SOURCE: White, I. A., and J. J. White. “The Place of Josef Knecht's ‘Lebensläufe’ within Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel.” The Modern Language Review 81, no. 4 (October 1986): 930-43.

[In the following essay, White and White investigate the function of the three appended biographies at the end of Das Glasperlenspiel.]

Proportionately few interpretations of Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) devote much attention to the concluding ‘Lebensläufe’ which take up about a third of the text and which the narrator himself describes as ‘der vielleicht wertvollste Teil unseres Buches’.¹ Readings of Hesse's novel often treat Knecht's death as if it were the end of the entire story or, at most, content themselves with a brief outline of the poems and fictive biographies which in fact make up the final part of the work. Those who have considered the posthumous texts in any detail have done so largely in thematic terms, exploring the parallels between the individual ‘Lebensläufe’ Knecht writes and his own life within Castalia. And with the eventual publication in 1965 of the so-called ‘Vierter Lebenslauf’, attention was for a while deflected to the novel's Entstehungsgeschichte: away, that is to say, from the role played by the three extant, completed biographies in the text itself to an unfinished project that Hesse had hoped at one (early) stage to attribute to his hero. While it has generally been acknowledged that the three appended biographies cast further light on Knecht's personality and eventual decision to leave Castalia, their function as an indication of his development and their structural role within the narrative have not been investigated. Yet these are features which further reinforce the narrator's claim that the concluding biographies are one of the most crucial elements in his entire narrative.

We first learn about the place of biography-writing within the Castalian educative process early in the section of the novel entitled ‘Studienjahre’:

Es wird … nichts an Leistung verlangt, als jedes Jahr die Abfassung eines ‘Lebenslaufes’. … Der Schüler hatte die Aufgabe, sich in eine Umgebung und Kultur, in das geistige Klima irgendeiner frühern Epoche zurückzuversetzen und sich darin eine ihm entsprechende Existenz auszudenken; je nach Zeit und Mode war das Kaiserliche Rom, das Frankreich des 17. oder das Italien des 15. Jahrhunderts, das perikleische Athen oder das Österreich der Mozartzeit bevorzugt, und bei den Philologen war es Sitte geworden, daß sie ihre Lebensromane in der Sprache und im Stil des Landes und der Zeit abfaßten, in welchen sie spielten; und es gab zu Zeiten höchst virtuose Lebensläufe im Kurialstil des päpstlichen Rom um das Jahr 1200, im Mönchslatein, im Italienisch der ‘Hundert Novellen’, im Französisch Montaignes, im Barockdeutsch des Schwans von Boberfeld.

(I, 172-73)

Given this tendency on the part of the pupils to indulge in stylistic virtuosity and to choose fashionable subjects, it is worth noting that none of Knecht's exercises represents an attempt at stylistic anachronism for its own sake. (There is, to take an obvious point of contrast, less stylistic orientalism to his Indischer Lebenslauf than there was to Hesse's earlier Indian novel Siddhartha.) Also, the examples cited here by the narrator reveal much more precise concern with a particular historical period than Knecht's own biographies ever display. Even when performing pedagogic tasks for the institution, Knecht is more of an outsider than his fellow Castalians.

Although the narrator suggests that the activity of thinking oneself into a character from another age contains ‘ein Rest des alten asiatischen Wiedergeburts- und Seelenwanderungsglaubens’, the exercise is not primarily metaphysical in import, nor is it quite as innocent as this description might suggest. To some extent, it is an institutionally-sanctioned safety-valve for the young pupils' imaginations: ‘ein erlaubtes Feld der Betätigung’, ‘ein legitimer Kanal für das dichterische Bedürfnis des jugendlichen Alters’ (I, 174). Legitimate, that is, in contrast to poetry-writing, which is frowned on by the authorities as being too subjective and, more important, not as readily subject to their paternal control. Mainly, though, biography-writing is an institutionally-fostered means to self-discovery:

Man übte sich dabei, so wie man es in vielen stilkritischen Seminaren und so oft auch im Glasperlenspiele tat, im behutsamen Eindringen in vergangene Kulturen, Zeiten und Länder, lernte seine eigene Person als Maske, als vergängliches Kleid einer Entelechie betrachten. … Natürlich waren die meisten dieser imaginierten Vorexistenzen nicht nur Stilübungen und historische Studien, sondern auch Wunschbilder und gesteigerte Selbstbildnisse: die Verfasser der meisten Lebensläufe schilderten sich in demjenigen Kostüm und als denjenigen Charakter, als welcher zu erscheinen und sich zu verwirklichen ihr Wunsch und Ideal war.

(I, 173-74)

One of the more insidious features of the biography-writing exercise is the way in which it is calculated to elicit and at the same time to sublimate youthful feelings of rebellion. ‘Übrigens kam es auch des öfteren vor und stieß bei den Lehrern meistens auf wohlwollendes Verständnis, daß Studierende ihre Lebensläufe zu kritischen und revolutionären Auslassungen über die heutige Welt und über Kastalien benutzten’ (I, 174-75). But here, too, Knecht is an exception—perhaps surprisingly so, given that he is eventually going to voice fundamental criticisms of Castalia—but this, too, makes him less subject to the institution's controls than are his fellow pupils.

Of course, Knecht's adolescent feelings of revolt against Castalia have to some extent already been vented in the poems he wrote during the Waldzell period:

Jeder Leser wird da und dort in diesen zum Teil kunstvollen, zum Teil sichtlich rasch hingeschriebenen Versen Spuren der tiefen Erschütterung und Krise entdecken, welche Knecht damals unter Plinios Einfluß durchgemacht hat. Es klingt in mancher Zeile eine tiefe Beunruhigung, ein grundsätzlicher Zweifel an sich selbst und am Sinn seines Daseins. … Übrigens lag … ein Stück Rebellion gegen gewisse kastalische Hausgesetze schon in der bloßen Tatsache, daß er diese Gedichte geschrieben und sie sogar mehreren Kameraden gelegentlich gezeigt hat.

