Hermann Hesse

The poet also devoted himself to painting with great intensity from the First World War onwards. From his autodidactic beginnings, which helped him to overcome a life crisis, he created a significant body of paintings in around 3,000 watercolours, which convey the beauty of Ticino in vibrant colours – Hesse’s adopted home from 1919 until his death in 1962.

In 1916, Hermann Hesse underwent psychoanalysis in Sonnmatt near Lucerne. His doctor, Dr J. B. Lang, encouraged him to depict his dreams in pictures. Hesse paints his first pictures in Bern and in the neighbourhood of Locarno in Ticino. In 1917, Hesse intensively focussed on self-portraits. 1918 Further attempts at painting in Ticino, producing the first texts and illustrations for the book Wanderung (published in 1920). In favour of the German Prisoner of War Welfare, which Hesse had founded in Bern in 1916, he offers poetry cycles with his own illustrations for sale for the first time. 1919: Hesse illustrates his fairy tale The Hard Way and paints watercolours to accompany the painter’s poems. First exhibition of Hesse watercolours in 1920 at the Kunsthalle Basel, early reproductions in 1920 in the magazine Wieland, Munich. 1921 The art portfolio Elf Aquarelle aus dem Tessin is published. 1922 Watercolour exhibition in Winterthur together with paintings by Emil Nolde. Hesse writes and paints the fairy tale Pictor’s Metamorphoses for Ruth Wenger. 1925 Publication of Betrachtung.

Die Luganesische Landschaft by Josef Ponten, 1926 his story Die letzte Reise, both with colour reproductions of Hesse watercolours. Exhibition of 50 watercolours in Berlin and 100 watercolours in Dresden. In 1955, a volume of watercolours from Ticino and a series of art postcards after watercolours by Hermann Hesse are published for the first time. 1957, on the occasion of Hesse’s 80th birthday: exhibition of Hesse watercolours at the Schiller National Museum in Marbach. After Hesse’s death (1962), exhibitions of his watercolours worldwide, including in Tokyo (1976 and 1996), Paris (1977), New York and Montreal (1980), San Francisco and Chicago (1981), Madrid (1985), Luxembourg (1987), Hamburg (1992) and Sapporo (1995).

Basel

There are two periods in Hermann Hesse’s life in Basel: His childhood years from 1881 to 1886 and his time as a bookseller from 1899 to 1904. The brief years in Basel – his father Hesse had been called to Switzerland from Calw as editor of the missionary magazine – remained etched in little Hermann’s memory: ‘Home for me was Swabia and Basel on the Rhine’, Hesse later wrote. He immortalised his childhood in Basel – the family lived on Müllerweg – vividly and with great sympathy in Hermann Lauscher and in the story The Beggar. However, it was also a period of initial serious conflict with parental authority. ‘The boy has a life, enormous strength, a mighty will and really also a kind of quite astonishing mind for his four years. Where is he going?’ his mother noted in her diary on 27 March 1882, complaining about his passionate storming and pushing.

The family returned to Calw in 1886. Hermann Hesse did not see his ‘favourite town’ again until he was an adult. After his time as an apprentice and assistant in Tübingen, he moved to Basel in September 1899 as a bookseller’s assistant. ‘I had no other wish than to come to Basel’, writes Hesse in his Basel memoirs. He first worked at Reich’sche Buchhandlung, then from April 1901 at Antiquariat Wattenwyl, where he remained until spring 1903. In Basel, he sought and found a new intellectually stimulating environment and succeeded in building up a circle of acquaintances consisting of culturally active and educated people. He socialised in the house of the historian and state archivist Rudolf Wackernagel and devoted himself to self-study of the fine arts. Visiting the Basel Art Museum became a favourite habit. In Basel, Hesse also discovered his passion for travelling and hiking.

In spring 1901, he travelled through northern Italy for two months. The Basel photographer Maria Bernoulli accompanied him on his second trip to Italy in 1903. A year later, the two married and decided to move to the countryside. They found an empty farmhouse in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance. The young couple moved in on 10 August 1904.

Childhood in Basel 1881-1886

The Swiss capital Bern

Berne

The Hesse family moved from Gaienhofen to Bern in September 1912. Not to the city, however, but to a rural house in the quiet suburb of Ostermudingen. Hesse found everything he was looking for: beautiful countryside, nearby mountains and a stimulating, cultivated society. However, the marital problems increase. His wife Mia becomes increasingly ill and Hermann Hesse finds it increasingly difficult to coordinate his roles as father, writer and critic of the times. This phase also saw the outbreak of the First World War, which he countered with his political exhortations, and the establishment of a prisoner-of-war welfare organisation.

