SOURCE: Wilde, Lawrence. “The Radical Appeal of Hermann Hesse's Alternative Community.” Utopian Studies 10, no. 1 (winter 1999): 86-93.

[In the following essay, Wilde considers Hesse's portrayal of flawed utopias in his novels.]

I am at odds with the political thinkers of all trends, and I shall always, incorrigibly, recognise in man, in the individual man and his soul, the existence of realms to which political impulses and forms do not extend.

(ITWGO [If The War Goes On … Reflections on War and Politics], 11)¹

Detachment, Autonomy, and the quest for spiritual self-fulfilment are the key themes in the novels of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), and they do not obviously lend themselves to a political reading. However, in his final two novels, The Journey to the East, published in 1932, and The Glass Bead Game, published in 1943, he creates alternative enlightened communities and grapples with the question of how they might relate to the world at large. As Martin Buber remarked, ‘the spirit is in the last analysis a collective one’ (Buber, 30-31), an interpretation which Hesse accepted without demur (Glatzer & Mendes-Flohr, 611). The novels retain his well established philosophical rejection of the spiritual vacuity of modern life, but overcome the individualistic disengagement implicit in his earlier work. In this paper I outline Hesse's principal social philosophical precepts and then concentrate on the utopian elements of his work on alternative community in his final two novels, particularly The Glass Bead Game, set in the monasticlike society of Castalia in the twenty-third century.

I shall argue that although he deliberately creates a flawed utopia, he retains a utopian striving for the creation of a society embodying ideals of intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual refinement, while rejecting the idea that it can be prescribed in any particular form. Hesse presents an open dialectic which recoils from identifying the necessary structures of an ideal ethical community but emphasises the need to continue the struggle for the transformation of values. His ideas on alternative community have a strong affinity with the ethos of much of the new social movement activity which developed at the time when his work achieved cult status, and I develop this point in the final section.

HESSE'S PHILOSOPHY

In many respects Hesse appears to be a romantic writer pining for a lost age of purity and excellence. This is expressed in his celebration of natural beauty and rural tranquillity, his attachment to eighteenth century literature and music, and his hostility to technological ‘progress’. It is no surprise that in the futuristic society described in The Glass Bead Game there appears to have been no significant technological advance from our period, with only the occasional mention of a car or train (Fickert, 219). But Hesse was also a nonconformist rebel concerned for the fate of those who did not comply with the prescribed values of the society they inhabited. He bemoaned the pressures generated by life in modern capitalist society and the instrumental and often callous behaviour which threatened to engulf the world. In response he espoused the pursuit of self-understanding through grasping the spiritual insights offered to us in tragedy and the illusory nature of prestige and wealth. Occasionally he expressed sympathy with the ideal of socialism and even admired Marx, considering his critique of capitalism ‘essentially incontrovertible’ (MB [My Belief], 367; Sorell, 61).

Hesse was an explicitly holistic and dialectical writer who repeatedly in his novels depicts the struggle for self-awareness in the lives of his characters. Through them he reaffirms the values of love, beauty, and integrity in the face of a world increasingly dominated by acquisitive and competitive norms. As a dialectician he conceived of self-discovery as ‘wholeness’ arrived at through a process of necessary struggle, identifying the positive in the negative and constantly questioning conventional notions of progress and achievement (Ziolkowski, 1). As we shall see, the dialectical approach is central to The Glass Bead Game, in which the influence of the philosophy of Hegel is suggested. In his earlier works the emphasis on paradox owed much to the Indian and Chinese philosophies which had influenced him from an early age and receives its clearest expression in Siddhartha, in which the eponymous hero experiences the extremes of poverty and wealth, power and dependence, self-discipline and gratuitousness, before finally achieving peace. Spiritual serenity is gained as wealth and glory are renounced. This spirituality is not associated with an external demiurge, but is found in the process of taking hold of one's own destiny through searching and learning. His enduring respect for Eastern philosophy is summarised by his endorsement of the Chinese philosopher Yang Chu and his work on the Four Dependencies, the four things which are desired too greatly: long life; fame; title and rank; money and possessions. The ‘unremitting desire’ for these things causes complete fear, and ‘every state’ is built upon this fear. For Hesse, as for Yang Chu, individuals who overcomes these desires find themselves and achieve peace (ITWGO, 111).

