Демиан

PENGUIN CLASSICS

DEMIAN

HERMANN HESSE (1877–1962) was born in Calw, a small southern German town in the northern Black Forest, in July 1877. He was the son and grandson of a family of strict Pietist missionaries, a heritage that affected him deeply throughout his life. His grandparents had spent decades of their lives on the Malabar coast of India, where his mother also lived and worked. By the time Hesse was born, however, the family had settled in Calw, though he spent part of his early childhood in a dormitory for missionaries’ children in Basel, Switzerland, the main seat of their movement, where his father was teaching. Later, back in Germany, he went through another period of institutionalized living in a Protestant boarding school housed in an old monastery not far from his home. His escape from the school at fifteen years of age became the subject of his novel Beneath the Wheel. Both experiences fortified his distaste for authority and his celebration of the individual.

In 1895, at age eighteen, Hermann Hesse struck out for himself by taking work in a Basel bookstore. It took him nine more years of writing, however, to establish himself with his first full-length novel, Peter Camenzind (1904), followed by Beneath the Wheel (1906), Gertrud (1910), and Rosshalde (1914), as well as a wealth of short fiction, including Knulp (1915). He married Maria Bernoulli of a prominent Swiss family and lived with her and their three sons on the shore of Lake Constance in Switzerland.

A significant change in Hesse’s life occurred with the outbreak of World War I. He spent the war years in Bern, Switzerland, working with an agency under the auspices of the Red Cross, supplying books and other amenities to German prisoners of war. After the war and a psychological crisis, his marriage shattered, and Hesse removed himself to Montagnola, a small town in Italian-speaking Switzerland. There—in the relative peace of rural surroundings, interrupted only occasionally by forays into the urban centers of Zurich and Basel—he created his best-known work: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). Remarried in his later years to Ninon Ausländer, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who inspired and sustained him in the face of his failing eyesight, he lived out his life in the seclusion of Montagnola. He received many important honors, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, and died in 1962 soon after his eighty-fifth birthday.