[Hesse's] entire work seems an endless recording of the process of awakening. The very word fascinates him, and in his last work, the monumental Glass Bead Game (1943), published in this country under the title Magister Ludi, we find the protagonist's admission that "awakening was to me a truly magic word, demanding and pressing, consoling and promising." (p. 52)
In the early novels, Peter Camenzind and Beneath the Wheel (1906), this "exercise" was still so much shrouded in psychological realism that Hesse appeared to be one more of the many sensitive and delicate anatomists of puberty…. Yet, in the light of Hesse's later development, it becomes quite obvious that the psycho-biological "case histories" of Peter Camenzind and Hans Giebenrath are only timid approaches to the painful process of awakening…. (The fact that in both cases the return to the dark is caused by failure to establish satisfactory sexual relations opens the door to psychoanalytic interpretations to which Hesse has been only too often subjected.) There is, in these early books, still a wall barring the adolescent hero from the open road, the same wall which separates young Hesse from the realization of his own inner self and of the problems which beset him and his time. A shock was needed to break down the barrier and bring an awakening which would force upon Hesse the reëvaluation of all values, and open the road before him. The shock came in the form of the first World War.
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