Apart from their astonishing success in America, [Hesse's] works seem to be surviving in Germany despite the adamant hostility of many worthy critics, and his reputation there is probably on the rise….

Das Glasperlenspiel is quite properly seen by Hesse himself as a work of contemporary relevance…. There is in the early versions some revulsion against art and learning, against "bourgeois" prejudices. His outlook, in 1936, is however clearly revealed in the figure of Dasa ("Indischer Lebenslauf") who is unmoved finally by the demands of society and refuses to have recourse to violence….

One finds, if one looks for it, much that is a pointer to the later Hesse in his early writings….

A dissatisfaction with stereotyped everyday life and with immobility shows itself early. What is called (by [Volker] Michels) "die Aktualität der Alternative" is offered as a new path.

It was in the pauses between his major works that Hesse wrote much of what appears in Kleine Freuden (as also in Die Kunst des Müssiggangs). As time goes by, so one finds him more willing to be explicit and in certain directions uncompromising. By the early 1930s, in fact, he has become an adamant pacifist…. [He] is convinced that the world is sick above all else from a lack of brotherly love….

Hesse's path, he felt, was an inevitable choice, even if it might appear "der Weg eines Don Quichote"…. From 1933 we have the "mature" Hesse before us, still given at times to shrill moments of depression, but fundamentally unchanging in his conception of the world, which is pacifistic, rationalistic, and full of hortatory idealism.