SOURCE: Wilde, Lawrence. “The Radical Appeal of Hermann Hesse's Alternative Community.” Utopian Studies 10, no. 1 (winter 1999): 86-93.

In the following essay, Wilde considers Hesse's portrayal of flawed utopias in his novels.

I am at odds with the political thinkers of all trends, and I shall always, incorrigibly, recognise in man, in the individual man and his soul, the existence of realms to which political impulses and forms do not extend.

(ITWGO [If The War Goes On … Reflections on War and Politics], 11)¹

Detachment, Autonomy, and the quest for spiritual self-fulfilment are the key themes in the novels of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), and they do not obviously lend themselves to a political reading. However, in his final two novels, The Journey to the East, published in 1932, and The Glass Bead Game, published in 1943, he creates alternative enlightened communities and grapples with the question of how they might relate to the world...