-
15 Joseph Knecht and The Glass Bead Game: Spiritual Heritage
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Thus [Joseph Knecht’s] path had been a circle, or an ellipse or spiral or whatever, but certainly not straight; straight lines evidently belonged only to geometry, not to nature and life. —hermann hesse, The Glass Bead Game1 H esse’s final two works of fiction are intimately connected, as Hesse indicated in a letter of 1936: “If it [The Glass Bead Game] turns out as planned, then it will be my last major work and will give complete expression to the final phase of my inner existence which began with The Journey to the East.”2 Two important features of this “final phase” of Hesse’s “inner existence” were the transmission of cultural values and reflection on religious and theological questions, especially in relation to his Pietist-Protestant heritage. The “turning back to Christianity”3 that began around the time of Siddhartha was in full swing in this “final phase of [Hesse’s] inner existence,” and Hesse directed his interests at eighteenth-century Swabian Pietism. After completing Journey in the spring of 1931, Hesse, as his letters of the early 1930s reveal, immersed himself in the history and theology of Swabian Pietism: I’ve the house full of literature, mostly theological, from this period.… I’ve a favor to ask.… I would like a few biographies—old ones, if possible —of these Swabian fathers.… [Also] I would like a few of our religious schoolbooks; except for my school Bible, I no longer have any of them. I would especially like … the Church hymnbook, the Catechism, the Confirmation book. Also any short histories of Württemberg.… I’ve been reading … some old tomes from Calw, namely, writings on the lives of Swabian Pietists: Bengel, Oetinger, etc. And I’ve discovered that a few of them, like Oetinger, held an attraction for me in my youth.… At the moment I have, from a library in Zürich, Spangenberg’s complete works [four volumes] on the life of Count Zinzendorf, and many other 193 15 Joseph Knecht and The Glass Bead Game spiritual heritage such works, also a Württemberg hymnbook from the year 1700.… I would also like to know: How was it with church music in Württemberg between 1700 and 1750? Were there many organs in the cities and churches? Were there separate organists, or did the schoolmasters take care of this? Who did the singing in places with an organ, priests or teachers? I would especially like some dates on Johann Sebastian Bach.… Were Bach’s works known in Württemberg before 1750?4 Hesse’s works of the 1930s, works of central importance for understanding his mature vision and faith, coincided with detailed, prolonged reading in Pietist histories and works of theology, biographies and autobiographies of influential Pietists, and church music and liturgy.5 In the course of his research, Hesse came to hold Johann Albrecht Bengel and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, the two chief fathers of Württemberg Pietism, in the highest regard. I’m still not fond of Pietist language, but it no longer irritates me, and I’ve discovered behind these old books a few things that interest me.… I was most pleased to see how these stubborn Swabian Christians took a stand against all the polish and cleverness of the Enlightenment; they are the only theologians of this era that one can still benefit from reading.6 Hesse considered Oetinger the most “venerable and attractive personality of Protestant Pietism.”7 Hesse’s studies in Swabian Pietism were in preparation for The Glass Bead Game. Hesse conceived a plan for the story as early as 1927 and seriously began work on the project in April 1931, following completion of Journey. In the late 1920s Hesse envisioned writing a number of life stories of the same man, set in different periods—a transtemporal biography , or series of reincarnations. One of these stories was to be that of an eighteenth-century Swabian theologian named Joseph Knecht. Hesse’s original idea was to deal with “reincarnation as a form of expression for stability in the midst of flux, for the continuity of tradition and of the spiritual life in general.”8 In the early 1930s the plan of the work changed. Hesse turned his attention to the creation of the spiritual, utopian realm of Castalia and its Glass Bead Game—a futuristic vision of a kingdom of monklike scholars dedicated to the study and preservation of the highest intellectual and aesthetic values drawn from the past. A narrator...