(I, 160-61)

Writing poetry, in contrast to writing biographies, is an ‘inoffizielle, ja heimliche und mehr oder weniger verbotene Art von literarischer Tätigkeit’ (I, 172). Repeatedly, Knecht's poems, also printed as part of the ‘hinterlassene Schriften’ mentioned in the novel's title, betray the rebellious spirit that gave rise to their very creation. The first poem is tellingly entitled ‘Klage’ (as so many of the others could have been). It is characterized by a restless dissatisfaction untypical of the Castalian ethos:

Uns ist kein Sein vergönnt. Wir sind nur Strom,
Wir fließen willig allen Formen ein:
Dem Tag, der Nacht, der Höhle und dem Dom,
Wir gehn hindurch, uns treibt der Durst nach Sein.
So füllen Form um Form wir ohne Rast,
Und keine wird zur Heimat uns, zum Glück, zur Not,
Stets sind wir unterwegs, stets sind wir Gast,
Uns ruft nicht Feld noch Pflug, uns wächst kein Brot. …
[Gott] spielt mit uns, dem Ton in seiner Hand …

(II, 241)

The mood is continued in the following poems:

Frei unser Leben, stets zum Spiel bereit,
Doch heimlich dürsten wir nach Wirklichkeit,
Nach Zeugung und Geburt, nach Leid und Tod.

(II, 243)

Einst war, so scheint es uns, das Leben wahrer,
Die Welt geordneter, die Geister klarer,
Weisheit und Wissenschaft noch nicht gespalten.

(II, 255)

The sense of impending apocalypse in ‘Der letzte Glasperlenspieler’ (II, 247) has little to do with Castalia's view of its own timeless status, and again the emphasis on transience in ‘Stufen’ (II, 257) shows a young man struggling against the institutional wisdoms of Castalia. The salient exception to this rebellious, questioning tendency is the last poem in the sequence, ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’, which ends with the lines:

In ihrem Dienst ward unserm Leben Sinn,
Und keiner kann aus ihren Kreisen fallen,
Als nach der heiligen Mitte hin.

(II, 258)

Unlike many commentators,² we do not take this final poem to be unequivocal evidence that Knecht, after a period of doubting, has now returned to the fold. For a start, there is something suspicious about Knecht's use of the past tense in this poem: it is as if he were already talking elegiacally about the former significance of the Glass-Bead Game. Tellingly, the narrator refers, rather guardedly, to the period of doubt preceding the final poem: ‘bis in dem Gedicht “Glasperlenspiel” die fromme Hingabe gelungen scheint’ (I, 160-61), a formulation which virtually puts into question the genuineness of Knecht's apparent new-found faith in Castalia. Knecht's development at this stage, then, would appear to have been marked by a phase of flaunted rebellion (such as other Castalians at most give expression to in their assigned biographies), followed by an apparent but probably superficial return to the fold (more a suppression than a real overcoming of doubts). In the biographies we shall find that pattern partly reversed. For they begin with Der Regenmacher, by common consent the most uncomplicated paean to Castalian values to be found in any of the ‘Lebensläufe’; but this is followed by Der Beichtvater and Indischer Lebenslauf, both of which embody more complex reactions to Castalia than either open rebellion or acquiescence in its code.

Already Knecht's youthful rebellion, in the poems, has been less orchestrated by the Castalian authorities than it would have been if it had been conducted within the biography framework. But the poems limit their scepticism to the Glass-Bead Game and the doubting individual, whereas the biographies, especially Indischer Lebenslauf, are to transcend this juvenile subjectivity in order to respond to real threats from the outside world. Knecht the writer of the biographies is a relatively more mature man than the author of the Waldzell poems. And from biography to biography we can see him gradually learning to look beyond himself, but not in the spirit of negative rebelliousness that characterizes many of his fellow pupils' ‘Lebensläufe’.

Although Hesse originally conceived of the ‘Lebensläufe’ as part of a multi-strand narrative treating ‘einen Menschen, der in mehreren Wiedergeburten die großen Epochen der Menschheitsgeschichte miterlebt’,³ the three stories at the end of Das Glasperlenspiel hardly conform to this plan. As Mark Boulby has observed, ‘it would be stretching terminology greatly to apply such a description to any of the existing “biographies”’.⁴ The only ‘Lebenslauf’ which might have fitted this description is the so-called ‘Vierter Lebenslauf’.

Since the welcome publication of ‘Der vierte Lebenslauf’ in 1965, there has been a tendency to talk of it in terms which give it a greater significance than the three biographies which actually form part of the novel. Theodore Ziolkowski, whose concern is mainly with Hesse's historical sources for this unfinished fourth biography, concludes that ‘it is a pity … that Hesse did not complete this fourth “Life”. It represents, in his work, a new venture into historical fiction of a sort that he had never previously attempted.’⁵ And Mark Boulby, the author of another major article on the fourth biography, has seen it as ‘a key to Das Glasperlenspiel’.⁶ But the idea of a ‘vierter Lebenslauf’ plays a very different role within the novel that Hesse did actually write from the role that the now published incomplete biography may play within Hesse's development as a writer or that it might have eventually played in Das Glasperlenspiel. We shall argue that Das Glasperlenspiel would have been made into a very different work by the inclusion of the ‘Vierter Lebenslauf’ and, in contrast to Ziolkowski, that the decision to end with Indischer Lebenslauf actually strengthens the novel—which would have been taken in a false direction by the fourth biography, even granted its uniqueness as a piece of historical writing. But before we advance these arguments, it is necessary to look at the way in which the idea of a fourth biography is retained within Hesse's novel.

‘Von Josef Knecht sind drei … Lebensläufe erhalten’, the narrator reports, ‘wir werden sie wortgetreu mitteilen. Ob er nur diese drei Lebensläufe geschrieben habe, ob nicht einer oder der andere verlorengegangen sei, darüber sind mancherlei Vermutungen möglich.’ What is certain, however, is that Knecht did attempt one further biography at the explicit behest of the Castalian authorities.

