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The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse

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The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse

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Highlights & Notes

He published Under the Wheel (Unterm Rad, 1904), an autobiographical novel about the brutality of educational institutions and authoritarianism in Germany; This Side (Diesseits, 1907) and Neighbors (Nachbarn, 1908), two collections of stories; Gertrud (1910), a novel; and Underway (Unterwegs, 1911), a volume of poems.

By the beginning of the 1930s he finished two important works he had begun earlier, Narcissus and Goldmund (Narziss und Goldmund, 1930) and Journey to the East (Die Morgenlandfahrt, 1932). The two books rounded out many of the existentialist, romantic, and Oriental ideas with which he had been experimenting during the 1920s. Now, in 1932, he was ready to begin his magnum opus, The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel), which would take him ten years to complete.

Hesse’s heroes refuse to comply with the norms of bourgeois life, and they reject the hypocrisy and superficiality of European society corrupted by materialism.

The mother figure is consequently a symbol of refusal to accept a “masculine” or “logical” way of regarding the world that leads to war and destruction.

that nationalism is the most dangerous force because it can inspire people to obsessively seek power and become caught up in war for war’s sake.

proud and unapproachable women are precisely the ones who fall in love the fastest and with the most passion, just as the warmest and most glorious spring usually follows the hardest winter.

His life and actions were determined less by impulses and aspirations than by prohibitions and the fear of punishment.

A young pine tree stood over one of the fallen palaces, not one stone of which could be seen. The pine had at one time been the most advanced messenger and precursor of the growing forest. Now, however, it looked out at the growth of young trees in front of it. “We’re moving onward!” cried a woodpecker, who hammered on the trunk of a tree and regarded the growing forest and the glorious, green progress on earth with satisfaction.

  • nature over man

It is true that I, too, felt sorry about the death of the handsome, talented young man, and I thought, with a certain amount of sorrow, how much enormous talent there must be in the world for nature simply to toss it away so arbitrarily! But nature could not care less what we think about it, and as far as talent is concerned, there is such an excess that our artists will soon become their own audiences, and audiences made up of ordinary people will no longer exist.

First you must climb the Mountain of Knowledge, then you must perform some deeds, and finally you must find love and become happy.”

then all these people were his brothers and sisters. Each one of them carried the memory of a beloved mother and a better past, or a secret sign of a more beautiful and more noble destiny, and each person was dear to him and remarkable and gave him something to think about. Indeed, he felt that nobody was worse than he was himself.

For him, it was now wonderful and edifying to see how other people struggled and groped their way along those paths that he had once taken in his life, and how everyone pursued goals with zeal, vigor, pride, and joy. For him, this was a wonderful drama.

“My foreign King,” spoke the messenger, “you’ve made me sad. You see, I’ve come from another country, and the great bird on the temple roof was right. There is infinitely more misery here than I could have imagined. Your life seems to be a dreadful nightmare, and I don’t know whether you are ruled by gods or demons. You see, King, we have a legend — I used to believe that it was all fairy-tale rubbish and empty smoke. It is a legend about how such things as war and death and despair were common in our country at one time. These terrible words, which we have long since stopped using in our language, can be read in collections of our old tales, and they sound awful to us and even a little ridiculous. Today I’ve learned that these tales are all true, and I see you and your people dying and suffering what I’ve known only from the terrible legends of primeval times. But now tell me, don’t you have in your soul a sort of intimation that you’re not doing the right thing? Don’t you have a yearning for bright, serene gods, for sensible and cheerful leaders and mentors? Don’t you ever dream in your sleep about another, more beautiful life where nobody is envious of others, where reason and order prevail, where people treat other people only with cheerfulness and consideration? Have you never thought that the world might be a totality, and that it might be beneficial and salutary to honor this unity of all things? Don’t you know anything about what we at home call music and divine worship and blessedness?”

“Do you think it would be better if we turned around?” he asked, and he had not even finished uttering his last word when I already knew, full of repugnance, that I would say no, would have to say no. And at the same time all the old, habitual, lovely, and familiar things cried out reproachfully within me: “Say yes, say yes,” as if the entire world and home were wrapped around my feet like a ball and chain. I wanted to cry out yes, even though I knew for sure that I would not be able to do it.

Wasn’t I merely human, just a poor simple guy who had been drawn into doing things against my feelings that not even God would demand of me?

To a certain degree, the meaning of the war had finally been given its clearest expression by this random bombing. The world had been divided into two parts that sought to annihilate each other because they both desired the same thing, namely the liberation of the oppressed, the elimination of violence, and the establishment of permanent peace.

“Well now,” he responded, “you’re in a particularly bad situation as a civilian and entirely without papers! There are very few civilians left. Whoever is not a soldier is a civil servant. This makes life more bearable for most people. Many are even very happy. And they have gradually become accustomed to the deprivation. When we gradually had to give up potatoes and become accustomed to wood pulp — it’s lightly charred, which makes it rather tasty — everyone thought that we would never be able to bear this. And now it’s worked out well. And that’s the way it is with everything.”

My gift and uniqueness consist in this: I store images of the external world in my head, and out of them I am able to produce new images and arrangements only for myself. I can conceive the entire world in my mind. That is, I can create it anew.”

In the meantime, however, the defeated people had come to their senses at the moment of their greatest predicament. They had banished their leaders and princes and declared themselves ready to rule themselves. Councils had been formed out of the people, and they showed their willingness to deal with their country’s misfortune by using their own power and their own minds.

The empire cannot become a child again. Nobody can. It cannot simply give away its cannons, machines, and money and once again write poems in small peaceful cities and play sonatas. But it can take the path that the individual must also take when his life has led him to make mistakes and suffer profound torment. It can recall its previous past, its heritage and childhood, its maturation, its rise and fall, and it can find the power while recalling everything that essentially and immortally belongs to it. It must “go into itself,” as devout people say. And in itself, it will find its essence undestroyed, and this essence will not want to avoid its destiny but affirm it and begin anew out of its best and most profound qualities that have been rediscovered.

Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.

Every person encounters the open door here and there in the course of life, and it occurs to everyone at one time or another that everything visible is symbolic and that spirit and eternal life are living behind the symbol. Of course, very few people go through the gate and abandon the beautiful phenomenon of the outside world for the interior reality that they intuit.

All children, as long as they still live in the mystery, are continuously occupied in their souls with the only thing that is important, which is themselves and their enigmatic relationship to the world around them.

Seekers and wise people return to these preoccupations as they mature. Most people, however, forget and leave forever this inner world of the truly significant very early in their lives. Like lost souls they wander about for their entire lives in the multicolored maze of worries, wishes, and goals, none of which dwells in their innermost being and none of which leads them to their innermost core and home.

With growing sorrow and fear, the poor man painfully saw how wasted and empty the life that lay behind him had become. It no longer belonged to him but was strange and disconnected, like something once memorized that could be recalled only with difficulty in the form of barren fragments.

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