Political Suicide in Hermann Hesse's Weimar Novels: Reading the Withdrawal from the Political

Sex, drugs, spiritualism, and suicide are among the themes typically associated with Hermann Hesse, especially for a certain segment of Hesse's readership. Yet while these elements, along with the international phenomenon of "Hessomania," have been well documented, less consistent attention has been given to Hesse's engagement with Weimar politics. Even where critics advance theories of the political content of Hesse's work, the arguments offered tend to shift from discourses on the political to more mystical notions of individuation, as in the case of Siegfried Unseld's contribution to the volume Hermann Hesse und die Politik (1992). Unseld argues that Hesse constructs a dialectic of rule and servitude - an interesting argument but one that finally falls outside the category of the political because of the emphasis on inward, individual comportment. More recently, Marco Schickling has presented a political portrait of Hesse that tends towards the other extreme, with Hesse looking at times almost like a Chomskyan media critic, as Schickling argues that "from the beginning he studied [. . .] how the print media functioned, the interests controlling them, and how they were manipulated" (301). Schickling provides an interesting psychobiographical sketch of Hesse's political commitments, but although he raises valuable points concerning Hesse's personal activism - primarily in the form of literary-critical journalism and the humanitarian effort to provide prisoners of war with reading material (Bücherzentrale für Kriegsgefangenenvorsorge) - important aspects of Hesse's political engagement still require more critical attention: first, the political dimension of his Weimar novels, his poetical Hauptwerke; and, second, his own emphatically antipolitical position. Although apparently divergent claims, these opposing points actually reveal an essential characteristic of Hesse's engagement with politics: Hesse's narrative retreat from politics is a mechanism of containment, which resolves the social contradictions intimated by a potentially subversive political program, with the result that political dissidence itself is mastered, subsumed under a cultural-political reaffirmation of the same. For the purposes of this article, "politics" may be read as the nexus of discourses constituted through the processes and practices of identifying, articulating, and disputing problems facing a particular community, including the problem of its self-relation and the distribution of power within the community. Consequently, the first part of this article considers the extent to which Hesse's texts overtly address the "political," and the second part demonstrates the technique by which the explicitly political dimension is subdued and recontained in Hesse's enframing narrative structures and in the dynamic of withdrawal from the discursive field of the political. This (anti)political subtext has not been adequately treated in the critical literature, and it is this lack of a perceived rootedness in contemporary concerns that has effected the general discomfort among critics regarding Hesse, an unease that moves many scholars to offer some sort of justification for their interest in Hesse, a moment of private confessionalism, in which critics tend to acknowledge a long-time interest in this unfashionable figure, but not without reservations.

These reservations towards Hesse among critics and academics have been widely acknowledged, one of the most famous expressions of this sentiment being Jeffrey Sammons's "Hermann Hesse and the Over-Thirty Germanist." In his recent re-evaluation of the critical discussion surrounding Hesse, Ingo Cornils offers a brief but significant discussion of the "deep suspicions" that mark a certain range of Hesse's critical reception, beginning with a Spiegel article from 1958 "that ridiculed Hesse as an old man tending his vegetable patch" (6) and continuing to contemporary critics like Klaus-Peter Philippi, who states that today Hesse is simply uninteresting for the academic community and the cultural-theoretical apparatus of problems these intellectuals bring to texts (7). Often this rejection of Hesse hinges on the absence of political relevance in his work, as in the case of Adolf Muschg's criticism of Hesse as scandalously harmless (11-13). It is not altogether surprising that Hesse's texts have continued to deflect more rigorous examination of their political dimension, because central to Hesse's Weimar narratives is an act of political suicide - that is, an...