SOURCE: White, I. A., and J. J. White. “The Place of Josef Knecht's ‘Lebensläufe’ within Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel.” The Modern Language Review 81, no. 4 (October 1986): 930-43.

In the following essay, White and White investigate the function of the three appended biographies at the end of Das Glasperlenspiel.

Proportionately few interpretations of Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) devote much attention to the concluding ‘Lebensläufe’ which take up about a third of the text and which the narrator himself describes as ‘der vielleicht wertvollste Teil unseres Buches’.¹ Readings of Hesse's novel often treat Knecht's death as if it were the end of the entire story or, at most, content themselves with a brief outline of the poems and fictive biographies which in fact make up the final part of the work. Those who have considered the posthumous texts in any detail have done so largely in thematic terms, exploring the...