In every Hesse novel there are passages which describe intense and profound experiences of self-discovery. This affirmation of the revelatory power of intuition is a literary expression of the philosophical position popularised by Nietzsche and Bergson in the fin de siecle period. Nietzsche was the biggest influence on Hesse's thought in the early part of his life, not the Nietzsche festooned by the Nazis but the philosopher who condemned the greed and ‘sheeplike conformism’ of Wilhelmine Germany to become ‘an anti-patriot and anti-German’ (AW [Autobiographical Writings], 191-2; cf. ITWGO, 77). These moments of self-discovery in Hesse's novels are similar to the idea of ‘integral experience’ in Henri Bergson's doctrine of intuition. As with so many European intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, Hesse was attracted to Bergson's philosophy, sharing a conviction in the richness of intuition and a scepticism towards the restricted and artificial nature of analytical knowledge (MB, 368-9). Like Bergson, Hesse valued comedy and poetry as expressions of untainted creativity; in Steppenwolf he describes humour as ‘perhaps the most inborn and brilliant achievement of the human spirit’ (S [Steppenwolf], 67), and in The Journey to the East he talks about the creations of poetry ‘being more real and vivid than the poets themselves’ (JE [The Journey to the East], 108).

Despite his disdain for the world of politics, in essays and novels after the First World War there are numerous references to the menace of bellicose nationalism. He denied that he was a pacifist, believing that world peace could not be brought about by a pacifist movement (ITWGO, 54), but his opposition to militarism was so profound that he exiled himself from Germany, taking up Swiss citizenship in 1923. A number of essays and other short pieces on world affairs, mostly written during or immediately following the First World War, were compiled in If the War Goes On … Reflections on War and Politics, published in German in 1946 and for the first time in English in 1972. In “The European” he sees the War as the culmination of the surrender of the European spirit to the myth of technological progress, comparing this debased spirit to the simple humanity of other cultures (ITWGO, 41-47). Yet in other writings he displays a love of German and European culture which holds out the hope that its finest ideals may one day be realised. He was a thorough internationalist who abhorred xenophobia, and at one stage he overcame his detachment by editing a small circulation youth magazine, Vivos Voco. For the most part, however, he avoided aligning himself with any social group, convinced that his role as a spiritual writer demanded an Epicurean withdrawal.²

In his novels there are several points at which Hesse declaims against that illusory community which ideologues exalt as ‘the nation.’ In Demian, written in the aftermath of the First World War, he offers the hope that Europeans might learn from the catastrophe, so that the lust to rage and kill would be shattered and replaced by a ‘new humanity’, like a giant bird emerging from the broken shell of the world (D [Demian], 152-3). Demian denounces the misguided nature of the communal spirit manifested in pre-war nationalism:

The only manifestation of communal spirit to be seen at present is the herd-instinct at work. Human beings fly into each other's arms because they are afraid of each other—the masters afraid for themselves. They are a community composed entirely for themselves!

(D, 127)

Hesse abhorred the cultural direction which Europe had taken in the industrial age and was adamant that ‘the will of humanity is never and nowhere to be identified with that of our present communities, states and nations, clubs and churches.’ However, at this point in time the only hope offered is the vague notion of individual revivification, drawing on the philosophy of Nietzsche (D, 128). The rejection of a communal life based on ‘anxiety, fear and opportunism’ is reiterated through the character of Haller in Steppenwolf, in which his ‘outsider’ status is confirmed when a young professor describes Hailer as a traitor to his country because he had argued that Germany was just as much to blame as the other countries for the First World War. The professor is characterised by his ignorance of social affairs, his easy acceptance of jingoism, and his hatred of communists and Jews (S, 94-99). With typical self-effacement, Hesse later has Hailer mocking his own half-hearted rebelliousness against militarism and capitalism (S, 152-3). Steppenwolf expresses not only Hesse's unease with the bourgeois world but his growing conviction that it is not enough merely to withdraw from it. However, it is only with the publication of his penultimate novel, The Journey to the East, that he introduces the idea of collective commitment in the form of an elite community striving to fulfil the highest spiritual and cultural ideals.

