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Your second question: “How come I never hanged myself as a seminarian , even though I sometimes longed to do so?” I cannot explain my inactivity; although I had many reasons for going ahead, my throat balked at the rope. Unbeknownst to me, my inner will to live was stronger than my will to die. —hermann hesse, responding to a letter from a student who had read Beneath the Wheel1 I n the spring of 1903 Hesse spent three weeks travelling in Italy, his second trip there, returning home to Basel to put the finishing touches on his breakthrough work, Peter Camenzind. Hesse had been working in Basel as a book dealer since 1899, but with the success of Camenzind he was able to commit himself full time to his writing and to an engagement with Maria Bernoulli. The couple would marry in August of 1904, settling into a new home in southern Swabia, on the shores of Lake Constance. Hesse spent the fall of 1903 and spring of 1904 in Calw, living with his father and sister.2 During this time he wrote Beneath the Wheel, a scathing attack on the Swabian educational system. Hesse published the work in two parts in the spring of 1904 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and it appeared as a book in 1906. Beneath the Wheel outsold Camenzind, more than 15,000 copies in its first printing, a success that established Hesse as more than a one-work wonder, and associated him with the restlessness and anxiety of a segment of youth and youth-oriented culture in Wilhelmine Germany. Beneath the Wheel tells the story of the demise of Hans Giebenrath, an exceptionally gifted young man from a small Swabian town. The plot is simple, and Hesse draws heavily on his experiences as an elite student . The novel is set at the close of the nineteenth century and opens with Hans being pressured, prodded, and trained by his philistine father and insidiously ambitious teachers for the state Landexamen, which the boy passes with flying colours. A summer filled with excitement over 71 7 Beneath the Wheel the anti-school novel the fast-approaching school year; the loss of simple, childhood pleasures like fishing and gardening to preparatory studies in Hebrew, Greek, and mathematics; and persistent headaches, omens of what is to come, follow Hans’s success. Hans then departs for Hellas house (where Hesse himself had stayed) of Maulbronn seminary. The middle portion of the novel details student life at Maulbronn, where “it is common knowledge that one or more students will drop out during the course of their four years at the academy.… At other times a boy will run away or be expelled.… Occasionally … it happens that a boy in despair will find an escape from his adolescent agonies by drowning or shooting himself.”3 Drowning is to be the fate of Hans Giebenrath, while fellow student Hermann Heilner, like Hesse, is the one who will run away. At Maulbronn Hans meets Heilner, the rebellious and artistic young man who writes poetry, plays the violin, and eventually escapes from the oppressive atmosphere of the school. Heilner possesses enough self-confidence and self-will to stand his ground against the external pressures of family and society, and simply leaves. Hans, in contrast, begins to feel the pressures of school life, suffering from headaches and other psychosomatic symptoms. In short time, the “overworked little horse lay by the wayside, no longer of any use,” and Hans is sent home, listless, exhausted, and depressed. The picture Hesse paints of Hans Giebenrath’s demise is stark: No one … detected behind the slight boy’s smile the suffering of a drowning soul casting about desperately. Nor did it occur to any of them that a fragile creature had been reduced to this state by virtue of the school and the barbaric ambition of his father and his grammarschool teacher. Why was he forced to work until late at night during the most sensitive and precarious period of his life? Why purposely alienated from his friends in grammar school? Why deprived of needed rest and forbidden to go fishing? Why instilled with a shabby ambition? Why had they not even granted him his well-deserved vacation after the examination?4 Whereas Hesse threatened suicide, Hans comes “under the wheel,” slipping beneath the dark, cold waters of the local river. The narrative does not offer any clear explanation of the precise causes of Hans’s rapid demise—perhaps...

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