Mit Bestimmtheit wissen wir nur, daß es Knecht nach der Überreichung seines dritten, des ‘indischen’ Lebenslaufes von der Kanzlei der Erziehungsbehörde nahegelegt wurde, er möge einen etwaigen noch folgenden Lebenslauf in eine historisch näherliegende und reicher dokumentierte Epoche verlegen und sich mehr um das historische Detail bekümmern. Wir wissen aus Erzählungen und Briefen, daß er daraufhin in der Tat Vorstudien zu einem Lebenslauf aus dem achtzehnten Jahrhundert gemacht hat. Er wollte darin als schwäbischer Theologe auftreten, der den Kirchendienst später mit der Musik vertauscht. …

(I, 175)

Knecht's failure to produce this biography was of course also Hesse's. Since we now have in published form both of Hesse's draft versions of the fourth⁷ biography, it is possible to construct a picture of what Das Glasperlenspiel would have been like if it had ended with ‘Der vierte Lebenslauf’ instead of Indischer Lebenslauf. Ziolkowski has convincingly demonstrated how the fourth biography's ‘masses of eclectic material’ (Ziolkowski, p. 134) were proving increasingly recalcitrant. Instead of becoming integrated, they were threatening to swell to a novel-length biography that would have risked distorting the whole structure of Hesse's enterprise. And with its motif of defection, Ziolkowski tries to argue, ‘Der vierte Lebenslauf’ is also thematically out of tune with the whole. However, this depends on Ziolkowski's frequently-challenged view that ‘the three “Lives” … represent Knecht's state of mind during a period of youth when he still did not doubt the supremacy of the realm of culture’, whereas ‘the fourth “Life” … envisages a defection from the world of spirit as represented by theology for the sake of music or Art’ (Ziolkowski, p. 142). But to argue thus not only does an injustice, as various commentators have pointed out, to the actual content of Der Beichtvater and Indischer Lebenslauf but ignores the fact that the Waldzell poems have already shown Knecht doubting the supremacy of the realm of culture (that is, Castalia). If the fourth biography shows defection and disenchantment with a chosen spiritual path, then this brings it into alignment with its two predecessors and the poems; it hardly constitutes a reason for abandoning the project. As Ziolkowski rightly points out, ‘Hesse had encountered similar difficulties of composition with other works and overcome them’ (Ziolkowski, p. 143), so there must be other, more cogent reasons for the abandoning of the fourth biography. The two that we would propose are: first, that Hesse did not want Knecht to learn from the writing of this biography, and in obedient response to the Castalian authorities, lessons about history which he would be able to absorb only from Pater Jakobus, and second, that this biography, for all its historical precision, would have offered a less effective ending to the entire novel than Indischer Lebenslauf does.

It would have been paradoxical to have had a Knecht, already betraying radical doubts about certain aspects of Castalia, learn about history as a response to a Castalian injunction. (Many of Knecht's most profound instructive experiences come in encounters with non-Castalians, much to Castalia's shame.) Castalia may be able to control its other pupils with a skilful amalgam of liberties and restrictions, but Knecht is too much his own master to be contained in this way. This is probably why, instead of simply dropping the fourth biography as a failed project, Hesse chose to attribute failure to complete it to his hero, as well. ‘Am Ende ließ er diese Arbeit liegen, zufrieden mit dem, was er bei ihr gelernt hatte, erklärte sich aber für unfähig, daraus einen Lebenslauf zu machen, denn er habe viel zuviel Einzelstudien getrieben und Details gesammelt’ (I, 176). The reference to Knecht's being ‘zufrieden mit dem, was er bei ihr gelernt hatte’ is not explained. But in the light of the complaint in one of his poems about ‘Weisheit und Wissenschaft’ now being ‘gespalten’ (II, 255) and bearing in mind that Knecht viewed the requisite historical project as ‘die Arbeit eines Gelehrten’, whereas his earlier biographies were more creative (‘Schöpfungen und Bekenntnisse eines dichterischen Menschen’ (I, 176)), it would not be unreasonable to deduce that he had learnt about the profound difference between Castalia's over-academic sense of Geist and his own search for a more pragmatic form of wisdom. Certainly by placing the unfinished biography in fourth and final position, Hesse leaves his hero noticeably at odds with his Castalian masters.

For Hesse himself, the place or order of the satellite biographies within the sequence of the narrative appears to have been an important factor, more so even than their thematic repercussions for our image of Knecht. On 18 June 1943 Hesse wrote to Walther Meier, ‘literarischer Leiter’ of the Zürich publishing house Fretz & Wasmuth, which was about to publish Das Glasperlenspiel, concerning the position of the three ‘Lebensläufe’:

Die Idee, die Schriften Knechts nicht am Schluß, sondern innerhalb der Biographie zu bringen … war von mir von Anfang an so geplant. Es ergab sich dann aber für mich, ganz im Gegensatz zu Ihrem im heutigen Brief geäußerten Gedanken, die Notwendigkeit, die Schriften eben doch an den Schluß zu stellen, und davon weiche ich jetzt … ungern ab.

Hesse clearly values the biographies highly, which is why he is able to sympathize with Meier's suggestion that they be inserted in the body of the narrative, as a kind of sugaring for the pill of Knecht's lengthy life-story. Nevertheless, the idea does not appeal.

Daß es für den Leser sehr wünschenswert sei, die Biographie durch die Lektüre der “Schriften Knechts” zu unterbrechen, ist für mein Buch nicht schmeichelhaft. Aber auch, wenn Sie damit völlig recht hätten und es wünschenswert vom Verlegerstandpunkt wäre, dem Leser bei seiner Langweile und seiner Suche nach Zerstreuung zu Hilfe zu kommen, so wäre dies doch keineswegs mein Standpunkt! Sondern ich meine: gerade die Leser, denen die Biographie langweilig und schwierig scheint, sollen lieber abgeschreckt werden und auch auf die Schriften verzichten, statt daß man ihnen Rosinen bietet, um sie nur ja nicht zu verlieren.⁸

If the ‘Schriften’ have to be inserted earlier for commercial reasons, Hesse argues, then the poems should come after the section ‘Waldzell’ and the biographies en bloc at the end of ‘Studienjahre’: ‘Auf jeden Fall bleiben die drei Lebensläufe beisammen und gehören zu den “Studienjahren”, die Rosinenwirkung einer spielerischen und sinnlosen Verteilung übers ganze Buch fällt also dahin’ (Gesammelte Briefe, III, 226). In the end, though, Hesse is adamant that the plan of putting the posthumous material right at the end of the novel is the more appropriate one (‘den richtigeren Plan’), even if he gives no indication of why he feels this to be the case. Nevertheless, to consider just one aspect of this issue, an examination of Indischer Lebenslauf soon reveals strong reasons for its being the biography with which Hesse prefers to conclude his entire novel.

