Wagner (1920) and to his most popular work, Siddhartha. Although Siddhartha’s life closely parallels that of the Buddha, the novel, with its synthesis of all major religions, is really the profession of faith of a seeker who cannot accept any doctrine but who, when he finds his “way,” is able to approve each doctrine and share in the universal brotherhood of all of those who have glimpsed something of the divine and the eternal.

Steppenwolf is, like all Hesse’s work, the biography of a soul. In this novel, Harry Haller purges his soul of time and personality in a vain attempt to attain the realm of the Immortals. Although he fails because he has not learned to see the eternal behind the temporary and to laugh at the game of life, the novel ends on a note of hope for Haller. In Narcissus and Goldmund, the conflict between Spirit and Nature is embodied in the relationship between Narcissus, the analytical thinker and theologian who represents the Spirit, and Goldmund, the dreamy artist who represents Nature. Narcissus inhabits a monastery, the World of the Father, while Goldmund lives in the outside world, the World of the Mother. Ultimately, a mystical union of these opposites is realized.

After Narcissus and Goldmund, Hesse’s perspective again changes, and in his last two prose works the individual quest is no longer the center of the novel. In The Journey to the East, the message is that the willful, personal self must die and the suprapersonal self must increase. This means the liberation of the true self and the ability to view life as a game. The journey Hesse describes in this work is not geographical but spiritual. All wayfarers are drawn irresistibly eastward in search of the home and youth of the soul, the everywhere and nowhere, the unification of all times. The east becomes a metaphor for the Kingdom of the Spirit, and the whole book is an appeal to a way of life that runs against the currents of the time. When Hesse speaks of the order of the wayfarers, he perceives them as a wave in the eternal stream of the human spirit toward the East, toward Home. This novel also celebrates artists as artist-saints, for among the travelers are famous painters, writers, and musicians. Demian expresses the belief that it is through those who bear the mark that humanity progresses. Now, years later, this belief is reaffirmed. The Journey to the East announces that it is good for those who bear the mark to know that they have comrades and to know that they are part of the journey.

The Glass Bead Game is Hesse’s masterpiece. Like The Journey to the East, The Glass Bead Game expresses faith in the indestructibility of humanity’s spiritual culture. Regardless of differing interpretations, The Glass Bead Game repeats the major motifs of Hesse’s other works, particularly the essential duality of human nature, which is represented by contrasting characters who form bonds that ultimately transcend their differences and result in an all-encompassing oneness. The artist-saint and the millennium are the principal themes of The Glass Bead Game. The artist-saint—the self-fulfilled individual—is embodied in such characters as Goldmund, Demian, Siddhartha, and the Wayfarer to the East. In The Glass Bead Game, the artist-saint Josef Knecht is formally installed in the eternal and invisible Kingdom of the Spirit, the end of the Inward Way.

Siddhartha

First published: 1922 (English translation, 1951)

Type of work: Novel

A young Brahman searches for ultimate reality through profligacy and asceticism and learns that wisdom cannot be taught but must come from one’s inner struggle.

Siddhartha combines two universal myths, that of Everyman searching for enlightenment and that of the hero on the way to sainthood. Siddhartha takes the journey common to all of Hesse’s later heroes, passing from the irresponsible paradise of childhood through the purifying conflicts of youth to the liberation of adult wisdom, the “higher irresponsibility” of absolute faith. Throughout Hesse’s works is the reminder that one can learn how to live only from life itself, not from books or teachers. Thus, Siddhartha, the eternal seeker, goes his own way, bowing to no one. He must disregard the wishes of his father, the advice of his friend Govinda, and finally even the counsel of the great Buddha. Only thus can he find his way to his true self.

The story of Siddhartha is also built on the myth of the quest. For Siddhartha, the quest begins when he feels that the teachings of Brahmanism do not lead to salvation and decides to try other paths. He leaves home with his friend Govinda to join the ascetic Samanas, with whom he spends three years. When he realizes that asceticism and yoga are only leading him further away from himself, he goes with Govinda to hear the teachings of Guatama the Buddha. Govinda remains with the great teacher, but Siddhartha decides that he must seek his own path through immersion in the world of the senses.

