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Hermann Hesse, the American Youth Movement, and Problems of Literary Evaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Egon Schwarz
Egon Schwarz*
Affiliation:
Washington University St. Louis, Mo
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Abstract

When Hermann Hesse received the Nobel prize in 1946 he was virtually unknown in this country. The critics who reluctantly turned to the new celebrity found his works threadbare and derivative. Today there exists a veritable Hesse cult in the United States among the dissident and the young. The affinities between the German author and the disaffected youth in America are many. They share similar attitudes toward adolescence, sex, drugs, the Orient, the nation, the state, the church, the military, the schools, and authority in general. A glance at the rebellious students in Hesse's native country, however, reveals that he is held by them in the same low esteem they reserve for the entire Romantic tradition of inwardness of which they regard National Socialism as an ultimate version or perversion. This contradiction of values held by sociologically and ideologically comparable groups puts the lack of a viable theory of literary evaluation into sharp focus. While traditional literary scholarship is reticent on the subject, its acts of criticism and historiography are replete with unreflected value judgments. A theory of evaluation based on the careful analysis of an author's reception, such as of Hesse's posthumous fortunes, could combat prejudice in scholarship and further the understanding of the historical dimension in the literary work.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 5 , October 1970 , pp. 977 - 987
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

Note 1 in page 977 Bernhard Blume, “Amerika und die deutsche Literatur,” in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, 1959 (unnumbered pages).

Note 2 in page 977 Claude Hill, “The Journey to the East; Author: Hermann Hesse,” Saturday Review of Literature, 1 June 1957. An aggressively derogatory voice is that of Dwight MacDonald. Oskar Seidlin had published in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 14 (1953), 109–31, what is probably the first comprehensive survey of Hesse's work written in this country: “Hermann Hesse: The Exorcism of the Demon.” In a review of this article, praised by other critics, Dwight MacDonald wrote in the New Yorker, 23 Jan. 1954, p. 99: “Oskar Seidlin's turgid inflation of Hermann Hesse, a pretentious minor writer, whom Mr. Seidlin's energetic pumping operations inflate to increasingly bigger dimensions until he shares the fate of the frog in the fable. …” Hesse's present American popularity has been analyzed, from a point of view different from mine, in several studies, especially by Eugene Timpe in Symposium (Spring 1969), pp. 73–79, under the title “Hermann Hesse in the United States,” and Theodore Ziolkowski in his article “Saint Hesse among the Hippies” in the American-German Review, 35, No. 2 (1969), 19–23.

Note 3 in page 977 Colin Wilson, The Outsider (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 51.

Note 4 in page 978 “Den empfand ich immer als einen durchschnittlichen Entwicklungs-, Ehe- und Innerlichkeitsromancier—eine typisch deutsche Sache,” in: Gottfried Benn, Ausgewdhlte Briefe, mit einem Nachwort von Max Rychner (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1957), p. 200. My translation.

Note 5 in page 978 Kitsch, Konvenlion und Kunst (München: List Verlag, 1957), pp. 97–108 and 124–38. Some of the expressions with which Deschner attempts to characterize Hesse's prose style are “sugary,” “silly,” “insipid” (p. 98), “stereotyped,” “conventional” (p. 100), “gilt-edged syrup” (p. 108), and many similar ones.

Note 6 in page 978 LI. 367–77, from Hesse's essay on Dostoevsky. See Claude Hill, “The Journey to the East.”

Note 7 in page 978 “Hermann Hesse: Einleitung zu seiner amerikanischen Demian-Ausgabe,” Neue Rundschau, 58 (1947), 245–50; quotation on p. 248.

Note 8 in page 978 Der Spiegel, No. 40 (1968), p. 177.

Note 9 in page 978 Von Richard Wagner zu Bertolt Brecht: Eine Geschichte der neueren deutschen Literalur (Frankfurt/Main and Hamburg: Fischer Biicherei, 1964), p. 175.

Note 10 in page 979 New Yorker, 18 Jan. 1968, p. 87.

Note 11 in page 979 This task has been performed in recent years by a series of books, of which I shall mention only the ones by Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956); and Mark Boulby, Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1967).

Note 12 in page 979 In this section I am utilizing the insights of Walter Müller-Seidel, Probleme der literarischen Werlung (Stuttgart: I.B. Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1965). Most of the quotations are taken from his book. Mliller-Seidel in turn lists the works of other scholars concerned with evaluation. A recent work is Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph Strelka (University Park, Pa., and London: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1969), with many contributions on this subject.

Note 13 in page 980 Wissenschaft als Beruf, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 3rd ed. (Tubingen: Mohr, 1968), p. 602.

Note 14 in page 980 Ilölderlin, Samtliche Werke, i (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1947), p. 321.

Note 15 in page 980 Grundbegrife der Poetik (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1946), p. 246.

Note 16 in page 980 Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957, p. 21.

Note 17 in page 980 “Problème der literarischen Wertung,” in Neae Zurcher Zeitung, Overseas ed., No. 50 (20 Feb. 1965).

Note 18 in page 980 Geschichle der deutschen Literatur, 6th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1891), p. 713.

Note 19 in page 981 Stephen Koch, “Prophet of Youth,” The New Republic, 13 June 1968, p. 23.

Note 20 in page 981 Koch, p. 23.

Note 21 in page 983 Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1965).

Note 22 in page 983 See Anthony W. Riley, “Das Glasperlenspiel in English Translation (with an Unpublished Letter of Hermann Hesse's),” Monatshefte, 59 (1967), 344–50. See also Ziol-kowski, The Novels of Hermann liesse, p. ix.

Note 23 in page 986 By D. J. Enright (12 Sept. 1968), p. 10.

Note 24 in page 987 The Uncommitted, p. 382.