Soul of the Age

by Hermann Hesse

  238. The Glass Bead Game.

  239. Boyhood friend of Hesse’s; later mayor of Göppingen.

  240. Kafka’s friend and executor, Max Brod, wrote to Hesse on December 1, 1926: “I don’t know whether I have ever told you that Franz Kafka loved your works and, although he usually didn’t pay much attention to criticism, the receipt of a review of yours was one of the final pleasures he had as he lay on his deathbed in Kierling.”

  241. Hesse and Hubacher were both friends of the Swiss painter Ernst Morgenthaler and his wife, Sasha.

  242. André Gide’s letter of March 11, 1933, read:

  “Depuis longtemps je désire vous écrire. Cette pensée me tourmente—que l’un de nous deux puisse quitter la terre sans que vous ayez eu ma sympathie profonde pour chacun des livres de vous que j’ai lus. Entre tous, Demian et Knulp m’ont ravi. Puis ce délicieux et mystérieux Morgenlandfahrt el enfin votre Goldmund, que je n’ai pas encore achevé—et que je déguste lentement, craignant de l’achever trop vite.

  “Les admirateurs que vous avez en France (et je vous en récrute sans cesse de nouveaux) ne sont peut-être pas encore trés nombreux, mais d’autant plus fervents. Aucun d’eux ne saurait être plus attentif ni plus ému que André Gide.”

  243. From 1905 to 1933, Hesse wrote fifteen reviews of works by Gide, in which he tried to spark interest in his works (WA, 12:417–19).

  244. Director of the pharmaceutical division of a Basel chemical firm. Hesse met him in 1924 during his first cure at Baden. Stoll supplied Hesse with medicaments in return for books, paintings, and special printings.

  245. “Statement of Allegiance to Socialism” (letter to Adolf Grimme, Minister for Education), in Sozialistische Bildung, Berlin, February 1933.

  246. Hesse was offering his friends manuscripts of poems illustrated with colored drawings. The following note was attached:

  “In the summer of 1933, I wrote a small cycle of poems (eleven in number). Since they cannot be published at present, and since the situation in Germany is such that my income has sunk to the level of the inflation years, I would ask any friends of mine who can afford it to purchase a copy of these poems, either for themselves or as a gift for somebody else. I have copied the text on very fine paper, and illustrated it with colored drawings. No two copies are identical, each is different in some way. Handwritten copies cost from 200 to 250 francs, depending on the particular request; typed copies are 150 francs.”

  247. Adele Gundert.

  248. “Besinnung” (“Contemplation”) (Gedichte, p. 623).

  249. The concordat between Germany and the Vatican was signed by Vice-Chancellor von Papen and Cardinal Pacelli, the State Secretary, on July 20, 1933.

  250. Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, a scholar in religious studies and an expert on India, who served for some time as head of the German Movement for the Faith.

  251. Painter and graphic artist, illustrated several of Hesse’s books and designed the dust jackets for all his works in the Suhrkamp editions.

  252. “Bird,” a nickname for Hesse.

  253. The Lion and the Tiger: Hesse’s young cats.

  254. The widow of the publicist Heinrich Wiegand.

  255. In 1933, Hesse gave the typewritten manuscript of his fairy tale “Vogel,” with illustrations by Gunter Böhmer, as a Christmas gift to his patron H. C. Bodmer (WA, 6:460ff).

  256. Painted eggs from Romania.

  257. Vom Baum des Lebens: Ausgewählte Gedichte (Leipzig, 1934).

  258. “The Fourth Life of Josef Knecht”; originally intended as part of The Glass Bead Game.

  259. Erich Mühsam, poet, dramatist, essayist. In 1919, as a member of the “revolutionary workers’ council,” he took part in the proclamation of the Bavarian Republic of Soviets. He was tortured to death in the Oranienburg concentration camp.

  260. Hesse’s publisher Samuel Fischer died on October 15, 1934.

  261. In a column in the cultural section of the National-Zeitung of January 13, 1935, the author accuses the S. Fischer Verlag of opportunism vis-à-vis the Nazi leadership because of a deleted footnote in Die Schaukel, a novel by Annette Kolb.

  262. The footnote reads: “Ever since the day when the Jews gained some influence in intellectual life, artists began to sense the presence of certain opportunities, and they no longer had to contend with their former hardship, which often amounted in subjective terms to an absolute standstill.[ … ] These days we are a small band of Christians in Germany who remain conscious of our indebtedness to Judaism.”

