Veneration and Revolt: Hermann Hesse and Swabian Pietism

Conclusion

[I]t imposes no strain on our credulity to believe in the continued existence of a constellation that has vanished below the horizon —hermann hesse, The Glass Bead Game1 P ietism, to borrow the language of Charles Taylor, was one of the fundamental sources of Hermann Hesse’s self. “The genesis of the human mind,” writes Taylor, is … not monological, not something each accomplishes on his or her own, but dialogical.… We define [our identity] always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities that significant others want to recognize in us. And even when we outgrow some of the latter—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.2 This image of self-formation through conversation aptly suits Hesse’s relationship to Pietism. The conversation took place at an intensely personal, but also a cultural, level. Through his parents, and especially through his grandfather Hermann Gundert, Hesse felt connected to the intellectual and spiritual tradition of Swabia, a tradition to which Pietism made no small contribution—and this connection is manifestly present in Hesse’s literature , as I have attempted to demonstrate in this study. Pietism was for Hesse a tradition and a heritage in the sense that Paul Ricoeur and HansGeorg Gadamer understand these notions. “The idea of ‘heritage’ … is one of the more appropriate expressions for the efficacy of the past [and] can be interpreted as the fusion of the ideas of a debt and a tradition.”3 Hesse’s was a “historically effected consciousness” that “rises above … naïve comparisons and assimilations by letting itself experience tradition and by keeping itself open to the truth claims encountered in it.”4 As Gadamer has noted, tradition need not be equated with conservation. Rather, tradition 217 Conclusion implies transmission; the encounter with tradition “means learning how to grasp and express the past anew.”5 Hesse’s radical individualism and self-will were no doubt a reaction to Pietism’s demand for the surrender of the self in a “corporate community .” His frequent harsh self-recriminations were no doubt conditioned in part by guilty feelings bred by his Pietist milieu. His repeated Neoplatonic statements and fictionalization of a unique, transcendent God or One informing and inflected in the diversity of the world’s religious traditions were a response to a perceived religious exclusivism and triumphalism inherent in Christian theology, myth, and institutions, and fostered by the sectarian nature of his family’s Pietism.6 But for all Hesse’s criticism of his religious heritage there are deep-running affinities. Hesse’s skeptical and critical attitude toward the bourgeois world he was immersed in; the autobiographical and confessional impulse of his literature; his ecumenical outlook; his romantic, Böhmist mysticism; his pacifism and internationalism ; his repeated evocations of the value of service and the ideal of love—all this Hesse absorbed from his Pietist heritage and transmitted to others through his literature. And even Hesse’s criticisms of Pietism stand inside the tradition of the “true Protestant,” an image that Hesse readily applied to himself. Just as early Pietists considered their movement a reformation of the Reformation, Hesse felt himself, even in revolt—perhaps especially in revolt—to be fulfilling a certain destiny demanded by his Protestant character and heritage. Hesse’s “back and forth between veneration and revolt” is a basic feature of his literature, a pivot around which the lives of his characters revolve; this is explicitly so in the case of Hans Giebenrath, Emil Sinclair, Harry Haller, and Joseph Knecht, and implicit in the lives of Peter Camenzind, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and H.H. It is tempting to view this back-and-forth movement, symbolized most powerfully in Hesse’s frequent fictionalizations of the event of Maulbronn, as something of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Johannes Cremerius, in his psychoanalytically informed study, sees Hesse as subjected to irresolvable tensions generated by exposure to two radically different worldviews —the strict Pietism of his family and the “liberal, enlightened” worldview represented by psychoanalysis, which Hesse discovered during the First World War: Hesse’s reception of Freud was enthusiastic, but it includes aspects not derived from psychoanalysis. In other words, ideas from a completely different world flow, through the back door, skewing his understanding of Freud; [these] ideas derive from a world in opposition to the Freudian, 218 Conclusion from the world of...