Veneration and Revolt: Hermann Hesse and Swabian Pietism by Barry Stephenson (review)

Veneration and Revolt impresses not only by its professional style and language, but also by a large collection of endnotes which the publisher should have made easier to access. The frequent English translations of Hesse quotes are excellent and of a literate elegance that might have surprised Hesse himself, who, true to his Pietist background, nurtured a plain-spoken and often lyrical style that could be easily shared with his readers and which was often embellished by subtle irony and humour. The book provides a thorough background and describes the historical development of Pietism in Germany over several centuries, eventually overlapping with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the new return of strife and conflict. The various religious traces of Pietism lead to the main topic of the German/Swiss Nobel Prize winner via the work of the Basle Mission and a publishing house in his small Swabian hometown of Calw, where he was born in 1877.

Stephenson leads us to this point, but not before carefully tracing the history of Pietism back to the Reformation, and notably to early efforts at defining a simpler and more straightforward approach to Christian devotion. The trend away from well-established churches during the Reformation led to the inspired rediscovery of a direct and personal experience of God such as those vividly described by the mystics and encouraged by various representatives of Pietist thought, who turned to Jesus for enlightenment and salvation.

This tradition undeniably had a great initial impact on the young Hesse, a somewhat difficult child of rather hapless parents who would have liked him to continue in their tradition and become a priest. They spent periods of their lives as devoted servants of the English mission in India and later dedicated their work to publishing materials for religious-educational edification and moral clarity. Hesse’s mother, of French Swiss extraction, wrote a biography of the legendary Puritan missionary David Livingstone, who she hoped would set an example for her son. On the other side of the spectrum was the scholar Hermann Gundert, Hesse’s grandfather and a well-known man of letters with an enormous library, who instilled in Hermann an interest in India and Eastern thought that presaged much of his later interest.

Stephenson describes how Hesse happened to be born into a conflicting and rapidly changing world and developed an independent mind which he displayed to the chagrin of his parents. He continued along his headstrong path while still maintaining many of the values, views, and customs he owed to his Pietist upbringing and his family. On the lighter side, the book notes Hesse’s perfunctory record-keeping, his compassionate willingness to listen and help others in extensive and patient correspondences, and in his ever-evolving (auto)biographies.

Stephenson carefully tracks the influences of Pietism in Hesse’s correspondence and major works and on his life more generally. Since religious study is often necessarily serious business, he may have missed much of the humour that characterizes Hesse’s style to most readers’ delight. In the name of the figure Leo in the Journey to the East – which is richly populated with Hesse’s renamed acquaintances – the explanation might well be that the figure ‘Leo’ was probably named after Hesse’s favourite cat, and Hermann Heilner, like Harry Haller, shared the initials with himself, while Hermine in Der Steppenwolf was his youthful and still unencumbered self. We will try not to make too much of this but still need to point to Hesse’s comment to a reader who had discovered contradictions in Hesse’s writings and correspondence: in the ancient Chinese tradition, opposites do not cancel each other out, but are both true, and wisdom comes with a smile.