For the Germanist of my own age, over thirty but not yet too far over, the great enthusiasm for Hermann Hesse among younger people poses a vexing dilemma. For the fact is that many of us, with important exceptions, do not think that Hesse is a writer of the first rank…. (p. 112)

Hesse's stylistic mediocrity directs attention to other problems. First of all, his characteristic stylistic posture is certainly willed. There is a certain amount of vivid writing in Steppenwolf, here and there in Narcissus and Goldmund, and elsewhere, while Siddhartha is, of course, exceptionally mannered, as is, to a lesser extent, The Glass Bead Game…. (p. 113)

The inner way and the search for wholeness [, Hesse's themes,] are aspects of a criticism of modern society with sources in the resistance to the developing phenomena of the modern world in German Classicism and Romanticism around the turn of the nineteenth century. As Hesse came out of his adolescent crisis in the mid-1890s, he began a lonely and isolated time during which he read deeply in this tradition. This reading was the formative cultural experience of his life, and indeed one that was not very different from what he would have acquired had he gone through a normal course of university education, for Goethe, Schiller, and the Romantics were the axis of German Bildung—although, to be sure, Hesse's point was the opposite, that he could learn as much by himself as at the university. For all that he protested against the vulgarization of Bildung, especially in Steppenwolf, he shared its assumptions: that in this unparalleled flowering of German culture, along with its assimilation of Classical antiquity, Renaissance art, and Indic studies, were to be found the guidelines for responding to and evaluating the experience of the present.

The transplantation of the effort of German Classical-Romanticism to find an alternative for society into the crises of the early twentieth century is the key to neo-Romanticism, of which Hesse is one of the major exemplars. It may be seen most clearly in Steppenwolf, for despite the change Harry Haller undergoes in his way of dealing with the strains between the ideal and the real, nothing has been altered in his secularized and aesthticized scheme of redemption. Salvation and truth lie in exactly the same place at the end as at the beginning…. Except for Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, there is scarcely an artist or thinker to whom Hesse alludes who lived later than the 1830s. These spirits are in a profound sense all alike, insofar as they are in touch with the one and all, that timeless realm where the poles of opposites touch and spark ethereal comets. This fraternity hovers above life and history, and it is only with infrequent intermittence in touch with the feeble and shabby emanation that is our environment. Harry Haller believes this at the beginning, and the truth of it is demonstrated to him at the end. (pp. 118-19)

[To Hesse], pitiable and disreputable turmoil is the life of man in society, that part of human existence that is beneath the concern of the wise man. The inner way escapes and withdraws from it; the search for wholeness transcends it and discovers the cosmic unities that ultimately govern the world.

This search for wholeness, to which every one of Hesse's major works bears testimony, probably does not arouse active uneasiness in the ordinary American reader…. But to anyone sensitive to such matters in the German tradition, the theme is acutely troubling. For it is one thing to seek after unity in the world or in our perception of it; it is another to postulate ultimate unity and to regard all disharmonies as regrettable excrescences or ignorable and trivial aspects of an unimportant "reality." It is not wholly clear just where Hesse stands in this matter. (p. 122)

[The] use made of the organic metaphor through the nineteenth century and up until the advent of Fascism made it a dubious legacy indeed. The chief mischief it caused was to make the Germans incapable of dealing with the class conflict and of constructing a society that would accommodate it. Class conflict was simply impermissible, for society was to be a harmonious, organic whole. Although Nazism can hardly be called either harmonious or organic, many Germans thought it would be. Hesse never saw the connection between totalitarianism and the organic metaphor…. (p. 124)

Furthermore, unike such contemporaries as Musil, Thomas Mann, or Hermann Broch, Hesse appears to have made little effort to understand the modern civilization and society he so deplored, and consequently any assent to his cultural critique will share a striking lack of precision. Hesse's characteristic stance before his environment and civilization is one of uncomprehending bafflement, which does not prevent him from firm denunciation. Examples abound in Steppenwolf. What Harry Haller calls "jazz" is the very substance of the horrid vulgarity of the modern environment, when compared with the high idealism of classical music, but what he here abominates is not really jazz, but popular big-band dance music. It is true that this distinction was not very sharply made in the twenties, except by connoisseurs; nevertheless, Hesse was so appalled by modern culture that his alter ego flails away at an enemy of which he has a very superficial understanding. (pp. 125-26)

The vision [in Hesse's work] is not only conservative, it is blindered; it fails to focus upon the true shape of the problem. Hesse's lack of comprehension of the world whose rejection he insists upon could be demonstrated at length upon the inept account of the "feuilletonistic age" that is given at the outset of The Glass Bead Game. (p. 126)

[Hesse] did possess an instinctive sense for the worst excesses of pernicious nonsense. Sometimes he mounted a fairly coherent attack on the nonsense, such as in the often-quoted and somewhat unexpected passage in Steppenwolf in which the spirit of German music as a surrogate for reason is subjected to a sharp critique. Unfortunately, he is often a cliché-ridden writer, and it is the provenance of these clichés that is a cause for concern. Two examples are prominent enough in his writing to deserve some remarks.

