SOURCE: “Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha,” in German Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 2, March, 1952, pp. 103–09.

In the following essay, Malthaner discusses the relative “unpopularity” of Hesse's writing in the United States prior to the early 1950s, due to Hesse's preoccupations with autobiography and “Weltanschauung,” a philosophy of life, and how Siddhartha is such a work of literature.

Herman Hesse, the German-Swiss poet and novelist, is relatively little known in this country although a good deal of publicity has been given him since he was granted the Nobel prize for literature in 1946. This “unpopularity” of Hesse is only partly due to the fact that he writes in a foreign tongue—until very recently only very few of his works have been available in English translations—, even now his books are little in demand outside of university circles. That means that Hesse has not caught the fancy of the American public, that he...