The institute was a preparatory school for ministers who would then go on to attend the
Stift, or training school, for Protestant clergy in Tübingen. Yet Hesse had a difficult time at the seminary, and came to dislike its disciplined atmosphere intensely. He took leave the following March, and formally withdrew in May of 1892, just before his fifteenth birthday. His parents worried that he was disturbed, and he was sent to two separate special-education institutes, and then a secondary school in Bad Cannstatt. He performed poorly at each.
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Hesse pleaded with his parents to be allowed to come home, and they relented in the fall of 1893. He began helping at the Calwer Verlagsverein, and busied himself reading from his grandfather's bookshelves. When he asked his parents for permission to leave home, declaring his intention to become a writer, they refused. Instead, it was arranged that Hesse become an apprentice machinist at a Calw clock factory. He spent the next fifteen months training there, and once again found the setting intensely contrary to his personality. The work was hard, the atmosphere dirty, and Hesse yearned to return to the world of books.
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