One of these is the Führer principle…. [Its] permutations are widespread in neo-Romanticism, which developed … the theme of the great, creative personality who stands above common morality and moves the world by the force of his elite genius. The ideological purpose of this theory is to counteract the analysis of the dynamics of class in the course of history. Hesse puts a pure example of this into the mouth of Demian: "If Bismarck had understood the Social Democrats and made an arrangement with them, he would have been a clever ruler, but not a man of destiny. So it was with Napoleon, with Caesar, with Loyola, with all of them." Indeed, Demian ends with the word Führer, and the novel celebrates the amorality of the elite man with the mark of Cain for whom the rest of mankind is trash…. The theme reappears in the Tractate of Steppenwolf: "We are not here talking about man … such as those running around on the streets by the millions and who are no more to be regarded than sand in the sea or the drops of the surf; a couple of million more or less do not matter, they are material, nothing more." It is in the light of such careless use of an inhumane cliché that Hesse's critique of the bourgeoisie must be seen, for the Tractate continues shortly afterward: "A human being who is capable of comprehending Buddha, a human being who has a sense for the heavens and the depths of humanity, should not live in a world ruled by common sense, democracy, and bourgeois culture."

There is a continuous pattern in Hesse of subordination to a superior, wiser authority. The will to rebel is, to be sure, always present: Siddhartha and Goldmund insist on finding their own route through the world; Sinclair is so uncertain within that he has difficulty in following Demian; Haller resists for a long time the primitive, elemental authority of Pablo; and Knecht, when he breaks out of the Castalian order, is accused of wishing to choose his own master. Hesse apparently could not see how parochial this dilemma of individualism was. (pp. 129-30)

[The] hunger for wholeness did not generate in Hesse the thirst for holocaust, a loud insistence that only a cleansing bloodbath could clean the trash out of bourgeois society and restore heroism and purity. This tone is, however, deposited in Hesse's writings. Again Demian is the most offensive text…. I confess that I have difficulty distinguishing [Demian's] rhetoric from that of the early years of the S.S. into which the spirit of apocalyptic, elitist heroism eventually flowed…. If a writer is indeed obligated to the spirit, as Hesse so endlessly preached, then his first duty should be a sensitivity to language and its humane employment, not simply to be an indiscriminate blotter that absorbs uncritically all the hysteria and nonsense that may be in the air at the time. (pp. 131-32)

The sound of the apocalypse is heard in Steppenwolf also, although there it is all part of the experiment of the inner man, and consequently one does not know where to draw the line between the inner phantasmagoria and real existential choice…. Steppenwolf is the only book in which Hesse experiments with the ecstasy of violence and slaughter, although there are slight premonitions in a smaller compass in Narcissus and Goldmund. The destructiveness belongs, of course, to a psychodrama that takes place within the confines of Harry Haller's own skull, which is why Steppenwolf is Hesse's most comic book. But one may fairly ask if it is responsible or intelligent for an author of such profound pacifist convictions to give tongue, even as part of an aesthetic game, to bloodthirsty imaginings that were meant by others in dead earnest and were soon to be realized in a very concrete way.

Hesse is, by any severe artistic or intellectual standards, a minor writer, although a not uninteresting one if regarded with proper skepticism and sufficient knowledge of his context. For all his high-mindedness and humaneness, his consciousness unwittingly reflects ideological positions that have had catastrophic consequences. The substance of his writing is not mainly artistic, but priestly and homiletic, and he was not intelligent enough to wrestle effectively with the issues he raised. There is always a kind of shrinkage in Hesse from the consequences of the doctrines he is experimenting with; they are blunted by crossing them with incompatible doctrines, or they are made ultimately inconsequential by being placed in a play of the imagination that is intransitive because it is hermetically sealed from the detested world outside. His effect is to sugar-coat the dynamite of the German irrational tradition, and there is plenty of evidence that when that tradition is turned into pablum, those who overindulge in it are likely to wake up with a cosmic stomach ache. (p. 133)