THE ALTERNATIVE COMMUNITY

In order to gain a clearer view of the development of Hesse's ideas on the alternative enlightened community it is worth looking at his depiction of the League of the Journeyers to the East, to whom The Glass Bead Game is dedicated. The Journey to the East is modelled on the Bundesroman form which was popular in German literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, his favourite literary period. The focus is on a fantastic journey undertaken in a spirit of hope after the horrors of the First World War. Hesse comments that the country was ‘full of saviours, prophets and disciples’ with ‘presentiments about the end of the world’ and a pronounced interest in Eastern mysteries and religions (JE, 39-40).³ The journey itself traverses time as well as space, combines individual goals with the secret collective goal, and includes an array of historical and fictional characters, many drawn from his own novels. The central character, H. H., describes the East as ‘not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home [Heimat] and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times’ (51-2).

The journey collapses in disarray following the apparent desertion of the servant and bagman Leo, and ten years on H. H., who had participated as a musician, is desperately trying to recapture the only meaningful experience of his life by writing a history of the League, a task which he feels is beyond him. In fact the League had not collapsed, as he had supposed, and he is brought to realise that he had lost touch with it only through his own lack of faith and self-discipline. He realises that he is the author of his own misfortune, having failed to treat the problems which confronted the journeyers as challenges which could be overcome if the precepts of the League were maintained, and if faith and trust were enacted. Leo, revealed as President, tells him that his mistakes on the journey were not as serious as his more recent neglect of basic League vows brought on by his ‘egoistic impatience’ to regain contact with the League. He is acquitted and accepted back for his second novitiate.

What sort of an alternative community is presented here? The League of Journeyers is hierarchical, ritualistic, and exclusive to men. It seeks to encompass the ideals of aesthetic excellence, dedication, and integrity. The external goals, the objects of the quest, are secondary to the development of self-realisation gained in the process of seeking to understand. It is a hard lesson to learn, and this is demonstrated when the travellers quickly resort to mutual recrimination when the first misfortunes befall them. The externalisation of the goal had seduced them into neglecting the real goal of self-understanding which the precepts of the League were designed to encourage. The individual goals are fantastic and indeed ironic. H. H.'s personal quest to see and win the love of the beautiful Princess Fatima reveals the vacuity of the male idolisation of the image of woman, rendering her as something alien to be conquered, rather than as someone real to be befriended. On the journey he loves a woman, Ninon (the name of Hesse's third wife), who was jealous of Fatima, but later he reflects that in all probability it was her (48). Only on reflection was the hollowness of the fantasy replaced by the integrity of real love. Leo's personal goal, to learn the language of birds, is an impossible task but one through which the seeker may learn to appreciate birds for what they are. It is the observation which instructs rather than the achievement of mimesis.

The League knows no nationality and is prepared to defy state authority, for at one stage the journey's leaders disobey the order of the guardians of the crown (43-4). Leo comments that there are few born masters, but that those who strive to become masters ‘end in nothing’ (53). Nevertheless, the travellers themselves are prone to accede to prevailing notions of social status; they pay scant attention to Leo when he is in the role of servant, although at one stage H. H. speculates that he may know more than his ostensible masters. This reflection on the hierarchical relationship reads very much like a fictional reworking of the master-servant dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology. It is not a rejection of hierarchy, but a reminder that people should be respected for what they say and how they act, rather than for their social position. The master and the slave are combined within us all; we ought to serve our own convictions of what is right, we ought to master our impulses, and we ought to attend to all matters with the care they warrant in order to develop an integrated life.

H. H.'s despair at the imagined demise of the League is linked with his own inability to recapture in writing the splendour of the journey. Creativity had become impossible without the fellowship of the alternative community. But the League had not dissolved, and would continue as long as people shared its values and strove to realise them. It is outside the official community of the state, and also suspicious of it, and it is differentiated from the communities of civil society by its lofty ideals, its search for truth and beauty which is hidden from most people by the remorseless pressures of modern life. Salvation lies only through a community which transcends the state-civil society polarity. It is not simply an abstract aggregate of like-minded souls, for its code stipulates many duties and is evidently demanding. Its ceremonies indicate its tangibility, its substance, and symbolise the centrality of duty. It does not attempt to dissolve the distinction between state and civil society, although its precise relationship to them is not elucidated. The League's almost surreal existence exposes the illusory nature of the state's claim to represent all the interests of its citizens, or indeed all claims that society must march to the same tune. For Hesse, the alternative community is a conditio sine qua non of non-egoistic freedom. And although this freedom is still considered primarily as freedom of the individual, there appears to be an opening for a wider conception of social engagement in which the alternative community acts simultaneously as exemplar and mediator for the ‘external’ world.

