[In the following essay, Fickert discusses the central role of the glass bead game to Das Glasperlenspiel.]

The fantasy underlying Hermann Hesse's futuristic novel Das Glasperlenspiel is rather limited in scope. The world in the twenty-third century, as Hesse envisions it, has not changed in essence from what it is in the twentieth. As a matter of fact, means of transportation seem to have retrogressed: Locomotion on foot prevails, and travel by air is not even mentioned. Only in respect to the book's two central symbols has Hesse essayed an imaginative approach to the future. He has invented a country, Castalia, where an intellectual elite harbor and preserve the cultural achievements of mankind and where these chosen few engage in an activity known as the glass bead game. These two endeavors on the part of the Castalians are supported by their less-gifted kindred throughout the world in the belief (it must be assumed) that the activities of the Castalians will give meaning to their own insignificant lives. Castalia and the game are intimately related: The country exists for the sake of promoting the practice of the game and for an annual public demonstration of its subtleties. The game itself is therefore the unifying factor in the novel, the focal point in the life of its protagonist, and the touchstone by which he judges his associates. As a symbol of such monumental import, the game has unfortunately, but perhaps necessarily, rather vague contours.

An account of the genesis of Das Glasperlenspiel must begin with a notation Hesse made on the back of a letter he had received. He outlined there a novel that would concern itself with the successive reincarnations of a protagonist that were to take place in various historical epochs, beginning with the primeval and ending with the yet-to-be. “Even less actuality, even more fantasy” is Hesse's admonition to himself in regard to this future state of affairs.¹ In extended comments on this last phase in the unidentified protagonist's series of rebirths, Hesse elaborates on the symbol of the glass bead game he has already named. He reminds himself that the game will not be easy for the reader to visualize, “since it is very complicated, and has furthermore not yet been invented.”² In these tentative notes, the game, so Hesse suggests, represents “the world symphony,” consisting of many categories—music, history, space, mathematics (underlined). “X,” the novel's featureless hero, is depicted by Hesse as playing the game as though it were an instrument, varying its pseudo-music according to the styles of Bach and Mozart, but also in the manner of Plato. The players of the esoteric game, so Hesse proposes, devote themselves to it to the exclusion of all else, specifically all purposeful activities. Hesse soon began to flesh out this hastily drawn skeleton of a novel, and he subsequently published in various magazines brief sections, principally the Lebensläufe, the protagonist's “biographies,” as he finished them, together with some of Das Glasperlenspiel's poetry. In the meantime, he described his progress on the work to his friends. He confided to Thomas Mann that he was writing a book concerning a mental musical-mathematical game.³ Another reference in his correspondence has led George Wallis Field to conclude that the concept of the game was derived from the card game of Dichterquartett and that “the beads were first used as a kind of abacus to record points won—blue for the poets, red for the musicians, etc.”⁴ Except for these passing remarks on the game while the novel was being written, Hesse left it in essence unexplicated, a play of fancy in the work itself. Following the publication of Das Glasperlenspiel, he commented only on his unwillingness to expound on its features other than as they appear in the book.

The historian-biographer who introduces the story of Josef Knecht also gives an account of the origin of the glass bead game. It came into being, he reports, in a bourgeois age as an activity that provided a refuge for those overwhelmed by the sham culture of a money-oriented society. The game had a crude system of notation subsequently supplanted by an abacus-like arrangement of glass beads, which Bastian Perrot of Calw had proposed. The next improvement in the game involved the elimination of the beads themselves; the ideas they represented became independent of any physical presence. Hesse here implies that the game has dispensed with writing, the use of words, and that therefore it is not a patent symbol for the literary arts. At this point, so the story goes in Das Glasperlenspiel, Joculator Basiliensis developed what had been the private pursuit of intellectuals into a game of universal scope; Castalia came into existence, together with the Castalians, their hierarchy, and their educational system. Now, in the biographer's purview, Josef Knecht enters upon the scene, educated in the schools of Castalia and chosen to continue his studies in exclusive institutes of higher learning in order to be trained to become one of the expert players of the glass bead game. Eventually he is made magister ludi, the master of the game, and achieves the rank of a legendary figure in the history of this country harboring all of culture and an arcane activity.