He travels to a large city, where he falls in love with Kamala, a famous courtesan. With her help Siddhartha becomes wealthy, able to afford anything he wants—including Kamala herself. Eventually he realizes that this life of indulgence is just as pointless as a life of denial, that both luxury and asceticism can be extremes that obstruct the path to spiritual illumination. He decides, therefore, to turn his back on the world of Sansara and illusion. Unaware that Kamala is now pregnant with his child, Siddhartha flees the city and returns to the river, where, in despair, he almost commits suicide.

Realizing that suicide is an evasion, not an answer, he decides to stay by the river and to try to understand himself. He looks upon the contrary experiences of asceticism and indulgence as necessary opposites that define and neutralize each other, leaving him once again in his original state of innocence but with a knowledge of good and evil. Living with the wise ferryman Vasudeva, Siddhartha learns many secrets from the river, the most important ones being that time is an illusion, that all being is one, and that for knowledge to be significant, it must be conditioned by love.

Twelve years later, Kamala comes to the river with her son in search of Buddha. When she dies from a snake bite, Siddhartha begins to care for the boy. He loves his son desperately, but the boy longs to escape the two old boatmen and return to life in the city. Eventually he escapes, and Siddhartha, realizing how deeply he loves his son, also realizes that loving him means letting him go. Vasudeva soon dies, and Siddhartha takes his place. Govinda appears one day and is struck by the change that has overtaken Siddhartha, for it is clear to Govinda that Siddhartha, like Buddha, has at last achieved absolute peace and harmony.

When Hesse talks of peace and harmony, he means the perfect balance of opposites. Every truth is made up of equally true opposites. In order for Buddha to teach about the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, suffering and salvation. The world itself, however, is never one-sided. A deed is never wholly Sansara or wholly Nirvana, just as a person is never wholly a saint or a sinner. These absolutes persist because people are under the illusion that time is real. Time is not real; and if time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

The lesson Siddhartha learns is that the world is perfect at every moment, that every sin carries the hope of grace within it. During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all of the past, present, and future, and then to see everything as good, everything as perfect, everything as Brahman. Thus, everything that exists is good—death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary; it needs only the concurrence of true believers. Then all will be well with them and nothing can harm them.

Steppenwolf

First published: Der Steppenwolf, 1927 (English translation, 1929)

Type of work: Novel

An idealistic artist, struggling to accept the crassness of the real world, learns how to relate to humanity without compromising his integrity.

Steppenwolf is Hesse’s most surrealistic novel. With its cast of dreamlike characters, its Magic Theater, and its nightmarish imagery, it comes closer than any of his other works to re-creating the fevered intensity of the lost soul adrift in time and space, ensnared in its own smothering web. The only way back is the mystical process of depersonalization. Harry Haller, the main character, is a man in deep despair because he doubts his ideals and his vocation. Life has become senseless; he longs for new values. Haller first has to learn to accept himself wholly, then to perceive life as a game, and finally to expand his soul to include the whole world in its totality.

On the surface, a bourgeois world is a world of sanity. Haller looks about him at the comfortable routine of domestic existence, and although he feels nostalgia for it, he can no longer accept it. Thus when he sees a sign that says “Magic Theater; Entrance Not for Everybody; For Madmen Only,” he tries to enter, because only madmen can make any sense out of a bourgeois world. Until Haller reads the pamphlet entitled “Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” he has always thought of himself as a double personality: man and wolf, the civilized human being and the freedom-loving outlaw. So great is this inner tension that Haller has often been on the point of taking his life and indeed is able to keep living only because he plans to commit suicide on his fiftieth birthday.

After reading the treatise, however, Haller realizes that he is wrong in supposing that he is a twofold person. All people, he learns, have manifold personalities, and the common notion that each person is a single ego is false. The road to enlightenment is to surrender the idea of a central ego and to expand the soul until it includes nothing less than everything. To achieve this enlightenment, one must experience certain symbolic rites of passage that will remove one from the clutches of the bourgeois.