After the death of his father in 1916, the poet was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and underwent psychotherapy. In 1919, he broke with family life and sedentarism and left Bern after seven years to move to Ticino on his own. Mia was already undergoing clinical treatment at the time, and the children were sent to boarding school or placed with friends. Despite all the difficulties, the Bernese years were fruitful and successful years for the writer Hesse. Rosshalde and Knulp are completed during this time and the novel Demian is written, which particularly inspires young people and introduces a new stage in his poetic work. It also marked a new beginning externally, as Hesse initially published the book under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair.

The house where Hermann Hesse was born on Calw’s market square

Calw

Hermann Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in the Black Forest town of Calw. The exact place of birth is the house at Marktplatz 6, where his parents Marie (née Gundert) and Johannes Hesse have lived since 1874. Little Hermann was only four years old when his father, a Baltic German missionary, was appointed co-editor of the missionary magazine in Basel. In 1886, the family returned to Calw, where the nine-year-old entered the Calw Reallyzeum, the Latin school. At first the family lived in the house of the publishing association, later in Ledergasse. The world into which Hermann Hesse grew breathed both narrowness and breadth. In 1890, he was sent to the grammar school in Göppingen to prepare for the Landexamen. During these four years, despite an unhappy time at school, the small town of Calw, which Hesse glorified as the ‘most beautiful town between Bremen and Naples, between Vienna and Singapore’, became the epitome of home.

Plaques at his birthplace in Calw commemorate the town’s famous son

His childhood and youth in Calw recur in many of his poems and prose works. In 1906, the story Unterm Rad was published, which was largely written in Calw and is also set there. Hermann Lauscher (1900) and Knulp (1915) are also set on the banks of the Nagold. ‘When I as a poet speak of the forest or the river, the meadow valley, the shade of chestnut trees or the scent of fir trees, it is the forest around Calw, it is the Calw Nagold, it is the fir forests or the chestnut trees of Calw that are meant, and also the market square, bridge and chapel, Bischofstraße and Ledergasse, Brühl and Hirsauer Wiesenweg…’, writes Hermann Hesse about his Swabian hometown, for which he uses the code name Gerbersau in his stories.

Gaienhofen on the Höri peninsula on Lake Constance

Gaienhofen

In August 1904, Hermann Hesse comes to Gaienhofen on Lake Constance with his wife Maria Bernoulli, whom he had met in Basel. The young couple moved into a simple farmhouse on the Kapellenberg in the centre of the village. The years at Lake Constance are linked to Hesse’s first great successes as a freelance writer: Peter Camenzind (1904) is greeted with critical acclaim, Unterm Rad (1906) becomes a sales success. Hesse settled into the seclusion and naturalness of rural life, developed a ‘feeling of settledness’ and was very productive as a writer.

He wrote a series of stories at Lake Constance. He also made a name for himself as a literary critic and contributor to various literary magazines. And Hesse became a father: his eldest son Bruno was born in 1905. Sons Heiner and Martin were born in 1909 and 1911. Because of their offspring, the couple build their own, more comfortable house on the outskirts of Gaienhofen with the help of their father-in-law in Basel. Hesse also begins to establish himself socially. He cultivated lively contacts with many artists, musicians and painters who settled in the idyllic Lake Constance region after him. These included Otto Blümel, who decorated several of Hesse’s books.

Ludwig Finckh, Hesse’s friend from Tübingen, also settled nearby as a doctor. Later, the expressionist painters Erich Herkel and Otto Dix followed. However, Gaienhofen could not become a permanent residence. Hesse travelled, which he himself described as an ‘escape’. In 1911, he set off for India. A year later, the house in Gaienhofen was sold and the family moved to Bern in Switzerland.

Volker Michels on Gaienhofen, lecture 1995 (PDF, 160 kB) Hesse to Stefan Zweig

The cloister in Maulbronn Monastery

Erich Blaich

Maulbronn

On 15th September 1891, Hermann Hesse became a seminarian at Maulbronn Monastery after passing his Landexamen with flying colours. The old Cistercian monastery, one of the most beautiful and best-preserved monastery complexes in Germany, founded in 1147, had become one of the Protestant monastery schools in 1556 following the school reform under Duke Christoph von Württemberg. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), the mathematician and astronomer, attended the school in the years 1586-1589, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) from 1786. In 1807, the monastery school became the Protestant theological seminary with the mission of preparing the young scholars for the study of theology through the ancient languages at an early age.