To appreciate the centrality of Indischer Lebenslauf to Hesse's novel and to gauge why it, of all the biographies, is best suited to close the work, it is necessary to see the role played by war in the history of Castalia. There are already hints in the narrator's introduction that war played an important part in the birth of Castalia. The ‘Feuilletonistisches Zeitalter’ that, through its abuse of ‘Geist’, made Castalia ultimately necessary was a time of intellectually trivial undertakings ‘inmitten politischer, wirtschaftlicher und moralischer Gärungen und Erdbeben’, in a world dominated by ‘eine Anzahl von schauerlichen Kriegen und Bürgerkriegen’ (I, 31-32). (Knecht's later reminder to the Castalians (II, 115) that the period they tend to call ‘die feuilletonistische Epoche’ was also known as ‘das kriegerische Jahrhundert’ implies a rebuke for the way in which they have reduced the problems of the world at Castalia's inception from the moral to the aesthetic.) As Knecht reminds his fellow Castalians in his departing circular letter: ‘Unsre Vorgänger und Stifter begannen ihr Werk am Ende des kriegerischen Zeitalters in einer zerstörten Welt. Wir sind gewohnt, die Weltzustände jener Zeit, welche etwa mit dem ersten sogenannten Weltkriege begann, … daraus zu erklären, daß eben damals der Geist nichts gegolten habe und für die gewalttätigen Machthaber nur ein gelegentlich benütztes, untergeordnetes Kampfmittel gewesen sei’ (II, 117). He is drawing attention to this period because he sees its equivalent approaching once more (and Hesse meant his readers to perceive a similar recurrence of violence in their own world, though on a very different timescale). ‘Es nähern sich kritische Zeiten. … Machtverschiebungen bereiten sich vor, sie werden nicht ohne Krieg und Gewalt sich vollziehen’ (II, 123). This is one of the threats Knecht seeks to draw attention to with his vivid parable in explanation of why he is leaving Castalia:

Es sei mir erlaubt, die Situation durch ein Gleichnis zu verdeutlichen: Es sitzt einer in der Dachstube über einer subtilen Gelehrtenarbeit, da merkt er, daß unten im Hause Feuer ausgebrochen sein muß. Er wird nicht erwägen, ob es seines Amtes sei und ob er nicht besser seine Tabellen ins Reine zu bringen habe, sondern er wird hinunterlaufen und das Haus zu retten suchen. So sitze ich, in einem der obersten Stockwerke unsres kastalischen Baues, mit dem Glasperlenspiel beschäftigt, mit lauter zarten, empfindlichen Instrumenten arbeitend, und werde vom Instinkt her, von der Nase her darauf aufmerksam, daß es irgendwo unten brennt, daß unser ganzer Bau bedroht und gefährdet ist, und daß ich jetzt nicht Musik zu analysieren oder Spielregeln zu differenzieren, sondern dorthin zu eilen habe, wo es raucht.

(II, 107)

It would be wrong narrowly to identify Knecht's image of fire exclusively with war. Knecht sees the contemporary world as threatened by various manifestations of Ungeist, war being simply the most palpable of them. In any case, his image of fire on the ground floor of a building is conveniently ambiguous enough to suggest both the ‘innere und äußere Gefahren’ he sees assailing Castalia (II, 109). This may just be another way of hinting that the diagnosis presented in his ‘Rundschreiben’ is more subtle and wide-ranging than that implicit in Indischer Lebenslauf; but Indischer Lebenslauf does nevertheless indicate that he has sensed danger, has at least conceived of it hypothetically, at a much earlier stage in his development. Indischer Lebenslauf can in this respect be viewed as something of a halfway house between Der Regenmacher and Knecht's ‘Rundschreiben’.

The point is that Knecht's Indian biography introduces into the ‘hinterlassene Schriften’, and into Das Glasperlenspiel as a whole, a sense of danger and of social destructiveness that is scarcely present in the previous two biographies and, as far as one can see, would not have figured in a completed ‘vierter Lebenslauf’. Unlike his predecessors, Dasa, the story's hero, is born into a world of overt hostility, of rivalry and greed for power. His father, a ‘kriegerischer Fürst’, is the reincarnation of a demon-ruler slaughtered in battle by Vishnu; and when his mother dies, Dasa becomes the victim of his stepmother's desire to promote her own son, Nala. Eventually Dasa is sent into exile, only to return later and marry the beautiful Pravati. But he is later forced to kill his half-brother for stealing his wife from him. Life, as the yoga-master whom he subsequently meets in the forest seeks to tell him, is a ‘dämonisches Flechtwerk von Erlebnissen, Freuden und Leiden, die einem das Herz erdrückten und das Blut stocken machten’ (II, 439). In a vision which the yoga-master induces in Dasa, the hero vicariously experiences the meaning of Maya; he becomes ruler, reattains Pravati, only eventually to be betrayed and deprived of his happiness until he perceives the nature of life's ‘Traum, Blendwerk … Spiel und Schein’ (II, 439). In the light of this experience, Dasa decides to abandon the world: ‘Er hat den Wald nicht mehr verlassen’ (II, 442).