The autobiographical element predominates in this account of the career of the most famous of the Glasperlenspieler. In the person of the biographer who draws upon reminiscenes, official papers, juvenilia, unpublished poetry—that is, all available sources—Hesse is again the compiler of documents that the editor of Harry Haller's, the Steppenwolf's, papers was; he is the historian of the League of Travelers: H. H. He tells his own story: The anonymous chronicler Hermann Hesse explores the life and work of Josef Knecht; the name is the new pseudonym for Hermann Hesse. Knecht—also Dasa and Famulus in the “Biographies”—depicts the author as servant and conveys Hesse's belief that the artist has a mission: He lives his life and recreates it in service to mankind. “Art,” he has said, “is as indispensable as bread; for that reason I have devoted my life, often at the cost of personal sacrifice, to being an artist. … Art belongs to the functions of humanity that serve to ensure that humanity and truth continue to exist.”⁵ Therefore, the name Josef is also appropriate, since it designates the artist figure; at the time of Das Glasperlenspiel's composition, Mann, with whom Hesse felt he had a special affinity, was publishing his series of Joseph novels concerning an outsider-intellectual who becomes a “provider,” the protector of his people. The relationship of Castalia to the world that supports its existence duplicates that that exists between the artist and the public. The Castalians are not allowed to be productive in the sense that they might manufacture a product or plant a crop. They engage only in a play of fancy, represented as the glass bead game. Like the artist, they live for the sake of exercising their imaginations. In his analysis of the meaningfulness of artistic endeavor, Hesse proposes that the promulgation or publication of the results of the artist's playfulness is important only insofar as a few more people will thereafter also be inspired to become artists.

In the novel the glass bead game is further developed through the efforts of such incipient Castalians. One of them, Bastian Perrot of Calw, had first introduced the use of glass beads: He is Hermann Hesse once more, since “Perrot” refers to the clockworks factory in which Hesse once worked as a young man, and “Bastian” is probably a passing reference to Johann Sebastian Bach. I find it less likely but not improbable that Bastian is a shortened form of Saint Sebastian, who generally represents the suffering outsider-artist. Hesse's invention of names for the novel's characters and places has the complexity and playfulness of the game itself. The final phase in its development, as the chronicler in Das Glasperlenspiel reveals, came about through the efforts of Joculator Basiliensis, who dispensed with the glass beads so that the abstractions they symbolized could function by themselves. “Joculator” suggests the clown; in his article “Hagiography and Humor in Hesse's Glasperlenspiel,” Erhard Friedrichsmeyer proposes that “Perrot” in its similarity to the French “Pierrot” is a prior form of “Joculator.”⁶ Once again, in associating this contributor to the game with the city of Basel, where he lived for a number of years, Hesse identifies himself as the game's creator; and once again he makes the point that its essential nature is its fancifulness. Since Basel is indeed the home of Jacob Burckhardt, perhaps Hesse is foreshadowing the appearance of Pater Jakobus; in this event playfulness would be rampant. As Friedrichsmeyer has also emphasized, the situation is expressly paradoxical, since Hesse takes his fancies seriously: His glass bead game is humanity's greatest achievement, defined as “the unio mystica of the separate branches of the universitas litterarum,”⁷ that is, the sum total and intrinsic worth of all the arts.