  263. Bonniers Litterära Magasin.

  264. The introduction to The Glass Bead Game (published in Die Neue Rundschau, December 1934).

  265. The Schweizer Journal had declared itself insolvent.

  266. On his way back from Rome, the physician and writer Hans Carossa visited Hesse in Montagnola.

  267. Painter; designed the cover and title page for Die Morgenlandfahrt (The Journey to the East).

  268. Indische Sphären (1935).

  269. “On Reading the Summa Contra Gentiles.”

  270. The lawyer Dr. Wolfram Kimmig had the power of attorney over Hesse’s bank account in Constance, Germany.

  271. Stunden im Garten (Vienna: Bermann-Fischer, 1936).

  272. Hesse’s brother Hans, who lived in Baden (near Zurich).

  273. Hans Hesse’s wife.

  274. Hans Hesse had worked twenty-four years for the Brown Boveri Corporation.

  275. Transcribed from a copy of the letter, without any initial greeting.

  276. The choir of the choral society, to which Hans Hesse had belonged.

  277. Possibly an illustration for Adalbert Stifter’s stories Der Hagestolz (1852) or Abdias (1853).

  278. Wilhelm Schmidtbonn, short-story writer, novelist, and playwright.

  279. Since November 1935, Hesse had been the target of venomous and slanderous assertions by Lily Birmer and Will Vesper in the journal Die Neue Literatur. Vesper criticized Hesse for writing book reviews in Bonniers Litterära Magasin “for Jewish money.” Vesper himself had been Hesse’s predecessor, but was fired for spreading National Socialist propaganda. He went on to say that, while Hesse “praised” books by Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and other authors inimical to the Third Reich, he had only critical things to say about the “new German literature” of the Third Reich.

  280. Die Ernte aus acht Jahrhunderten deutscher Lyrik (1906–10), an anthology of poetry in two volumes, edited by Will Vesper.

  281. On January 11, 1936, Leopold Schwarzschild had described the publisher Gottfried Bermann Fischer as the “token Jew in the National Socialist book trade” in a periodical of the German émigrés in France, Das neue Tage-Buch. He claimed that there was “considerable suspicion that the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin is a silent partner” behind Fischer’s efforts to set up his publishing house in Switzerland or Vienna. Whereupon Thomas Mann, Hesse, and Annette Kolb published a letter of protest in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “[Gottfried Bermann Fischer] is in the process of securing new quarters for the S. Fischer Verlag abroad, in a German-speaking country. The aforementioned article hinders these efforts by … making it seem … as if they had already broken down … The undersigned hereby declare that to the best of their knowledge the accusations expressed and intimated in the Tage-Buch article are both unjustified and harmful to the person involved.” In the Pariser Tageblatt of January 19, 1936, Georg Bernhard printed the full text of this protest letter and then asserted in his editorial, “The Case of S. Fischer,” that the Third Reich was using Thomas Mann, Hesse, and Annette Kolb as window dressing. He asserted that Hesse and Kolb were helping “to deceive the outside world” by contributing to the Frankfurter Zeitung, that “fig leaf of the Third Reich,” and thus lending support to Dr. Goebbels: “Their position shows that they don’t feel morally bound to avoid dealings with the propaganda apparatus of the Third Reich.” Hesse also published an immediate rebuttal of this article, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

  282. Georg Bernhard’s editor
ial in the Pariser Tageblatt, January 19, 1936.

  283. Mann was working on the third volume of his Joseph tetrology, Joseph in Egypt.

  284. The Martin Bodmer Foundation in Zurich awarded Hesse the Gottfried Keller Prize (6,000 francs) on March 28, 1936. It was the first literary prize Hesse had received since 1904, when he was awarded the Viennese Bauemfeld Prize for Peter Camenzind.

  285. About Julien Green’s novel Le Visionnaire.

  286. Stunden im Garten.

  287. Neue Gedichte (Berlin, 1937).

  288. With a biographical sketch by Fr. Kaphahn (1935).

  289. Hesse had asked Korradi (possibly in exchange for a manuscript of a poem with Hesse’s own illustrations) for three books which had just appeared in Germany: Reinhard Buchwald, Schiller; Daniel Chodowiecki, Von Berlin nach Danzig; and Ernst Hello, Abglanz.