To some extent the power struggles both within Dasa's family during his early years and in the Maya-vision (a kind of ‘magisches Theater’) may reflect some of the infighting and factionalism Knecht had already encountered within Castalia before his rise to power. But Indischer Lebenslauf is more than merely a young man's stylized version of the institutional world he already knows. It projects onto a legendary society the fear of imminent war that had not haunted any of Hesse's fiction since Der Steppenwolf. It is much more obviously a product of the Europe of the latter half of the 1930s than are the previous two ‘Lebensläufe’, and it is difficult to conceive how such a dimension could have been effectively brought into the novel's conclusion using the ‘Vierter Lebenslauf’. There may be a social dimension to Der Regenmacher as well,⁹ but it does not have the relevance to Knecht's well-founded fears about Castalia and the outside world that Indischer Lebenslauf has.

In 1955 Hesse replied to a reader who complained ‘daß ein junger Schüler Kastaliens ohne praktische Lebenserfahrung sie [i.e., the biographies] nicht hätte schreiben können’.¹⁰ There is something to this charge, although Knecht is presumably meant to display the true precocity of genius, not that of a pseudo-intellectual. Yet there are various striking respects in which a biography like Indischer Lebenslauf, despite being given pride of place at the end of the novel, is demonstrably the product of a less mature Knecht than the man who is eventually to leave Castalia.

There is, for example, a far more simplistically world-denying quality to Indischer Lebenslauf than Knecht eventually displays. For the young Dasa, and his creator, life and wisdom are polar opposites: ‘Versenkung und Weisheit waren gute, waren edle Dinge, aber es schien, sie gediehen nur abseits, am Rande des Lebens, und wer im Strom des Lebens schwamm und mit seinen Wellen kämpfte, dessen Taten und Leiden hatten nichts mit der Weisheit zu tun’ (II, 425-26). There is a general tendency, in Indischer Lebenslauf, for the world in its entirety to be associated with negative ideas. ‘Ich suche Frieden, ich suche Ruhe’, Dasa confesses to his guru: ‘Ich war zum Fürsten geboren und wurde zu den Hirten verstoßen … der Rajah … hat mir Pravati weggenommen, ich mußte sie in seinen Armen sehen. … Ich habe den Rajah erschlagen … ich bin ein Totschläger. … Ich mag dieses schreckliche Leben nicht mehr ertragen, ich möchte seiner ledig werden’ (II, 405-06). Such a one-sidedly negative view of life is similar to the one Knecht eventually castigates in his fellow Castalians: ‘Die Geschichte scheint uns ein Tummelplatz der Triebe und der Moden, der Begehrlichkeit, der Habgier und Machtgier, der Mordlust, der Zerstörungen und Kriege, der ehrgeschossenen Städte’ (II, 116). But as the circular letter goes on to point out, this can be only an incomplete picture, history is more than this: ‘Wir sind selbst Geschichte und sind an der Weltgeschichte und unserer Stellung in ihr mitverantwortlich. Am Bewußtsein dieser Verantwortung fehlt es bei uns sehr’ (II, 116). If anything, it is this concept of social responsibility that marks the difference between the Knecht of Indischer Lebenslauf and the author of the ‘Rundschreiben’. ‘It is perhaps rather difficult’, Sidney M. Johnson declares, seeking to fit the final biography into a positive interpretation, ‘to see exactly how Dasa meets his responsibilities. One must first accept the basic philosophy that the “real” world is actually “Maya”, a mere illusion, and then it becomes quite clear. Service to the spirit is through yoga exercise and meditation.’¹¹ That, to be sure, is the only kind of responsibility the young Knecht seems to be concerned with. Within the biography itself, much depends on recognizing the world as Maya, and ‘Maya’ is a concept which would seem to pre-empt social intervention. Yet while the notion of Maya illustrated in Indischer Lebenslauf no doubt owes much to Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, as well as to the Upanishads, it would be wrong to conclude, with Boulby (Hermann Hesse, p. 308), that ‘it is the Schopenhauerian undertone of the main novel which is here suddenly orchestrated in full here’. For the novel proper eventually transcends this Schopenhauerian tone, because its hero does, and arguably also because its author had done so.

Thus, in 1936 (that is, at the time of the composition of Indischer Lebenslauf), Hesse ends a letter to Arthur Stoll with these words: ‘Nach der indischen Vorstellung, die ich immer geliebt habe, ist das ganze Reich der Zeit und der Zahl, das Reich der Materie und der Quantität, nur “Maya”, Oberfläche und Scheinbild’ (Gesammelte Briefe, III, 42). But by 1941, the time of intensive work on Knecht's own life story, one finds a very different attitude to Maya. Writing in January of that year to a Frau E. B. about the fate of a Jewish friend, Hesse catalogues the series of misfortunes that eventually led to the man's death. He then concludes: ‘Sie werden mir sagen, das alles sei bloß “Maja”. Ja, so redet man sich von der Mitverantwortung los’ (Gesammelte Briefe, III, 175). The idea that ‘Maya’ might function as something of a let-out, a defence-mechanism, is new; any appeals to an Indian or Schopenhauerian quietism are now an inadequate alibi. Even if the world is mere Maya, Hesse seems to be saying, that does not absolve a Knecht of the moral responsibility he has towards his fellow men for the events of history. This is the tenor of the whole letter to E. B. and of Knecht's crucial ‘Rundschreiben’.

Now, if there is such a marked development between the Knecht of Indischer Lebenslauf and the man who eventually wrote the ‘Rundschreiben’, then it would seem reasonable to expect further differences and indications of maturation in the hero from biography to biography. After all, the fact that the writing of a biography was an annual assignment for Castalian pupils, together with the knowledge that in Knecht's case only three such biographies survive, must mean that they are separated from one another by at least a year's interval, if not by a longer period. It would therefore be surprising if they did not bear witness to changes in the hero's outlook. Nevertheless, the dominant tendency in the secondary literature on the subject is to treat the biographies as ‘parallel’ documents or as ‘variations’ on a constant set of themes and preoccupations. For Ziolkowski, still with justice the most influential commentator on Hesse's work, the stories are all variations on the theme of ‘young Knecht's faith in the realm of the spirit and in the ideal of service to the hierarchy’.¹² Boulby, while rightly seeing that only Der Regenmacher corresponds to Ziolkowski's view of the biographies, contends that ‘the theme which the … stories … have in common is not so much service as the transmission of the spiritual seed’, an idea which has been echoed by other commentators.¹³ Such monolithic treatment of the biographies comes dangerously close to suggesting that Hesse is uneconomically illustrating the same points four times over (if one sees the story of Knecht's own life as a further embodiment of the same issues). Even where differences between the various biographies have been observed, their implications for Knecht's development have not been brought out, for they have usually been left unassimilated into an overall structure.

