Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was a German-born Swiss novelist and poet whose fiction explores the individual's search for self-knowledge and spiritual meaning. Raised in a Pietist missionary family in Calw, he settled in Switzerland and lived from 1919 in Montagnola, in Ticino. His novels draw on Indian and Chinese thought, Christianity and Jungian psychology. Siddhartha (1922) follows a young man in the time of the Buddha who leaves every teacher to find enlightenment through his own experience. Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game followed, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.

Key ideas

• Wisdom cannot be passed on by teaching; it has to be found through one's own experience.
• The path to self-realisation passes through sensual life, worldly success and disillusion, not only through renunciation.
• The river in Siddhartha shows the unity and continual flow of all things, in which time is in a sense an illusion.
• A person is not one self but many, and growth means accepting the conflicting sides of one's nature, as in Steppenwolf.

Major works

• Siddhartha (1922)
• Demian (1919)
• Steppenwolf (1927)
• Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)
• The Glass Bead Game (1943)

In the Book corner

• Siddhartha 1922 · Beginner
  A short novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, telling the life of a young Brahmin who seeks enlightenment…

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