The ideal of an alternative community representing spiritual and aesthetic purity, as sketched in The Journey, is further developed in The Glass Bead Game, in which the Game's Order and its province of Castalia are initially presented as the zenith of intellectual refinement and ethical concord. Castalia is more established than The League of The Journeyers to the East, for it has territory, security, and organisational autonomy. It represents a more complete withdrawal, a separation from the world of material concerns, a fully resourced and privileged spiritual think-tank unsullied by mundane demands. The passions here are channelled through music and the complex inventions of the Game; they are cerebral rather than sensual experiences. The travails of the outer world are transcended through study and contemplation, through which the inner world becomes enriched. However, the essentially aloof and escapist character of Castalia is eventually deemed to be inadequate by the central character, Joseph Knecht, the head, or Magister Ludi, of the Order.⁴

The Game emerged from the ashes of the Age of the Feuilleton, the twentieth century bourgeois period of unfettered individualism which is described as ‘the intellect's debasement, venality, and self-betrayal’ (GBG [The Glass Bead Game], 19). It was a period in which society had freed itself from the ‘tutelage’ of the Church, and partially from the authority of the State, but was marked by an absence of a new form of authority which might command respect and legitimacy. Hesse characterises the Age of the Feuilleton as pervaded by a ‘general mood of doom’ (24), and he gives a number of examples of the society failing to take responsibility for its own destiny and instead engaging in escapist diversions such as popular newspapers, the cult of the celebrity, crossword puzzles and driving motor cars. It was a society ravaged by wars and civil wars (22), until some sort of ‘great crisis’ (32) gave rise gradually to a recovery of cultural consciousness. It is a bleak view of the mid-twentieth century which undoubtedly reflects the foreboding he felt in the years leading up to the Second World War. Reading it now, more than half a century after publication, his depiction of the prevailing cynicism is uncomfortably consonant with many aspects of late twentieth century post-modernity. However, it is not an entirely hopeless picture, for he is at pains to point out that the foundations for a cultural renaissance were already present in some enlightened individuals and groups.

The Order of the Glass Bead Game is an intellectual successor to the age-old but largely spiritual League of the Journeyers to the East, which gave a special welcome to the new Game because of the promise which it offered for an intellectual renaissance (GBG, 34-7). It is a community of austere, erudite and creative men, who have renounced the temptations of money, fame, power or popularity (74). It is not a religious Order but is dedicated to the playing of the Glass Bead Game, an intellectual pursuit which had originated in the Music Academy in Cologne. It drew its early inspiration from the musical renaissance which followed the Age of the Feuilleton, and was then taken up and developed by mathematicians, eventually growing to encompass all branches of knowledge and moving away from the use of glass beads which originally gave it its name (31-44). Music and mathematics remained as the most significant elements of the exercise, symbolising the unity of crystalline logic and creative imagination (82). Music for Hesse, it should be noted, was not the demonic force of primal passion that it was for Schopenhauer, but rather the fullest expression of human spirit and intellect combined, an ‘act of courage, a serene, smiling, striding forward and dancing through the terrors and flames of the world’ (317).

Knecht enters the Order largely through his youthful enchantment with the inspirational dedication of the old Music Master, with whom he develops the first of a number of key relationships through which we can chart his progressive commitment and then disenchantment with Castalia. In his time as a student at the elite school at Waldzell Knecht meets an older student, Plinio Designori, and their debates play a key role in opening up the Order of the Glass Bead Game to criticism. Plinio is the son of a wealthy and influential figure from the ‘real’ world who questions the escapism of a society which neither knows nor wishes to know anything about the lives of the labourers and poor people who provide the material base for the Castalians to enjoy their contemplative life (97). Knecht struggles to respond to the invective of the more self-assured Plinio, but he is encouraged by his tutors to maintain the relationship and eventually he is able to give informed and articulate defences of the spirit of Castalia. From these encounters Knecht confirms his vocation to the Order and his commitment to Castalia, but he does not really counter the specific charges levelled by Plinio. What he gains most from his friendship is a respect for the ‘alien’ world ‘in which there were loving mothers and children, hungry people and poor houses, newspapers and election campaigns’ (99). It becomes clear to him that the Castalian way is privileged and protected, and he values all the more his freedom to develop his senses and intellect by walking, swimming, playing fugues and reading Hegel.