  290. Fortunat Strowski, Vom Wesen des französischen Geistes (1937).

  291. The fairy tale “Der Dichter” or “Weg zur Kunst” was written in 1913.

  292. The plan was never carried out. In the preliminary sketches for The Glass Bead Game, however, there is mention of a learned article by Josef Knecht, “Some Hypotheses about the Pre-Confucian Commentaries on the I Ching,” which is said to have appeared in print.

  293. “The Attempt at a Comprehensible Historical Introduction,” which had just been published separately.

  294. Frühling und Herbst des Lü Bu We, translated by Richard Wilhelm (1929).

  295. The philologist and publicist Anni Carlsson.

  296. Buber, the writer and philosopher of religion, was appointed professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1938 and left Germany in March of that year.

  297. The racist anthropologist Ernst Krieck, professor at the universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg, who, in an article in his journal Volk im Werden, “Death Throes: A Final Word about Thomas Mann,” had called Mann a senile, destructive liar who would have to be “cleared out” of Germany.

  298. Swiss author, who published three novels, including Jakob von Gunten (English translation by Christopher Middleton; New York: Vintage, 1983), and a large number of short prose pieces before entering an asylum in Waldau, near Bern, on January 25, 1929. Three selections from his shorter works have appeared in English: Selected Stories, trans. Christopher Middleton (1982), Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy Tale Plays and Critical Responses, ed. Mark Harman, trans. Walter Arndt (1985), and Masquerade and Other Stories, trans Susan Bernofsky (1990).

  299. Rudolf Kassner, philosopher and essayist. Hesse had championed his writings in several reviews (the first appeared as early as 1900). Hesse wrote on November 28, 1937, in the Basel newspaper National-Zeitung that Max Picard and Kassner, “who often says the exact opposite, but corroborates him just as often, are the two really genuine physiognomists nowadays, at least in the German-speaking world.”

  300. A small watercolor by Hesse.

  301. An Expressionist poet.

  302. Dr. Emil Schäffer, author of Habsburger schreiben Briefe and a monograph on Hermann Hubacher, the Swiss sculptor and friend of Hesse’s.

  303. Son of Thomas Mann; drama critic and writer.

  304. E. T. A. Hoffmann.

  305. Author of patriotic novels.

  306. “Im Presselschen Gartenhaus” (“In the Garden House at Pressels”), a story set in Tübingen in the 1820s (WA 4:387ff).

  307. “Nachtgedanken” (“Night Thoughts”) (Gedichte, pp. 665–66).

  308. An illustrated manuscript version of the fairy tale “Piktor’s Metamorphoses.”

  309. “Alle Tode” (Gedichte, p. 457).

  310. An introduction to Zen Buddhism, with a preface by C. G. Jung (1939).

  311. The Glass Bead Game.

  312. Since September 1933, the writer Max Herrmann-Neisse had been living with his wife in voluntary exile in London.

  313. The last version (April 3, 1940) of “Flötenspiel” (“Flute Music”) (Gedichte, p. 673).

  314. Conrad Haussmann, a former contributor to the journal März.

  315. The family of Otto Rosenfeld, a businessman, who lived close to the Haussmanns in the Hohenzollernstrasse in Stuttgart. The correspondence between Hesse and Otto Rosenfeld was never found.

  316. Czernowitz in Bukovina, the easternmost tip of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  317. Walter Weiss (no other information available).

  318. Journalist and writer; emigrated to the United States in 1933.

  319. Author of novels, short stories, and poetry.

  320. Lilly and Heinz Kehlmann.

  321. Luise Rinser’s first book (1941). Hesse gave copies as a present to many of his friends.

  322. Franz Schubert: Sein Leben (1941).

  323. Cement manufacturer and patron of the arts; Hesse’s close friend.

  324. Thomas Mann’s grandson.

  325. Die Gedichte (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1942), the first collected edition, which included 608 poems.

  326. Marie Hesse was born on October 18, 1842, in Tellicherry, India.

  327. On November 25, 1942, Peter Suhrkamp brought the manuscript of The Glass Bead Game back to Switzerland. In 1945, he described the situation as follows: “The Glass Bead Game was supposed to appear in 1942. The Ministry of Propaganda prevented its publication because of one chapter, which takes place in a monastery. The Glass Bead Game deals with the form and history of a pedagogical province in a utopian country, in which politics and culture are administered separately. Responsibility for the culture of the country is vested exclusively in a synod consisting of the most productive minds. The work emphatically criticizes the impact of literary journalism on language and intellectual matters.” Excerpt from Suhrkamp’s statement to the military government when he was requesting a license for his publishing house in Berlin in 1945.