The high point in the life of Josef Knecht is his seven-year tenure as magister ludi, master of the game; his contributions to it constitute the basis for his having become the legend the novel sets out to tell many years after his death. He has been responsible for both the perpetuation and the refinement of the glass bead game. The novel's events and characters—such as they are—reflect Josef Knecht's confrontations with the Glasperlenspiel. His decision to devote himself to a career in Castalia comes about because of his adulation of the Old Music Master. This saintly man—his death is a kind of transcendence—exemplifies tranquility for Hesse-Knecht, the artist who does not have to struggle with words to express what exists in the world of the imagination. But Knecht lacks the capacity to emulate the serenity of the Old Music Master. Furthermore, as a musician rather than a composer, he, unlike Knecht, has no desire to become magister ludi; indeed, he even expresses some reservations about the significance of the game. Under these circumstances, it becomes difficult to accept the theory, put forth by I. Halpert, that the Music Master is a literary portrait of Goethe, drawn by Hesse in blind devotion. Field has helped to clarify the relationship between music and the game by indicating that they manifest a parent-child kinship: Music is a reproduction of the concept that originally came into being in the imagination. The composer, in creating music, has been involved in the playing of the glass bead game; the musician, in playing the music, is a once-removed participant. In this way, Knecht's achievement is ultimately greater than his mentor's, and Hesse finds consolation in being a writer.

The magister ludi's most devoted disciple among the Castalians, Fritz Tegularius, is another portrait of a player of the game, but one who lacks Knecht's brilliance. Critics generally agree that the character is related symbolically to Friedrich (that is, Fritz) Nietzsche. As a Dichter (writer and poet), Nietzsche represents an artist whose role is closer to Hesse's than that of the composers whom he envies. Because of the flawed performance of Tegularius, the Nietzsche surrogate, and Knecht's acknowledgment of it, the reader of Das Glasperlenspiel is enabled to distinguish between the game as a symbol for the literary arts and the game as a symbol for the more nebulous but more significant art of creative thinking, the interplay of ideas, an act of creative imagination. Tegularius's fault seems to be arrogance, the inability to differentiate between the importance of the game and the brilliance of the player. Apparently, Hesse felt that Nietzsche considered the artist to be greater than his art. For Knecht the lot of the individual Castalian is insignificant in the face of the necessity of ensuring that the game survive. Although the hierarchy insists that his superior performance as magister ludi precludes his abandoning his post, Knecht perseveres in carrying out his decision to leave Castalia. Knecht's actions at the end of the novel are not those of the master of the game, but those of an individual writer, namely Hesse, who is still a player of the glass bead game, even though he must put the world of Castalia behind him. To an extent, Mark Boulby has considered the book to be for Hesse the equivalent of playing the game: “And the game which Knecht plays,” he suggests, “is similar to that game played by the author of the novel, ‘to make Castalia visible’, to evoke for the reader an ideal dream.”⁸

The symbol of the game, nevertheless, has a wider significance than that of representing the writing of a novel. Castalia's game does contain some parallels to Hesse's literary career, as critics have pointed out. Joseph Mileck, for example, compares Knecht's seven games as magister ludi to Hesse's seven major tales.⁹ Concurrently, he finds that “the game becomes the passion for Knecht that writing had become for Hesse.”¹⁰ In a more general way, Mark Boulby equates the game with literature: “It is evident,” he proposes, “that the periodic stylistic mutations of the Game are a metaphor for literature.”¹¹ The fact that Thomas von der Trave, whom Knecht follows as magister ludi, is patently a literary portrait of Thomas Mann of Lübeck on the Trave River likewise leads to the too-pat conclusion that literature and the game are synonymous. But Hesse's word-picture of Mann does not lack an element of gentle satire. As a master of the game, Thomas von der Trave is too much the novelist whom critics have labeled the ironic German. Hesse respects the sharpness of Mann's intellect, the sophistication of his humor, but he seems to find lacking in Mann's work das Märchenhafte, the touch of the poet, that is present both in the inventions of Hermann Hesse and in the games of Josef Knecht, the legendary glass bead game player.

