This personal crisis found its magnificent expression in the fantastical novel Der Steppenwolf (1927), an inspired account of the split in human nature, the tension between desire and reason in an individual who is outside the social and moral notions of everyday life. Sick and doubt-ridden, he sought a cure in the psychoanalysis of Freud, eagerly preached and practised at that time, which left lasting traces in Hesse’s increasingly bold books of this period. Redemption had to come from beyond the accepted norms, perhaps from the light of the East, perhaps from the core hidden in anarchic theories of the resolution of good and evil in a higher unity. He took it as evidence that the entire civilization of Europe in which he had so long believed was sick and decaying. He was savagely attacked by the German press and was apparently deeply shocked by this experience.

When at the beginning he wanted to speak some words of peace and contemplation to his agitated colleagues and in his pamphlet used Beethoven’s motto, « O Freunde, nicht diese Töne», he aroused a storm of protest. It's interesting to look back at the assessment of Hesse's work made by the Nobel Prize committee in that fateful year of 1946 to get some idea of just what they saw in him then, with the rubble of Hitler's Festung Europa lying all around them:

Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)ĭid we all get it wrong? Was The Glass Bead Game never really on a level with The Trial or Buddenbrooks - let alone that more recent candidate for pole position, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities?

Magister ludi the glass bead game