After a gap of something like three decades Knecht renews his acquaintance with Plinio, who visits Castalia for a refresher course in the Game. Plinio, now a leading politician, is weighed down by an unhappy marriage and his onerous political responsibilities. The impression is given of a life clouded by impending crisis, a mirror of the world at large. Whereas their youthful debates had convinced each of them of the rightness of his chosen path, their meeting in adult life serves as a catalyst to remove their certainties. Plinio complains of the ‘unreality’ of Castalia:

Isn't it an artificial, sterilised, didactically pruned world, a mere sham world in which you cravenly vegetate, a world without vices, without passions, without hunger, without sap and salt, a world without family, without mothers, without children, almost without women?

(311)

However, despite the sharpness of Plinio's attack, his return as a visitor in a sense confirms the mission of Castalia. He needs its spiritual balm to help him to face his private and public problems. Knecht, after years of seeking to preserve the serenity which he had found in his revered role model, the Music Master, realises that the perfection of Castalia is really a form of stagnation. He resolves that his destiny lies in the world outside, in the work of teaching. Plinio and Knecht come to see their worlds as complementary rather than dichotomous.

Knecht's circular letter to the Board of Educators of the Order of the Glass Bead Game requesting that he be relieved of his duties as Magister Ludi delivers his final verdict on the flawed Utopia. In it he expounds a theory of the circulation of elites and the danger of developing the ‘characteristic disease of nobility—hubris, conceit, class arrogance, self-righteousness, exploitativeness,’ and he criticises the Castalians for a ‘severe lack of insight’ into their place in the structure of the nation, the world, and world history (348-9). In his letter he affirms the need to engage with society and he extols the virtues of the ordinary teacher: “More and more we must recognise the humble, highly responsible service to the secular schools as the chief and most honourable part of our mission. That is what we must seek to extend” (GBG, 363). His request to the Board to take some members of the Order to staff an ordinary school is rejected, and he leaves Castalia to teach Plinio's problem son, Tito. However, on their first trip he dies when following the boy into an icy lake for a strenuous swim. As with all the decisive moments later in the book, it recalls an earlier incident. When only 17 years old Knecht had expressed his admiration for the rebels in school who had spiritedly refused to conform to the code of behaviour. One of them, Charlemagne, is characterised by his ability to swim so long under water. Knecht hopes that if ever the time came when he felt impelled to follow his own feelings he would be able to free himself and ‘leap not only backward into something inferior, but forward into something higher’ (76).

What had caused Knecht to shift his position, to break all precedent and walk away from the Order? The crucial ‘mediation’ between the young and mature Knecht is the relationship with Father Jacobus at the Benedictine monastery at Mariefels. As his first task after being accepted into the Order as a full member, Knecht is sent there on a mission. Initially he is charged with presenting lessons in the Glass Bead Game but ultimately to arrange a detente between Castalia and the Roman Catholic Church. The important and enduring thing which Knecht learns from these meetings is a respect for history and historical scholarship, which was wholly neglected by the Castalians. Jacobus is not interested in the philosophy of history, but rather the details of real struggles which require us to plunge into a mass of apparently contingent events and struggle to make sense of them (167-9). It is this which helps Knecht realise, even after achieving the highest office of Magister Ludi, that a community which turned its back on the world could not thereby fulfil its own high ideals; it was doomed to decay. At the very moment of his greatest triumph, an outstanding Glass Bead Game annual tournament, he dwells on the unpleasant thought that Castalia and the Game ‘are bound to pass away’ (265-6). The paradox here is that Knecht had been ‘gripped by the vision of transitoriness’ many years before at the very moment when he was seized by the greatness of the Glass Bead Game (119). At that moment it committed him to the Game because he saw its strength in developing an abstract understanding of the rhythm of life. Years later he applies that understanding to a criticism of the form of society which helped him to achieve it.

