nazis, especially since he already had more than his fill of riches. He was at an age when he could have withdrawn and kept his distance. His inability to do so may conceivably be a product of his vitality. For him “life” means success, homages, a huge income, banquets, festival performances, etc
., etc. He could not live without that—and wouldn’t have wanted to—and so he wasn’t wily enough to resist the devil. We don’t have any right to reproach him in any substantive way. But I think we have a right to keep our distance.

  That’s all I can say. Ultimately, Strauss will always win, since he will never pull out his hair or allow himself any pangs of conscience. Even though he adapted to the Nazis, he was one of the very few Germans whom the victors immediately permitted to travel to Switzerland. It’s been six months since several others, just as old as he, who suffered and were imprisoned under Hitler, received an invitation from Switzerland to spend time convalescing here, but the victorious powers have not yet let them out. The very thought is enough to give one heartburn.

  TO WALTHER MEIER

  [Early March 1946]

  Many thanks for the welcome books and letter.

  Naturally enough, the beautiful offprints354 came not from the Zurich newspaper—a nice idea like that would never have occurred to them—but from a friend of mine, who had it printed for me at his expense, since the issue in which the letter appeared was immediately sold out.

  On Friday, Bishop Wurm of Württemberg spent half a day here with me. He has had an invitation to visit Switzerland since last summer, but the Americans have only let him out now, obviously because they did not want to be responsible for the nonappearance of an important participant at the ecumenical church conference. Whereas they had no problem giving an exit visa to that darling of the Nazis, Richard Strauss. And Hitler’s favorite artist, the sculptor who produced that ultra-life-size, monumental kitsch for him,355 thereby earning himself millions, is just as popular now with the Americans, and his income is almost back to its previous level. Similarly, at the University of Milan, virtually all the old fascist professors are still thriving. Everything has been in vain.