[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 shr...

Hesse used romanticism as a tool for the development of a unique approach, leading to a sharp analysis of the self, the meaning of personal identity and the conditions of self-consciousness, which he explores in contemporary terms…. Hesse's postwar novels are concerned with the inner world turned inside out, yielding not only dreams, memories, or hallucinations per se but also the world underlying perception, which is dissolved and recomposed in the self's inner landscape. (p. 44)

In all of his work Hesse has concerned himself with the individual and his quest for meanings in life. For Hesse the forms of the society which surround the individual are meaningless; therefore, the individual becomes the outsider, the Hessean hero who asks, "How shall I live?"… Although, then, the theme of the outsider underlies much of Hesse's work, there are three novels which, it seems to me, stand out as signposts, marking the direction of Hesse's thinking in terms o...

For the Germanist of my own age, over thirty but not yet too far over, the great enthusiasm for Hermann Hesse among younger people poses a vexing dilemma. For the fact is that many of us, with important exceptions, do not think that Hesse is a writer of the first rank…. (p. 112) Hesse's stylistic mediocrity directs attention to other problems. First of all, his characteristic stylistic posture is certainly willed. There is a certain amount of vivid writing in Steppenwolf, here and there in Nar...

[The] distrust of everyday "reality"—it is characteristic that [Hesse] customarily bracketed the term with quotation marks to indicate what he regarded as its tentative, problematic nature—remained a conspicuous theme in Hesse's thought throughout his life. (p. vii) At the same time, Hesse inevitably coupled his rejection of present "reality" with an assertion of his faith in a higher truth…. In 1940 his denial of "so-called reality" conc...

[Hesse] produced some twenty-five important works. While some of these belong to the realm of poetry, his most important novels are autobiographical in nature or fall into the category of Erziehungsromane. The Erziehungsroman, or novel of education, commonly shows the protagonist in his effort to cope with the demands that life throws up to him. How do I live best? How can I master the art of living the abundant life? These are most often the problems confronting Hesse's leading personalities. In nea...

With every new beginning, Hesse believed himself to be dealing with new problems and new figures. But on looking back in 1953 he realized that he had been concentrating all the time, from differing levels of experience, on "the few problems and types that are appropriate" to him. The demarcation of the poetic potential of his themes—though this seemed meagre to him then—is irrelevant, for at a later stage it enabled Hesse to look back on groups of individuals and to discern in th...

[In] spite of his 1946 Nobel Prize [Hesse's] work is somehow not admitted into the canon of "great" twentieth-century German authors. Germans, at least, would be amused nowadays, or mildly astonished, if a foreigner were to mention him along with Thomas Mann, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Kafka, or Brecht…. It is partly because the canon has no place for a writer whose work, though a coherent whole, is so curiously mixed. It is sometimes cloying, sometimes profound, then quixotically un-i...

[The] figure of the Prodigal Son, or as he is known to the Germans, the Lost Son, corresponds to Hesse's self-image as well as to the image of his protagonists. The epithet verlorener Söhn is first specifically used by Hesse in the poem "Die Entgleisten."…

One of the most important reasons for [America's] overlooking Hesse … was inherent within his own form of writing. He once said, "I know that I am not a story teller," and it is evident from his writings, especially those of his later period, that narration was often sacrificed to didacticism. He believed that "the true profession of man is to find his way to himself;" and the search for this way became a metaphysical search, associated with and intensified by Orien...

German dualism shows itself in the young Hesse in the serious struggle between mind and matter, spiritual and physical life. The young Hesse longs for the simple, the unsophisticated. His most famous fictitious character, Peter Camenzind, gladly gives up art to be a child of nature, living close to lake and mountain. Peter Camenzind, published in 1904, is, to a degree, autobiographical: Hesse has always lived in small villages hidden somewhere in the mountains. Autobiographical too is Hesse's next no...