Knecht's struggle to understand, defend and ultimately reject the Order in its existing form is depicted as a progression through contradictions, in true dialectical fashion. In his first meaningful dialogue with the Music Master prior to committing himself to the Glass Bead Game, he is told that ‘our mission is to recognise contraries for what they are; first of all as contraries, but then as opposite poles of a unity’ (81). Knecht's impatience to find a dogma through which all truth would be revealed is countered by the Music Master's reply that the truth exists not in perfect doctrine but within oneself, in the act of striving for self-perfection (83). From this moment on Knecht commits himself to refining and living out his most cherished values while struggling to relate them to the world at large. The nature of Hesse's dialectic is intriguing. It is no accident that we are told that Hegel's dialectical philosophy exerted by far the strongest attraction on the young Knecht (91), and it is possible to see Castalia as an incarnation of Hegel's ideal of the ethical community (Sittlichkeit). But what is crucial here is that ultimately Hesse is not satisfied with the exclusive and ahistorical nature of this pristine repository of aesthetic and intellectual perfection. What Hesse disliked in Hegel was his ‘professorial assumption of superior wisdom’ (MB 367). Hesse's dialectic is not closed, and Knecht's defection is an act of negation which insists on continuing to strive for humanist values in a wider world. At the end of the main narrative the poems of Knecht display this indominatable disposition to see the positive in the negative, as in this final stanza from ‘On Reading an Old Philosopher’:

Yet still above this vale of endless dying Man's spirit, struggling incorruptibly, Painfully raises beacons, death defying, And wins, by longing, immortality.

(434)

This remarkably optimistic view, along with similar sentiments in the other poems, suggests that there is room for embattled values to endure even in inauspicious times. The development of Knecht's self-realisation combines the affirmation of principles such as service, steadfastness, honesty, tolerance and learning,⁵ with a determination to struggle for them against the odds as part of a social commitment.

The Castalian Utopia is seriously undermined by the criticisms first of Plinio and finally of Knecht in his circular letter to the Board of Educators. The ideals of aesthetic and intellectual refinement in an atmosphere of serenity and understanding are lauded, but the path of isolation and exclusivity is shunned. The certitude engendered in the closed community must give way to a more humble learning by reengagement in the maelstrom that is everyday life in the world at large. This judgement presents the strongest answer to criticisms of Hesse which see his pursuit of ‘wholeness’ as necessarily implying a totalitarian imposition of certain values (e.g. Sammons, 122-8). The open-endedness of Hesse's ideal of a better world is exemplified in his brief message acknowledging his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He denies that his ideal is one of cultural conformity, insisting that he is all in favour of ‘diversity, differentiation, and gradation on our beloved earth.’ He declares himself ‘an enemy of the “grands simplificateurs” and a lover of equality, of organic form, of the inimitable’ (ITWGO 141-2). Hesse's alternative community holds its values dear, but it seeks to promote them in a sympathetic and reciprocal relationship with the rest of long-suffering humanity.

IMPLICATIONS

Hesse sets up his flawed Utopia in order to show that the values and knowledge which have been trampled on or distorted may yet be revived and enriched through collective effort. But the judgement that the path of isolation is inadequate and even dangerous carries the warning that if we turn our back on the world, on history, on ordinary people with their multiple problems, we invite a repeat of the catastrophe which had destroyed the Age of the Feuilleton. The invitation is to plunge, like Knecht, into the icy waters, in hope rather than expectation. That final swim is open to conflicting interpretations. Although I take it to be a sign of hope, an act of reengagement with the world and its problems, it is possible to see his demise as a consequence of hubris, of a gross overestimation of what can be done in the face of the perils of the material world. Yet it should be remembered that this is the final work of a lifelong humanist and anti-militarist who had started the book at the time of the Nazi seizure of power and had witnessed almost a decade of escalating barbarity. Against such a background, The Glass Bead Game is a book of hope, not for future perfection but for the expansion of values already present in society even at its darkest hour, in fragmented groups and individuals. Castalia is simultaneously a recognition of the need to find space for the preservation of certain ideals and an acknowledgement that those ideals are part of the ‘real’ world, even when that world appears to be consumed with base or foolish goals.