The one major exception to this is an interpretative approach which views the biographies as part of a grand scheme of history, with the emphasis being less on Knecht's personal progress and more on that of mankind in general. Two critics have, in their divergent ways, advanced such a view of the biographies' significance.

In ‘Utopie und Geschichte in Hesses Glasperlenspiel’, Barbara Belhalfaoui argues that the three biographies parallel the various phases of mankind's history outlined in Hesse's essay Ein Stückchen Theologie (of 1932), which she regards as a ‘fundamentaler Text für das Verständnis des Glasperlenspiels’ and worthy of a place in the Suhrkamp Materialienbuch.¹⁴ In this essay, which Hesse also printed privately under the title Stufen der Menschwerdung, three stages of development are posited: innocence, guilt (leading to despair), and ‘das Dritte Reich’: faith, or failing that, if the despair is not mastered, ‘Untergang’.¹⁵ For Belhalfaoui, Indischer Lebenslauf represents the Third Kingdom: ‘die letzte Stufe der Menschwerdung, jenseits aller Zweifel’ (Belhalfaoui, p. 186). Certainly, Dasa has transcended despair at the end of his life, so in that sense Ein Stükchen Theologie does delineate the stages of Dasa's ‘Menschwerdung’, when his life is viewed in isolation. Nevertheless, the imposition of such an a priori pattern distorts, to the extent that it makes Indischer Lebenslauf into the final goal of Knecht's spiritual development, when so much of the novel suggests he still has a long way to go. Yoga, described in the same essay by Hesse as an ‘Erziehung zum Verdacht der Schein- und Sinnenwelt, Besinnung auf den Geist’, is nevertheless judged to be ‘nur Stufe’ and not the ultimate goal or Third Kingdom (Mein Glaube, p. 64). So even in the early thirties, Hesse was expressing views which would seem inconsistent with a reading of Indischer Lebenslauf equating the hero's final resting-point, after the perception of Maya, with the utopian Third Kingdom.

A second phaseological reading, which also underestimates the marked differences between the Knecht of Indischer Lebenslauf and the man who goes out into the world at the end of the novel, is Edmund Remys's attempt at reading the biographies largely in terms of J. J. Bachofen's notions of ‘Mutterrecht’ and ‘Vaterrecht’. Der Regenmacher is here seen as an ‘initiation into … the mother world’ (Remys, p. 78), with Knecht, the biography's subject, eventually dying ‘in the service of the mother, in the service of nature and the well-being of the matriarchal society’ (Remys, p. 87). Der Beichtvater, in turn, displays ‘the inadequacies of an exclusive father world, constituting a denial of the mother’, with Famulus leaving ‘the city (symbol of the mother) and going into the desert (symbol of the father)’ (Remys, pp. 88-89). Indischer Lebenslauf, by the same framework of reference, ‘exemplifies the potential corruptibility of and the dangerous and evil aspects innate in the world of the mother. … The mother world of the senses is ultimately rejected by Dasa in favor of a serene harmonious spiritual life, the realm of the father’ (Remys, p. 96). But in fact, as we observed earlier, it is not specifically the mother-world, for Remys symbolized by Dasa's stepmother and Pravati, that is dismissed as corrupt, it is the world of the senses and action that is presented as mere illusion.

Remys concludes:

In these [biographies], the student Joseph Knecht expresses and underscores his unconscious awareness of the good and bad aspects of the mother and father worlds as well as his rejection of an exclusive father realm, exemplified by the sterile and doubtful Christian world of Josephus and Dion, and by the sheltered refuge of the holy man and Dasa. The spiritual retreat is, however, acceptable to Dasa and the yogi because they have made their best possible choice under the circumstances—given the imperfection of the mother world in the historical and social situation at that time. The mother world is more imperfect at some times in history than at others.

(Remys, pp. 106-07)

Remys goes on to argue at some length that the novel's main protagonist eventually goes the way of Der Regenmacher (which is why the study's subtitle refers to Das Glasperlenspiel as ‘A Concealed Defense of the Mother World’). However, there are dangers to a systematic application of Bachofen's ideas to the novel in this way, not the least being the dogged insistence with which everything is decoded as a symbol of either the mother-world or the father-world. The biographies are in any case not modelled on one source of this kind, but are an amalgam of a variety of influences, from Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and the Upanishads to Hugo Ball's Byzantinisches Christentum and Jung's Symbols of Transformation. But from our point of view, the main problem with this, as with any other reading of the biographies in terms of cultural history¹⁶—involving what Bachofen would call ‘das Lebensgesetz der Zeiten’¹⁷—lies in the fact that it is not rigorously applicable. Remys succeeds in documenting Bachofen's undeniable influence on some of Hesse's symbolism. Yet as he himself admits, Hesse did not accept Das Mutterrecht's hierarchy of categories of historical development (hetaerism, conjugal matriarchy, and patriarchy). Since Hesse, according to Remys, ‘accepts Bachofen's second level of conjugal matriarchy as the most perfect stage of human development’ (Remys, p. 170), this makes a mockery of his use and ordering of different periods of history and different cultures in Knecht's ‘Lebensläufe’. Moreover, it seems highly unlikely that Das Glasperlenspiel was intended to herald a new matriarchy in Bachofen's terms (even when redefined to suit the present purposes by Remys (Remys, p. 171)). No, if the biographies have a meaningful structure within the novel's overall plan, then it is primarily as evidence of Knecht's own development, not in any sense as symbolic cultural history.

