Hesse won the 1946 Nobel after a restless Pietist youth
Hermann Karl Hesse (1877–1962), German-Swiss poet-novelist, took the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature. Widely read at home in life, his global cult surged years after death in the counterculture era. Born 2 July 1877 in Calw’s Black Forest to a missionary family tied to India.
His father, Johannes, was born in 1847 at Weissenstein in Russian-ruled Estonia, so the baby was a dual German and Russian citizen, while his grandparents had served the Basel Mission in India. The Swabian Pietist household turned inward on small, earnest circles. His mother marvelled at the four-year-old’s unnerving strength of will, depression showed up in his first school year, and grandfather Hermann Gundert, a polyglot scholar, opened a library of world literature to him. The family lived in Basel from 1881 for six years before returning to Calw.
In 1891 he entered the seminary at Maulbronn Abbey, with 41 hours of classes a week, and soon fell into crisis and rebellion. A bookshop apprenticeship lasted three days, and a 14-month stint filing and soldering in a Calw clock-tower factory drove him toward inner pursuits. From October 1895 he worked twelve-hour days in a Tübingen bookshop, reading Goethe and Nietzsche at night; those school years later fed Beneath the Wheel.
Early books sold badly: only 54 of 600 copies of Romantic Songs moved in two years. Then Peter Camenzind, published by Samuel Fischer in 1904, became a hit that Freud counted among his favourites, and Hesse could live by writing. He married Maria Bernoulli that year while her disapproving father was away, and settled at Gaienhofen on Lake Constance.
Eastern thought and Jungian analysis shaped Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf and, later, The Glass Bead Game, all quests for authentic selfhood. Famous in German-speaking lands during his life, he became a worldwide craze among postwar readers only in the mid-1960s.
Source: Hermann Hesse