Although it was not Hesse's intention to adopt the utopian form in order to propagandise a political project, his ideas on the alternative enlightened community offer an intriguing affinity with the ideals and practices of the new social movements, particularly political ecology. Hesse's novels achieved a surprising cult status throughout the western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his critique of Feuilleton values chimed with a widespread disenchantment with the destructive logic of unrestrained technological ‘progress’. The new generation of non-conformist rebels demanded that society should reject the blind acquisitiveness which was propelling it towards catastrophe, and from their protests came the new social movements. Of course it is possible to read Hesse selectively as a spiritual resource for what Alberto Melucci has identified as the ‘narcissistic withdrawal’ displayed by some of those associated with contemporary alternative movements (Melucci, 209-10). But in his final novels Hesse moves towards a social engagement, at first focusing on the need for an alliance of the enlightened, and eventually expressing a commitment to propagate alternative values to the suffering world.

Hesse's idea then, is that in a myopic world hostile to a pacific, compassionate and non-acquisitive way of understanding, conscientious people should gather together to work for a revolution in values. This bears a striking resemblance to the ‘mission’ ethos of much new social thought and activity. Indeed Rudolf Bahro's utopian predictions of the emergence of a new spiritual authority, an ‘Invisible Church’ (Bahro, 228), and the development of ‘Institutions of Salvation’ in our present society (337) are very close to Hesse's idea of the alternative enlightened community. Hesse's literary device of the quest, signifying both material and spiritual discovery, also accords neatly with the new politics. As with Hesse's League of the Journeyers to the East and the Order of the Glass Bead Game, the new radical movements strive to develop their own philosophy and codes and their activities transcend national boundaries. They resist integration by the state or by older ‘antisystemic’ movements. This is far from easy, and is reflected by the tensions within political ecology on the efficacy of compromise. Do they preserve purity by standing fast, or do they pursue piecemeal reforms through compromise with the existing power structures? Hesse appends a poem entitled “A Compromise” to The Glass Bead Game (GBG 430) which spurns the appeal of ‘principled simplicity’ and urges that we confront reality rather than oppose it with dogma. There are no easy answers; the engaged alternative communities may alter the course of history for the better or they may drown in the icy lake, leaving others to take up the challenge. The spirit of our times may be as baleful as that of the Age of the Feuilleton, but the long view perspective adopted in The Glass Bead Game reminds us that our modern alternative movements are still in their infancy.

Notes

1. The reference here is to Hermann Hesse, If The War Goes On. Other works are abbreviated thus: AW is Autobiographical Writings, D is Demian, GBG is The Glass Bead Game, JE is The Journey to the East, MB is My Belief.

2. There is some evidence that Hesse's unshakable anti-militarism and his spirituality inspired communitarian movements in Germany in the 1920s; an extended quotation from Hesse's essay “Thou Shalt not Kill” appeared in Salt and Light, the major work of Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof Movement (Arnold, 1986, 67-9).

3. Mileck suggests that Hesse may have modelled the Journey on an evangelical tour undertaken by Gustav Graser and his followers in Southern Germany in 1920, which was accompanied by ecstatic meetings (Mileck, 229). Laqueur mentions another group, the Neue Schar, which was committed to creating a ‘swinging’ community ‘united in peace and joy’ (Laqueur, 116-7).

4. Knecht translates from the German as man-servant or menial.

5. These values are brought out in the three ‘lives’ set in Ancient times which Knecht wrote in his late twenties which are appended to the text. They are referred to in the text itself as ‘possibly the most valuable part of our book’ (115).

Works Cited

Arnold, Eberhard. Salt and Light. NY: Plough Publishing House, 1986 (originally published 1921).

Bahro, Rudolf. Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation. Bath: Gateway, 1994.

Buber, Martin. “Hermann Hesse in the Service of the Spirit”. In Hesse: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Theodore Ziolkowski. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974. 25-33.

Fickert, Kurt J. “The Mystery of Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel”. In Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film. Ed. Jan Hokenson and Howard Pearce. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986. 219-225.

Glatzer, N. and P. Mendes-Flohr, eds. The Letters of Martin Buber. NY: Schocken, 1991.

Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf. Trans. Basil Creighton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

———. The Journey to the East. Trans. Hilda Rosner. London: Panther, 1977.

———. Demian. Trans. W. J. Strachan. London: Panther, 1978.

———. If the War Goes On … Reflections on War and Politics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Triad/Panther, 1985.

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