Originally, Hesse had intended the biographies to be the product of the Waldzell period, but at a later stage he inserted the poems into that phase and delayed the biographies to the ‘Studienjahre’. One result of this shift is that Der Regenmacher can be read, like the final poem ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’, as an act of suppression. Certainly, Der Regenmacher contains motifs of learning and teaching, of service and self-sacrifice for the good of the greater whole that are relevant to much of Das Glasperlenspiel, especially ‘Die Legende’. But as its first position and Knecht's earlier Waldzell problems would lead one to expect, it also contains less positive, even dissident elements. The first of the three biographies may have a pronounced social dimension, but the actual society depicted in it stands out as being dissimilar to Castalia: apart from displaying a very different (matriarchal) power-structure, it is a world of fear and superstition, not one governed by Castalian reason. Yet for all the contrasts, this is—surprisingly—the one biography in which Knecht makes no attempt to ‘translate’ his personality back across the millennia. Symbolically, he simply retains the name ‘Knecht’ here (while using ‘Famulus’ and ‘Dasa’ later on), thus making a token refusal to treat ‘seine eigene Person als Maske, als vergängliches Kleid einer Entelechie’, as the authorities expect (I, 173-74). Many other features of the story make it far more problematic than an idealized version of the Castalian values Knecht will display in ‘Die Legende’: for example, the fact that apprenticeship to rainmaking was a matter of training ‘Knechts Sinne viel mehr als sein Verstand’ (II, 275), that he is mastering Nature, rather than something as artificial as the Glass-Bead Game, that he learns much from his inner voice (II, 279) whereas Castalian education is much more a matter of external mentor-figures—moreover, that he ‘nur lernte, was schon in ihm lag’ (II, 295)—and the stress on fear even in Knecht's view of life, as well as his problems with Maro and the Rainmaker's eventual inability to perform successfully the task for which he had trained for so many years. Der Regenmacher does not simply prefigure the end of ‘Die Legende’. The Knecht of this biography is sacrificed because he is unable to perform the task for which he was trained, whereas Josef Knecht dies in the fulfilment of his role as supreme Castalian. Der Regenmacher is the product of a young man who is looking enviously beyond the confines of Castalia: to the world of Nature, love, the senses, and a social vocation such as Castalia appears to have lost. But it is also the creation of someone who doubts his own abilities, for the image of a failed rainmaker does not augur well for someone about to embark on a Castalian apprenticeship. Before he can go much further, Josef Knecht will have to strengthen his faith in his own abilities. This we see him doing in Der Beichtvater, or having done by the time he writes this second biography.

With Josephus Famulus, we have moved, as Mileck points out, to someone who ‘was long a man of the world before he became a man of God’.¹⁸ He represents the growing need for greater faith and the response to the problem of self-doubt diagnosed in Der Regenmacher.

Initially, Famulus's religious life is much more world-denying than that of his rainmaking predecessor: ‘Er wanderte aus der Stadt in die Wüste, aus der schnöden Welt in das arme Leben der Büßer hinüber’ (II, 329). Living a hermit's existence and one of self-mortification, Famulus becomes a father confessor to many, listening silently, seldom commenting on what he hears, yet able to instil faith in the doubting. But all is not well. The narrator's remark that ‘wir wissen ja, daß den Weltflüchtigen und Büßern der Teufel eine ganz besondere Sorgfalt widmet’ (II, 335-36) really sounds like a cry from the heart of the young Knecht. Eventually, growing with old age ever more disenchanted and unsure of his role as father confessor, Famulus flees. (This is the point in his story at which he is closest to the hero of the end of Der Regenmacher.) But for Famulus this is more the prelude to a rebirth than an ending. At a moment of despair during his flight, he contemplates suicide, but in contrast to ‘der Regenmacher’ he rejects what he sees as the heathen ‘uralten Brauch des Menschenopfers’ (II, 343). The way in which he regains and strengthens his faith in an encounter with another hermit-confessor puts far more stress on the potential for personal development than the previous biography had done. In this other, more active, even violent confessor-figure (Dion Pugil, God's ‘Faustkämpfer’ (II, 348)), the passive Famulus would appear to be meeting his opposite. But in fact, miraculously, Pugil begins to assimilate some of Famulus's characteristics, and vice versa, until the two synthesize in a new symbolic harmony. The biography's reassuring outcome is a clear sign of how much Josef Knecht is aware of being enriched by his encounters with non-Castalians such as Designori: and it shows that true strength comes from exposure to opposites, not from the inward-looking methods of contemporary Castalia.

Der Beichtvater focuses very much on two individuals in isolation; it is, after all, about the loss and regaining of personal faith. But viewed as the creation of the young Josef Knecht, the first two biographies do have one revealing social facet. In both cases, the central teacher-figure is needed by society: the rainmaker is, in fact, one of the most important people in the community, and thousands of penitents feel a spiritual need to confess to the two ‘Beichtväter’. This reads like wish-fulfilment on Knecht's part: projecting a social importance which Castalia (the rainmaker's and Famulus's institutional equivalent) has ceased to enjoy. When we come to Indischer Lebenslauf—and the gap between it and its predecessor is greater than that between the first two biographies—we find a substantially changed situation. Society's predicament certainly suggests that it ought to feel in much need of the spiritual values Dasa comes to represent. But Dasa himself offers little to society, for he is the creation of a hero who at that stage in his development feels that there are more important things than direct social intervention. Dasa's solution remains the private way of yoga and meditation. This third biography seems calculated to prepare the way for Knecht's commitment to a life of service to the Glass-Bead Game. Yet as our previous discussion of the biography shows, Knecht is, almost despite himself, now too mature a man to be unresponsive to the challenges of the modern outside world. Indischer Lebenslauf both highlights and temporarily suppresses the problems with which the world is to confront Castalia.