Hesse enters the plant school at the age of fourteen. Like Hans Giebenrath in the story Unterm Rad and Josef Knecht in the Glasperlenspiel, he lives in the parlour or ‘Hellas’ house. Lessons are hard, free time is scarce. Despite this, the fourteen-year-old initially feels very much at home in Maulbronn and settles in quickly and well. He devoted himself to studying the classics. He translated Homer, studied Schiller’s prose and Klopstock’s odes. ‘I am happy, amused and satisfied. There is a tone that appeals to me very much,’ he writes in a letter dated 24 February 1892. Just a few days later, on 7 March, Hermann Hesse runs away for no apparent reason. After a bitterly cold night in an open field, the runaway is apprehended by a gendarme, returns to the seminary and is punished with eight hours in a detention centre. In the weeks that followed, he developed a depressive mood, friends withdrew, the seminarian Hermann became lonely and suffered from his isolation. In May, after just over six months in the seminary, his father brought him back to Calw. In addition to Unterm Rad, Maulbronn was also used in literature by Hesse as ‘Mariabronn’ in Narcissus and Goldmund and as ‘Waldzell’ in The Glass Bead Game.

In the Maulbronn cloister, poem by Hermann Hesse 1914

The Casa Camuzzi in Montagnola

Suhrkamp publishing house, Berlin

Montagnola

In May 1919, Hermann Hesse leaves Bern and moves south without his family. In the Ticino town of Montagnola above Lake Lugano, he found the picturesque Casa Camuzzi, a romantic little castle in which he rented three rooms. He probably had no idea at the time that he had found a place to live here until the end of his days. Montagnola marked the beginning of a drastic change in the life of the 42-year-old, who was in a deep personal and artistic crisis. His first marriage had failed, his view of the world had cracked during the First World War and his savings in German bank accounts were being eaten up by inflation.

Hesse was also facing a debacle as a writer. This changes abruptly under the southern sun. The accumulated psychological tensions are literally discharged in a creative frenzy that establishes his fame as a poet. The first summer is also the summer of Klingsor (a mirror image of Hesse), who paints and, like him, is at home in Casa Camuzzi. Hesse also began to paint intensively in Ticino, depicting the Mediterranean landscape in countless colourful watercolours. But this did not stop him from writing: His most important works were written in his new poet’s home: in addition to Klingsor’s Last Summer, these included Siddhartha, The Steppenwolf and Narcissus and Goldmund.

After twelve years at Casa Camuzzi, Hesse moved to Casa Rossa, later Casa Hesse, in 1931, which was made available to him and his third wife Ninon for their lifetime by their Zurich friends Elsy and Hans C. Bodmer. Hesse, now in his fifties, writes his later works here, more calmly and serenely, especially The Glass Bead Game (1943). As in Gaienhofen, Hesse lives very close to nature and gardening is part of his daily routine.

During the National Socialist era, Casa Hesse became a refuge for politically persecuted people, including Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich Wiegand. And masses of readers’ mail arrived in Montagnola: Hesse, who had become a moral authority for many people, corresponded with great diligence and iron discipline. He is said to have answered more than 35,000 letters. Hermann Hesse died on 9 August 1962, shortly after his 85th birthday. He is buried in the St Abbondio cemetery.

The university town of Tübingen on the Neckar

Tübingen

His escape from Maulbronn Monastery in 1892 was followed by stays in Bad Boll, the Stetten mental hospital, a final period of schooling in Cannstatt and a 1 1/2 year internship in the mechanical workshop of the Calw tower clock manufacturer Heinrich Perrot. Between October 1895 and June 1899, Hermann Hesse completed a three-year apprenticeship as a bookseller in Tübingen, followed by a year as an assistant. His place of work was the Heckenhauerische Buchhandlung, Holzmarkt 5, and he lived at Herrenberger Straße 28 as a subtenant. His work as a bookseller gave him a certain satisfaction, even if it was exhausting. The education of his superiors commands his respect.

Today, J.J. Heckenhauer in Münzgasse near the collegiate church is one of the oldest antiquarian bookshops in Germany.

Having escaped parental supervision, the eighteen-year-old began his own literary studies with astonishing self-discipline. He reads the classics, especially Goethe, in whom he discovers his literary gospel, and then devotes himself to the Romantics. He spends many hours in his room, keeping the outside world at arm’s length, the cheerful student life seems a waste of time to him. One exception was his friendship with the law student Ludwig Finckh (from 1897), who would himself become a writer and with whom he founded a circle of like-minded friends, the Petit Cénacle. To the displeasure of his family, Hermann Hesse soon began to produce his own literature. In November 1898, the self-financed Romantische Lieder were published, followed by the prose collection Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht. He also managed to get some poems published in magazines. The traces of Tübingen in Hesse’s work are comparatively weak. As a literary setting, the city on the Neckar was mainly included in two stories: Firstly in the historicising novella Im Presselschen Gartenhaus, and secondly in a chapter from Hermann Lauscher (Die Novembernacht), which bears the subtitle Eine Tübinger Erinnerung.