An episode in Knecht's career that causes him to take an objective look at Castalia and its game, his visit to Pater Jakobus, should—it would seem—provide occasion for the reader to gain further insight into the nature of the game. Jakobus, head of a Benedictine-like order, has a real-life counterpart, someone like Mann whom Hesse admired, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. In the novel he conveys a skeptical point of view in regard to Castalia's contributions to mankind. Jakobus is less a representative of the Church hierarchy than a historian, as Hesse portrays him; therefore, his suspicion of intellectuals and writers is difficult to account for, if not perhaps his suspicion of artists. In essence he is a realist who is convinced that playfulness and idealism, which created Castalia and the game, are transient phenomena, like all phenomena. These reservations on the Pater's (and Hesse's) part about the durability of art and the concept of immortality are set aside by Knecht's good nature and his deftness as an ambassador. Reality acknowledges the importance of the fanciful; Pater Jakobus is won over. At the same time, Knecht has discovered that the artist has a counterpart in the world outside of Castalia, the intellectual whose ruminations lead to action instead of works of art. Knecht also finds some part of this worldliness in himself. He takes this self-recognition back to Castalia with him; and while he is most successfully involved in creating with the imagination, he holds in abeyance his newly recognized desire to take action. At the end of the novel, he chooses Pater Jakobus's world of participation over Castalia's world of contemplation, knowing, however, that Castalia and the glass bead game will persevere and that his devotion to it has not been in vain.

The game Hesse's fancy produced has the boundlessness of the imagination itself. To an extent, the history of its coming into being in Hesse's mind can be traced, for it is clearly related to Plato's concept of ideals and somewhat less clearly to Kant's speculations about das Ding an sich. It must also be assumed that Hesse had read in one of his favorite authors, the German Romanticist Novalis, about a game of ideas played on a chessboard. Of more immediate import, one of Hesse's cherished memories must have been an instance in which his father's fondness for games played a part. In his memoir about his father, he recalls their last meeting. His father lay on his deathbed. They spent their last hours together reciting Latin maxims, alternately and in alphabetical order. In Hesse's work, an inkling of what is to be the glass bead game first comes into play in “Klein und Wagner,” where the concept of the Magic Theater is evolved. This realm of the free exercise of the imagination is fully elaborated in Der Steppenwolf. In the same book, the individual's free play of fancy is complemented by the depiction of the sphere inhabited by the Immortals, Hesse's symbol for the indestructible world of art. This magic realm Hesse transposed in Die Morgenlandfahrt into the League of Travelers. But the concept of the imagination in all its grandeur and ambiguity found its most apt expression in Das Glasperlenspiel. According to Joseph Mileck, “only simile and metaphor can shed light [on it]”¹²—and, I would hope, to some extent this wide-ranging analysis.

Notes

1. Autograph in the Hesse Nachlass, Marbach a. N., reproduced (in translation) in Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 256.

2. Ibid.

3. Hermann Hesse, Briefe (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1951), 125.

4. George Wallis Field, Hermann Hesse (New York: Twayne, 1970), 151.

5. Hesse, Briefe, 176: “Dass Kunst so notwendig sei wie Brot, ist auch mein Standpunkt, eben darum habe ich mein Leben, und oft unter Opfern, darauf verwendet, Künstler zu sein. … Die Kunst gehört zu den Funktionen der Menschheit, die dafür sorgen, dass Menschlichkeit und Wahrheit fortbestehen.” My translation.

6. Erhard Friedrichsmeyer, “Hagiography and Humor in Hesse's Glasperlenspiel,” in Hermann Hesse Heute, ed. Adrian Hsia (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1980), 259-60.

7. Hermann Hesse, Die Romane und die grossen Erzählungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 7, 37: “Unio Mystica aller getrennten Glieder der Universitas Litterarum.” My translation.

8. Mark Boulby, Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 302.

9. Mileck, Hermann Hesse, 275.

10. Ibid., 271.

11. Boulby, Hermann Hesse, 273.

12. Mileck, Hermann Hesse, 333.