Each of the ‘Lebensläufe’, we may conclude, marks a distinct phase in Knecht's journey to ethical maturity. In each, the problems are significantly different, yet each grows out of the predicament posed by its forerunner. To over-emphasize the thematic common denominators of the three biographies, as many commentators have chosen to do, is to imply that Knecht, their creator, is marking time, when this is far from being the case. To talk of ‘parallel biographies’ or to see in them essentially ‘variations’ on constant motifs is to impose upon them a quasi-Castalian timelessness. In fact, these are some of the few authentic documents that we have directly from the historically conscious hero of Hesse's novel. They show him to be constantly evolving, widening his horizons, and unconsciously preparing himself for the time when he will have to transcend both the territorial bounds and the intellectual limitations of contemporary Castalia.

Notes

1. Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel: Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung des Magister Ludi Josef Knecht samt Knechts hinterlassenen Schriften, 2 vols (Zürich, 1943), 1, 175. Further references to the text, given in parenthesis after quotations, are to this edition.

2. Compare George Wallis Field, Hermann Hesse: Kommentar zu sämtlichen Werken, Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 24 (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 143-46, and Edwin F. Casebeer, Hermann Hesse (New York, 1972), pp. 161-64. According to details in ‘Die Entstehungsjahre des Glasperlenspiels: Eine biographische Chronik’ (Materialien zu Hermann Hesses ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’, 2 vols, edited by Volker Michels (Frankfurt a.M., 1973-74), I, 35 and I, 43), ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’ (1933) was one of the earliest poems Hesse wrote; ‘Der letzte Glasperlenspieler’ was not written until 1937. Hence a poem from the period when Hesse had intended writing an uncritical account of Castalia becomes inserted at a point where its sentiments are very much put into question by context.

3. Materialien zu Hermann Hesses ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’, I, 294.

4. Mark Boulby, Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art (Ithaca, 1967), p. 265.

5. Theodore Ziolkowski, ‘Hermann Hesse: Der vierte Lebenslauf’, Germanic Review, 42 (1967), 130.

6. Mark Boulby, ‘“Der vierte Lebenslauf” as a Key to Das Glasperlenspiel’, MLR, 59 (1966), 635-46.

7. When Ninon Hesse first published the two versions of the ‘Vierter Lebenslauf’ in Prosa aus dem Nachlaß (Frankfurt a.M., 1965), she noted: ‘Der Lebenslauf, welcher hier der vierte genannt wird, wäre, wenn er beendet und ins Glasperlenspiel eingefügt worden wäre, der dritte gewesen (wie auch das handschriftliche Notizblatt besagt), er wäre auf den “Beichtvater” gefolgt. Da der dritte der “indische” wurde, soll der bisher ungedruckte aus dem 18. Jahrhundert hier der “vierte” genannt werden’ (pp. 603-04). This is presumably why the Suhrkamp Verlag, when it published a volume called Josef Knechts Lebensläufe in 1977, put the two versions (now entitled ‘Schwäbischer Lebenslauf aus dem 18. Jahrhundert’) in third position—which accords neither with the order of composition nor with the sequence described in the novel itself. In fact, as Joseph Mileck has pointed out, Frau Hesse was misled by the number ‘III’ against the eighteenth-century project on Hesse's Notizblatt: ‘The III used by Hesse did not relate to the internal biographies of the novel but to Hesse's work schedule. The eighteenth-century biography was simply the third (following the Castalia-tale and “Der Regenmacher”) of his “Lebensläufe” to receive attention. Had it been incorporated in the novel, it would have become the fourth internal biography, representing, as it does, the stage most immediately preceding Castalia and its glass-bead-game’ (‘Das Glasperlenspiel: Genesis, Manuscripts, and History of Publication’, in Hesse Companion, edited by Anna Otten (Albuquerque, 1977), p. 202). Despite this clarification (first published, under the same title, in the German Quarterly, 43 (1970), 55-83), the third position assumed by Frau Hesse continues to be common currency: see, for instance, Martin Pfeifer, Hesse-Kommentar zu sämtlichen Werken (Munich, 1980), p. 357.

8. Hermann Hesse, Gesammelte Briefe, 4 vols, edited by Ursula and Volker Michels in collaboration with Heiner Hesse (Frankfurt a.M., 1973-85), III: 1936-1948 (1982), 226-27.

9. Boulby is wrong to argue that ‘only one of the autobiographies, “The Rainmaker”, specifically introduces society, a restraint which confirms the view that service to society was never the primary ethos of The Glass Bead Game’ (Hermann Hesse, p. 308). In fact, Indischer Lebenslauf demonstrates just such an ideal ex negativo.

10. Materialien zu Hermann Hesses ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’, I, 297-99.

11. Sidney M. Johnson, ‘The Autobiographies in Hermann Hesse's Glasperlenspiel’, German Quarterly, 29 (1956), 167.

12. Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, 1965), p. 300. Similar views can be found in Ziolkowski's article on the ‘Vierter Lebenslauf’, and both of these works use the telling phrase ‘parallel “Lives”’.

13. Boulby, Hermann Hesse, p. 309. See also Johnson, pp. 165-69. Murray Peppard, ‘Hermann Hesse: From Eastern Journey to Castalia’, Monatshefte, 50 (1958), 252, and Heinz Stolte, Hermann Hesse: Weltscheu und Lebensliebe (Hamburg, 1971), p. 269. A useful survey of critical reactions to the ‘Lebensläufe’ can be found in Chapter 4 of Edmund Remys, Hermann Hesse's ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’. A Concealed Defense of the Mother World, European University Studies, 668 (Berne, 1983), pp. 58-67.

14. Barbara Belhalfaoui, ‘Utopie und Geschichte in Hesses Glasperlenspiel. Nachgewiesen anhand der Lebensläufe’, Recherches Germaniques, 10 (1980), 182-204 (pp. 185-86).

15. ‘Ein Stückchen Theologie’, in Hermann Hesse, Mein Glaube (Frankfurt a.M., 1971), pp. 64-65.

16. Although not developed, a similar phaseological reading is suggested both by Hans J. Lüthi, Hermann Hesse: Natur und Geist (Stuttgart, 1970), p. 127, and by Ernst Rose, Faith from the Abyss (New York, 1965), p. 135.

17. J. J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (Basle, 1948), p. 13.

18. Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art (Berkeley, 1978), p. 321.