Veneration and Revolt: Hermann Hesse and Swabian Pietism

11 "Breaking the Will"

Though by nature a lamb and as docile as a soap bubble, I have always behaved rebelliously toward commandments of every sort, especially during my youth. —hermann hesse, “Life Story, Briefly Told”1 A leitmotif of Hesse’s corpus is his affirmation of the virtue of selfwill (Eigensinn). “Self-will is Hesse’s chief article of faith, his ethical touchstone for value and integrity in all areas of human life … [and] the core of whatever teachings he wished to impart in his writings.”2 Siddhartha, like most of Hesse’s protagonists, embodies this virtue: he is a man who follows his own path, listening to the stirrings of his own heart, following his intuitions and natural inclinations. The literary and intellectual history of early twentieth-century Europe was shaped by consideration of the relationship between the creative individual and what was increasingly coming to be seen as a flat, one-dimensional society.3 Hesse’s literary oeuvre is informed by the necessity of the individual to remain true to one’s self, rather than succumb to the intense pressures of socialization enforced by church, state, and modern industry and bureaucratization . In an era dominated by violent collectivities, Eigensinn was the cornerstone of Hesse’s moral life. The foundation on which the architecture of Hesse’s self-will was to be built was the inner voice, the still point within amid the sound and fury of a crazed world; this voice would provide the individual contact with spiritual and moral forces. The “self-willed man … values only one thing, the mysterious power in himself which bids him live and helps him to grow.… His only living destiny is the silent, ungainsayable law in his own heart, which comfortable habits make it so hard to obey but which to the selfwilled man is destiny and godhead.”4 Nietzsche’s influence on Hesse’s virtue of self-will is unmistakable. In “Zarathustra’s Return,” written in 1919, Hesse explicitly invokes the name of Nietzsche as an exemplar of “a German spirit, a German courage, [and] a German manhood” that had 145 11 “Breaking the Will” been all but completely lost to the “uproar of the herd” and the “mass enthusiasm” for war.5 One path into understanding and interpreting Hesse’s affirmation of radical individualism would be to highlight such influences as the intellectual legacy of Nietzsche, the turn-of-the-century sense of cultural decline, and concern over the values of the “mass” or “herd” society associated with critiques of industrialization, rationalization, and bureaucratization . But this is not the route we will follow. Hesse’s persistent emphasis on self-will has another important context. The counterpart to Hesse’s advocacy of self-will is his frequent criticism of the Pietist notion of “breaking the will.” Hesse makes many references to “breaking the will,” but he was most preoccupied with understanding its impact on his life during the mid1920s , following the completion of Siddhartha. In his post-Siddhartha period, Hesse took a confessional turn in his writing, poring over his inner life through strongly autobiographical essays and therapeutic fictions. Steppenwolf is one of Hesse’s most widely read and esteemed works, and the theme of “breaking the will” is central to the novel. Whereas a sympathetic “turning back to Christianity” informs Hesse’s writing of Siddhartha, critical reflection on his Pietist heritage is the driving theme of Steppenwolf , the literary product, as Hesse describes it, of the “journey through the hell of myself.”6 A first step in understanding this journey, which I turn to in the next chapter, involves fleshing out the meaning of “breaking the will” within Pietist circles, and in works written in the time of Steppenwolf.  Pietists generally stood firmly in the Lutheran theological tradition of justification by grace through faith, with its inherent conception of humanity being in a state of sin. As Martin Schmidt first argued, however, one of the chief theological innovations of the Pietist movement was its emphasis on an experiential-based theology of regeneration or rebirth.7 In their efforts to revivify the church and Christian life, Pietists such as Philipp Jakob Spener took an interest in subjective experience. Whereas orthodoxy granted that simple faith in the promises of Christ effected salvation, Pietists sought to cultivate the actual experience of salvation, which was variously associated with notions such as “rebirth,” the “new man in Christ,” or “conversion”: 146 Turning Back If one...