The fact of the current Hesse vogue in this country is easier to ascertain than its causes…. It should be noted at the outset that the phenomenon is less aesthetic than cultural. This means, first, that any discussion regarding Hesse's purely literary merits is irrelevant to the subject. Whether Hesse is a "good" writer or not, he has touched a chord that resounds in the hearts and minds—probably "soul" would be the proper word since it is a common denominato...

Like every great artist [Hesse] has essentially but one theme, of which all his works are only maturing variations. Hesse's fundamental fable is the endless struggle of the individual for self-recognition and self-realization, and the resulting conflict with the equalizing forces, the temptations, and taboos of a given environment. (p. 355) Hermann Hesse is neither a "realistic" nor a "symbolistic" writer, in the loose and hazy sense in which these terms are commonly appli...

All nineteen pieces in [Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies] are fantasies, chosen by Theodore Ziolkowski from a half century of Hesse's writings. Some are tales of magic in the style of the Brothers Grimm or The Arabian Nights; at the other extreme we find social satires in which prevalent and objectionable trends are exaggerated to appear fantastical. All are perfectly representative of an author whose fictional heroes, from Demian to Harry Haller in Steppenwolf and Josef Knecht in Th...

[Even] as a poet [Hesse] likes the role of editor and archivist, the game of masquerade behind the guise of one who "brings to light" other people's papers. The greatest example of this is the sublime work of his old age, The Glass Bead Game…. In reading it I very strongly felt … how much the element of parody, the fiction and persiflage of a biography based upon learned conjectures, in short the verbal playfulness, help keep within limits this late work, with its dangerou...

With Hesse the expression alone is restrained, not the feeling or the thought; and what tempers the expression of these is the exquisite feeling of fitness, reserve and harmony, and, with relationship to cosmos, the interdependence of things; it is also a certain latent irony, of which few Germans seem to me capable, and whose total absence so often spoils so many works by so many of their authors, who take themselves terribly seriously. (p. 22) Hesse's [ironies], so charming in quality, seems to me ...

The central statement of ["My Belief"] is made in its title essay…. Far from playing about with ideas of an imminent apocalypse, or vague romantic notions of self-liberation through "magic," or what the more scientifically-inclined barbarians call "consciousness-expanding drugs," Hesse was a deep and original thinker who prescribed ways by which a man might make his way "from the realm of the spirit to the realm of the sense" before finally achi...

[The stories in Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies are] generically linked to a specific narrative medium, namely the fantastic. This rubric ought not disarm the reader; for Hesse, the fantastic is not an escapist mode for solipsistic flights of the imagination. Rather, many of the themes that problematize his other works surface here just as compellingly. The conflict between life and mind in modern man's soul, the situation of the intellectual and artist in a highly restrictive and h...

The theme of fantasy runs strong in all Hesse's work; in this selection of 19 stories [Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies], which span his entire writing career and embody many literary forms, he gives it its head. The title story, an allegorical account of a love affair of his own, is a charming but watercolory fable about the search for true happiness. "Lulu," the longest story and also the first written (1900), is a lushly romantic fairy tale, mingling fantasy and real...

Hermann Hesse's fairy tales in Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies are nowhere near the standard of his great work. Hesse thrives on the shifting, blurring, dangerous balance between fantasy and what we call reality: it is this balance between real and imagined worlds which characterizes his masterpieces Steppenwolf or the magnificent and sustained The Glass Bead Game. Only one story stands out from this collection, published in an authorized translation in Britain for the first time, P...

Hesse is, of course, one of the most significant of 20th century novelists, and his poetry … is for the most part engaging enough; but it has little of the potency of his fiction. In a familiar modern way, poetry is content to be, self-consciously, a "minor" mode; Hesse is a skilfully lyrical, sometimes poignant poet, but in what one must confess is a fairly conventional manner…. [Intellectually] speaking, Hesse is rather second-rate; and whatever one might think of this as a jud...