Haller has such an experience when he encounters a professor of comparative folklore with whom he once studied and accepts an invitation to dine with him and his wife. During the meal, Haller is forced to behave courteously and exchange social lies with his host and hostess. When the professor, a right-wing nationalist, ridicules a newspaper article denouncing the kaiser, however, Haller declares angrily that he is the author of the article and cares nothing for the professor, his scholarship, or his politics. Calling himself a schizophrenic who is no longer fit for human society, Haller storms out, relieved; the lone wolf in him has triumphed over the bourgeois.

Haller then meets Maria, who becomes his mistress, and Pablo, a handsome young musician with extensive experience in sex and drugs. One evening Pablo invites Haller to his quarters for a little entertainment—“for madmen only,” he explains—the ticket of admission being one of Pablo’s drugs. When Haller has succumbed to the influence of the drugs, Pablo holds up a small mirror in which Haller sees himself in a double vision, as a man whose features blend with those of a shy, beautiful, dazed wolf with smoldering, frightened eyes. Next Pablo leads him into a theater corridor where there is a full-length mirror. Standing before it, Haller sees himself in a hundred forms: as child, adolescent, mature man, both happy and sad, dressed and naked. One form, an elegant young man, embraces Pablo.

Turning from the mirror, Haller walks down the corridor, off of which are dozens of doors, each offering the fulfillment of a thwarted or unrecognized aspect of Haller’s personality. Haller goes through a sequence of bizarre experiences climaxing in the symbolic murder of Hermine and culminating in his appearance before a dozen robed judges who, instead of sentencing him to death as he expects, condemn him to “eternal life.” Then all but Haller laugh. He is left feeling that he still has much to learn about how to live but promises himself that he will work at it and one day even learn to laugh.

Narcissus and Goldmund

First published: Narziss und Goldmund, 1930 (English translation, Death and the Lover, 1932; also as Narcissus and Goldmund, 1968)

Type of work: Novel

Two close friends lead contrasting lives, one spiritual, one sensual, ultimately realizing that they are but opposite sides of the same nature.

In Narcissus and Goldmund, Hesse reaches into the past to explore the theme of the reconciliation of opposites. The conflict between artistic and scholarly existence had always been a problem for him, and in this novel Hesse embodies those opposites in the personalities of two close friends whose interdependent lives take meaning from each other. Both young men meet as novitiates in a monastery, but it is clear from the beginning that they are destined for very different vocations. Narcissus is a scholar who searches for meaning in abstractions, whereas Goldmund is a sensualist who seeks meaning in the concrete world of the senses.

At the end of his novitiate, Narcissus takes final vows and starts his prescribed ascetic exercises, dedicating himself to a life of service to the spirit even though he is aware of its one-sidedness. Goldmund, on the other hand, runs away from the monastery and meets a young gypsy who surrenders herself to him and then leaves him to return to her husband. Thus Goldmund’s first experience in the world of the senses teaches him how unstable and fleeting it is. Yet he continues his search for worldly satisfaction. He has an adventure with a peasant woman, then joins the household of a knight, from whom he flees after getting involved in a triangle with the knight’s two daughters. Shortly thereafter Goldmund experiences the violence of the world when he kills a thief, hides the corpse, and escapes.

Goldmund next becomes a disciple of Master Nicholas, a sculptor whose statue of St. Mary he admires. When Goldmund fashions a statue of the disciple John, the features are clearly those of Narcissus. Master Nicholas realizes Goldmund’s possibilities and decides to admit him to the guild and give the young man his daughter in marriage. Goldmund, however, does not want to live a bourgeois life and deserts his master. It is the period of the Black Death, and Goldmund meets two refugees, a vagabond cleric and a girl the cleric thinks he has rescued from the plague. For a time the three live together in a country cottage, but once the girl falls ill with the disease, the cleric flees, leaving Goldmund to nurse her until her death. Goldmund then returns to Master Nicholas, who, he learns, has died from the disease.