  328. Printed in a special issue on March 18, 1943.

  329. The National-Zeitung was the only daily newspaper in which Hesse’s critical book reviews could appear from 1920 to 1938.

  330. Walser was an inmate in an asylum at Herisau in the canton of Appenzell Ausser-Rhoden. In 1933, he had stopped writing, after having being transferred against his will from another institution at Waldau, near Bern.

  331. Louis Moilliet.

  332. Georg Reinhart.

  333. Alice and Fritz Leuthold.

  334. Clangor in the Latin of the motto.

  335. The carpet weaver Maria Geroe-Tobler. Hesse wrote a contemplative piece about a carpet of hers depicting a pair of lovers, “Über einen Teppich” (“On a Carpet”) (Die Kunst des Müssiggangs, pp. 340ff).

  336. Zwischen Sommer und Herbst (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1944).

  337. The marriage of Martin and Isabelle Hesse took place on July 22, 1944.

  338. Elisabeth La Roche, teacher of dance and choreographer.

  339. Pastor G. Schläpfer of Sirnach.

  340. The portfolio consisted of twenty-three poems, which Hesse wrote while in the mental clinic at Stetten. They are dedicated to Hesse’s early “love” in Cannstatt, Eugenie Kolb, whose acquaintance he had made through his brother Theo.

  341. The psychoanalyst Josef B. Lang.

  342. J. B. Lang, “Hat ein Gott die Well erschaffen?” Zur Theologie und Anthropologie von Genesis I–II, 4a; ein exegetischer Versuch (1942).

  343. “Dem Frieden entgegen,” (“Toward Peace”) (Gedichte, p. 695).

  344. At the end of January 1945, Peter Suhrkamp was released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in a virtually moribund condition.

  345. Günther Friedrich, a relative of Hesse’s, was a POW in England at the time.

  346. Written for Radio Basel on the occasion of the cessation of hostilities, the poem ends with the verses: “Wish. Hope. Love. / And the earth will again be yours.”

  347. A letter from the “Press and Publications Section of the Twelfth U.S. Army Group.” The writer Hans Habe, then chief editor of the German newspapers appearing in the American zone of occ
upation and entrusted by the Americans with the task of reconstituting the German press, had accused Hesse in a letter of October 8, 1945, of failing to “scream to the heavens” in protest against the Nazi regime as Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and Franz Werfel had done, and of having chosen instead “to remain elegantly isolated in Ticino.” Hesse called the mutilation of his poem “a barbaric act,” whereupon Habe seized on that phrase and lectured Hesse on the barbarism of recent history, concluding as follows: “But we believe that Hermann Hesse has forfeited any right to speak in Germany, ever again.” Habe referred to this incident on several other occasions, but his position varied and it was also contradictory. For the Habe letter, see appendix to Hesse, Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 3, p. 533.

  348. A writer and poet and friend of Hesse’s.

  349. In a letter of November 2, 1945, to Franz Xaver Münzel, Hesse had observed: “The (Protestant) Diocesan Bishop Wurm wrote to me yesterday saying that he had read my essays from the period around 1918 and must admit that he would have rejected them out of hand at that time, but that he found them utterly convincing today. And in twenty-five years some people will understand my current ideas and approve of them.”

  350. Franz Ghisler, the Swiss Consul in Constance, relayed Hesse’s letters to and from southern Germany.

  351. Adele Gundert.

  352. The former Hermann-Hesse-Way in Constance, which in the Nazi period had been renamed the Ludwig-Finckh-Way, was given back its old name.

  353. Morgenthaler was supposed to do a portrait of Richard Strauss.

  354. Of the “Letter to Adele,” which had appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of February 10, 1946.

  355. Josef Thorak.

  356. “Der gestohlene Koffer” (WA, 8:393ff).

  357. The writer Friedo Lampe.

  358. The Weeping and the Laughter (1947).

  359. Maass edited the Stockholm Neue Rundschau from 1945 to 1952.

  360. At the end of May, Hesse had written as follows to his son Bruno: “Just recently everything seemed to have been arranged so that our guests could enter the country, but the bestial American and French authorities are continually producing additional requirements and harassments and thereby preventing two ill and starving old women from undertaking a convalescent journey. I derive a certain amount of bitter satisfaction from this age-old spectacle: the victors are becoming more and more like beasts and are transforming their natural right into an injustice. That is one of the most uncanny laws of world history.”