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To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide a frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. —charles taylor, Sources of the Self1 A ny comprehensive study of Hesse’s life, literature, and thought must include Hesse’s responses to the First and Second World Wars. The wars that raged across Europe in the first half of the twentieth century were the defining events of a generation. Examining the actions and reactions of an individual to the world wars opens a window on to that person’s character, faith, and morals. In Hesse’s case, his responses to war were in large measure the product of his upbringing. Hesse denounced both world wars.2 In his essays written during the First World War (most of which were published in newspapers and other periodicals ), Hesse was critical from the outset of German patriotism, nationalism , and militarism—a position that led “official Germany” to view Hesse as a “suspicious and essentially undesirable character, worthy at best to be tolerated.”3 Hesse’s disgust with German nationalism led him to renounce his German citizenship; he became a Swiss citizen in 1923. During the era of the National Socialists and the Second World War, Hesse more or less withdrew from public pronouncements on political events. Hesse’s political writings during the Great War, his “censure of wayward artists and intellectuals, short-sighted politicians, and narrow-minded generals had been an exercise in futility, and his subsequent advocacy of social reforms, pacifism, and internationalism had been much less than rewarding .” Hesse was denounced in Germany as a traitor, and when Hitler rose to power, Hesse withdrew from public life, though he “remained in close touch with current events … and continued in his many private letters … to give candid expression to his decided political views.”4 115 9 War, Church, and State Hesse’s view of the Nazis was clear enough: he detested the “race and blood blather of the Nazis,” the “poison gas”5 emanating from the speeches of Hitler and his ministers; Hitler was a mad demagogue, the National Socialist Party a political inanity, and Hesse clearly saw the writing of another war on the wall.6 Hesse’s main act of political resistance to the Nazis through the 1930s (he was in his fifties) was to review the works of Jewish authors in German and Swiss periodicals, an act that drew an insidious and widespread reaction from the Nazi-controlled and ideologically dominated press. By the end of 1935 Hesse’s reviews were no longer being accepted for publication.7 Aside from being a small thorn in the side of Nazi ideology, Hesse and his wife Ninon (Doblin) Hesse used their home and position in neutral Switzerland to ferry a large number of political refugees from Germany (among them Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann) on to safe havens. In a foreword to a collected edition of political and wartime writings published in 1946, Hesse muses: Since I am an utterly unpolitical man, I myself have been astonished at the reliability of my reaction, and I have often pondered about the sources of this moral instinct, about the teachers and guides who, despite my lack of systematic concern with politics, so molded me that I have always been sure of my judgment and offered more than average resistance to mass psychoses and psychological infections of every kind.8 This is not mere self-congratulation. Mark Boulby, for one, comments that the “extraordinary consistency of [Hesse’s] opposition to the political course of his country from 1914 to 1945—in which the total attitude is not gradually evolved but stands there clear and whole from the outset— is an impressive (and rare enough) phenomenon in German intellectual life of this period.”9 As for the sources behind this moral instinct and attitude , Hesse answers the question he poses with reference to three profound formative influences: A man ought to stand by what has educated, imprinted, and molded him, and so, after much consideration of the question, I must say: three strong influences, at work throughout my life, have made me what I am. These are the Christian and almost totally unnationalistic spirit of the home in which I grew up, the reading of the great Chinese...

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