Soon thereafter Goldmund is caught in bed with the governor’s mistress and condemned to death. When a priest comes to give him extreme unction, Goldmund considers killing the priest and escaping in the priest’s habit, but the priest turns out to be Narcissus, who has become Abbot John. As Narcissus had promised, he has come to his friend in the hour of his direst need, when the world of the senses and the world of violence and disease have led him to contemplate the sin of premeditated murder. Through Narcissus’s influence, Goldmund is released, and the two friends return to the monastery, where Goldmund is given a shop in which he can create sculptures. Once again Goldmund cannot submit to the discipline of monastic life and flees. Years later he returns to the monastery as a tired old man. The world has become too much for him; he longs for peace but harbors no grudge against fate. He has no faith in a life after death but still looks forward to dying, seeing it as a happiness in which his mother will take him by the hand and lead him back into the innocence of nonexistence.

Although Narcissus is portrayed from the beginning as being well on the way to perfection, in the end he has not yet achieved it. His life seems complete only when it is seen as a frame of reference within which Goldmund’s experiences acquire meaning. The life of Goldmund is developed in stages as he moves upward from innocence through experience to attain, through sensuality, the higher innocence that Narcissus has sought through spirituality. Neither, however, can make it alone. As halves of the same entity, they need each other. This reality is the interdependence that is the theme of all of Hesse’s works.

The Glass Bead Game

First published: Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943 (English translation, Magister Ludi, 1949; also as The Glass Bead Game, 1969)

Type of work: Novel

A young man in a futuristic utopian society renounces the emphasis on pure intellect and the world of the spirit, leaves the Order, and dies.

The Glass Bead Game is Hesse’s masterpiece. He wrote it over a period of eleven years (1932 to 1943), during a time when the world seemed bent on self-destruction. Because The Glass Bead Game is, among other things, an urgent plea for an all-embracing humanitarianism, it has a more didactic tone and a more explicit linkage with spiritual ideas from the past. The result is a book subject to many interpretations. On one level it restates Hesse’s belief in the individual’s ability to attain perfection and to help others by serving as an example, creating an eternal circle of master and disciple. By affirming faith in the individual’s perfectibility and will to serve, Hesse implies his belief in the coming of a better humanity that will conquer chaos and barbarity.

For many readers, the significance of The Glass Bead Game lies in the synthesis that it represents in Hesse’s art and life. It is the work in which he reaffirms most strongly his belief in the Kingdom of the Spirit, seeing in the Game an eternal approach to this Kingdom. The central figure’s name, (Josef) Knecht, means “servant” in German, suggesting that his purpose is to serve the hierarchy. His ultimate service is as supreme Magister Ludi, an office he holds for eight years, but he is plagued by doubts from the beginning. Slowly he realizes that he is aware of the polarities of the light World of the Father (Castalia) and the dark World of the Mother (the outside world). Knecht harbors two opposing feelings within his breast—one toward service to the Order, the other toward “awakening.”

The irrational strain grows. As with Goldmund, it is the artist in him that desires liberation. When he does decide to leave the Order, the reason he gives is that he fears that devotion to the spiritual life in seclusion from the world leads to degeneration, that the glass bead game is nothing but an esoteric play as pastime. He prefers to become a Castalian teacher in the outside world. Not long after Knecht leaves Castalia in his quest for self-fulfillment, he drowns in an icy lake one morning right at sunrise. Hesse himself saw Knecht’s death as a sacrifice made to free Tito, his pupil, to take up Knecht’s cause. This affirmative conclusion is symbolized by the way Tito takes up the robe Knecht has left behind and puts it on after Knecht’s death.

By writing The Glass Bead Game, Hesse tried to achieve mainly two goals: to build a spiritual realm in which he himself could live and breathe in spite of the poisoning of the world around him and to strengthen the resistance of his German friends against the barbaric powers under which they had to suffer. In order to create this spiritual realm, however, it was not enough to return to the past or to dwell on the present. Instead it became necessary for Hesse to project his ideas into the future, when the unbearable present would have become history. The utopian character of the novel, therefore, is not a gimmick but a need to view the present from a clearer perspective.