Hermann Hesse’s Orient: Western Crisis and Eastern Redemption

Abstract

The German-born Nobel-Laureate author Hermann Hesse enjoyed three major waves of popularity in the twentieth century. The first surge in reception took place in the Weimar Republic following the Great War. The second, arose mostly in Germany during the period of Nazi rule and just after the Second World War. Finally, the third surge happened in the 1960s and 1970s, when Hesse reached a large readership at the time of the American Counterculture movement. In all these receptions, Hesse’s novels were seen as guides to help navigate crises in western civilisation. The resolutions offered in Hesse’s novels, particularly Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf and The Indian Life (the appendix to The Glass Bead Game) are either anchored in a narrative Orient or influenced by Vendānta and Buddhist philosophies. Framing the research within reception theory (Jauss 1967), the study of crisis in the West (Spengler 1919; Graf and Föllmer 2012) and Orientalism (Said 1978; Sardar 1999), I argue that Hesse’s readers across each of these waves of reception share a sense of social and existential crisis, and that Hesse’s novels functioned as a means of resolving this sense of crisis in the diverse socio-cultural environments of the West. They did so through the invocation of various understandings of the East as the Oriental other. Further, by way of conclusion, I suggest that a new wave of Hesse reception is in the making, and that these earlier surges of popularity can help us understand what Hesse’s Orient might offer in today’s pervasive sense of global crisis in academic and socio-cultural spheres.