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In my sixteenth year, after my school career had ended in failure, I consciously and energetically began my own education, and it was good fortune and delight that in my father’s house was my grandfather ’s huge library, a whole hall full of books, which contained among other things all of eighteenth-century German literature and philosophy. —hermann hesse, “Life Story, Briefly Told”1 A s a child Hesse spent many hours in his grandfather’s library, where alongside the shelves of “boring and dusty” theological works he discovered volume after volume of eighteenth-century German literature, works that stimulated his imagination and poetic inclinations.2 Following his failure at Maulbronn and, later, at the gymnasium in Cannstatt, Hesse returned home to complete an apprenticeship as a machinist —his real interest, however, was with the family library. That the family library contained both works of theology and literature is symbolic of a key feature of German culture, especially after the rise of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, namely, the intermingling of literature (or more broadly, art) and religion.3 Romanticism and Pietism in the century leading up to Hesse’s birth were two worlds that existed in close proximity to each other, two streams whose waters regularly crossed and mixed in the lives of many individuals, including the Swabian fathers whom Hesse glorified and members of Hesse’s family. Upon moving to the university city of Tübingen, where he would complete an apprenticeship as a book dealer, Hesse continued with his in-depth study of German literature . During his post-Maulbronn years in Calw, Tübingen, and Basel, Hesse began a prolific correspondence with former teachers, friends, and family; he also reached out to individuals who could be of help in guiding and bringing to fruition his desire to become a writer. Hesse’s letters were a vehicle to assimilate his reading, to hone his writing, to explore new 39 4 Romantics and Pietists ideas, and to fashion a worldview and faith to replace the lost certainties of his Pietist upbringing. Hesse’s turn to the German Romantics in the wake of the Maulbronn affair was in many respects a culturally scripted affair. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, “clergy, their sons and young theologians generally … came into literature in shoals.”4 Like many before him who experienced a crisis of faith, the world of literature, especially Romantic literature, became for Hesse a spiritual home, an orienting centre, in short, his new religion: I have founded my “center” on a belief in beauty, which is virtually the same thing as a belief in art.… This “center” of mine has developed from a passing fancy, a mere plaything, into a religion.5 Romanticism! It has all the mystery and youthfulness of the German heart, all its excess energy as well as its sickness, and above all a longing for intellectual heights, that gift for youthful, ingeniously speculative thought, which our age completely lacks. The religion of art: to me that is the essence of Romanticism at its most naïve and refined.6 Working in Tübingen and Basel bookshops by day, Hesse enthusiastically embraced Romanticism by night, and under its influence he would complete and publish his first works. A volume of poetry, Romantische Lieder (Romantic Poems), appeared in November of 1898, and a work of prose, Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (An Hour Behind Midnight) arrived in bookshops six months later. In 1900 Hesse published Hinterlassene Schriften und Gedichte von Hermann Lauscher (The Literary Remains of Hermann Lauscher), taking the pose of an editor of the literary estate of the poet and aesthete Lauscher. Hesse’s early Romanticism, his “religion of art,” was a bone of contention between the aspiring writer and his family, but it was also a means for Hesse to mediate a relationship to family and Christianity. As Hesse would write to his parents, My ultimate goal is beauty, or “art,” if you like; I don’t believe my path is any different from yours until one gets to the decisive turning point toward a specifically Protestant form of Christianity.… But let’s not go round and round in circles of words again; we are closer to one another’s truth than we realize.7 This is not merely Hesse’s attempt at reconciliation: it also points to thematic connections between the Romantic literature Hesse fell in love with and aspects of Pietism, connections that were concretized in the lives and 40...

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