Gertrude Read online

  GERTRUDE

  Gertrude

  ❧

  HERMANN HESSE

  translated by adele lewisohn

  introduction by thomas fasano

  Coyote Canyon Press

  CLAREMONT, CA

  coyote canyon press

  Claremont, California

  http://www.coyotecanyonpress.com

  Translated from the German, Gertrude, by Adele Lewisohn

  © 1915 by The International Monthly Inc.

  © Introduction: Thomas Fasano 2012

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book

  or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Typeset in 11/13 Janson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hesse, Hermann, 1877-1962.

  Gertrude / Hermann Hesse ; translated by Adele Lewisohn ; introduction

  By Thomas Fasano.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-9821298-9-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Lewisohn, Adele Guggenheimer, 1876- II. Title.

  PT2617.E85G413 2012

  833’.912--dc23

  2012035667

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  INTRODUCTION

  Hermann Hesse, the Nobel laureate who enjoyed a cultlike following in the 1960s, was born on July 2, 1877, in the town of Cawl, Germany, in the Black Forest. His family came of mixed stock: French-Swiss on his mother’s side, Baltic-Estonian on his father’s. Hesse’s mother, Maria, was born in India and educated in Germany. She bore nine children, of whom six survived. Hesse’s father, Johannes, served as a Pietist missionary in India (1869–1873) but was brought back to Germany because of ill health. He settled in Cawl to assist Hermann Gundert, the famous Pietist, Indologist, and the director of the Caliver Verlagsvereins. A year later he married Gundert’s daughter, Maria, and soon succeeded his father-in-law as editor of the Pietist publishing house in Cawl. Although a staunch Pietist and severe in his demands, Johannes Hesse was no narrow-minded sectarian. His taste for Latin literature, Greek philosophy, and Oriental religions fed an intellectual curiosity he passed on to his son. Pietism, however, with its belief in the inherent sinfulness of man and renunciation of all that is in this world, was the first of many institutions against which Hermann Hesse would rebel.

  Young Hermann grew up in an atmosphere unusually cosmopolitan for a provincial town. Cawl, with its narrow cobblestone streets, its crowded houses with their pointed gables, and the old stone bridge that still spans the Nagold River, in which Hermann swam and fished, left an indelible impression on the young boy, who as the son and grandson of Protestant clergymen was expected to follow in their footsteps. But at an early age Hesse was an aggravation to his parents and teachers. As early as 1881 his mother began to suspect that her son was not destined for the life of a Pietist, for she noticed that in addition to being willful and slow to obey his parents, he composed poems in his head before he could hold a pencil:

  Pray for Hermann with me, Johannes, and pray that I have the power to raise him. Using force is not enough. The little guy has his own life, the strength of a giant, a powerful will, and quite an amazing mind for his four years. . . . God must take this proud spirit and work with him and turn him into something noble and magnificent.[1]

  By 1883 Johannes Hesse began to wonder seriously whether it would be better to hand the child over to others to raise:

  It would be humiliating for us, but I am thinking seriously whether we should give him to an institution or place him in a stranger’s house. We are too nervous, too weak for him. It’s not enough having a house filled with regular discipline. He has all the natural gifts he needs: he observes the moon and the clouds in a delirious state, full of harmony, accompanied by a pencil or pen, and his drawings are wonderful. He also sings quite well, even if his songs lack rhyme.[2]

  In 1886, after living in Basel for five years, the family returned to Cawl. By this time Hermann had become manageable. School was a bore to him, yet he easily excelled. With little effort he was able to remain at the top of his class at the parochial mission school, later at the Latin school in Göppingen, in preparation for one of the Protestant church schools in Württenberg. After passing the entrance examination, he began his studies in Maulbronn in September 1891.

  Hesse’s stay, however, would be brief and unhappy. School failed to hold any interest for him as for Thomas Mann, and his formal education proved even briefer than Mann’s. From an early age he was determined to be a writer, not heir to his family’s Pietism. He began to suffer from headaches and insomnia and his behavior became erratic. His parents withdrew him from school in May 1892, after which he was passed from one pastor to another for convalescence. After a suicide attempt he ended up in a school for mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed children. His time there wasn’t pleasant, but after a stay of two months he was allowed to go home.

  Hurt by what he perceived as parental rejection, he began to inveigh against adult authority and religion. His letters from this time sound like the future Harry Haller of Steppenwolf railing against Western culture. Letters to his parents signed “H. Hesse Nihilist (haha!)” stand as testament to his agitated emotional state:

  Well, at least you’re rid of me. . . . How much would I give for death. . . . I have lost everything: home, parents, love, faith, hope, and myself. . . . The places you send me are like hell. . . . You keep saying to me: “Turn to God in Christ.” I see God only as a delusion in which Christ is nothing but a man. For this, you may curse me one hundred times.[3]

  By November the young rebel was ready to resume his studies at the Gymnasium in Castatt. That he would not be successful here soon became apparent. By January he sold most of his books, bought a revolver, rushed off to Stuttgart, and toyed with suicide. He soon returned to school, but he began to frequent taverns, to consort with dubious characters, and to gamble. By October his parents allowed him to return home, thus ending his formal education.

  Hesse would spend the next six months gardening and helping his father in the Verlagsvereins. Afterwards, he became an apprentice machinist in a clock-tower factory in Cawl. This was a trade he could take abroad (he was making plans to go to the United States or Brazil), but a year and a half of grimy physical labor was enough to disabuse him of any romantic notion of life as a foreign worker. He left the factory for a more suitable apprenticeship in the Heckenhauer bookshop in Tübingen. His days of rebellion were over: “Of that evil time, full of anger and hatred and thoughts of suicide, I will never speak.”[4]

  During his four years in Tübingen, he lived a quiet life, came under the spell of Goethe, and proved to himself that he was indeed a writer. He wrote fiction and essays, but his early poetry found a more ready reception. A collection of poems, Romantische Lieder (1899), was his first published book.

  That same year he began a job as an assistant bookseller at R. Reich’s bookshop in Basel, Switzerland. One of the most fruitful periods of his life would turn out to be the five years he eventually spent in Basel making an effort to be more socially active, living with and not apart from his fellow humans, and escaping the loneliness of his previous uninvolvement in Tübingen. Soon after his arrival he became a frequent
guest of several of the city’s culturally prominent families, often visiting the home of Pastor La Roche for their musical gatherings, and chatting away the evenings at the home of the prominent Bernoulli family. But like his sensitive protagonist, Peter Camenzind, Hesse was less at home in a crowded drawing room than at a tavern with a few friends or out in nature; and like Camenzind, the outdoors became part of an essentially lonely life. He was happiest when hiking in the woods around Basel, boating, or just wandering on one of his many excursions.

  It wasn’t long before Hesse became romantically involved. In the spring of 1900, he fell in love with Elizabeth La Roche, the “Elizabeth” of his love poems of the period and the romantic interest of what would be his first novel, Peter Camenzind. Despite his feelings, Hesse was too shy to pursue his love; and when obtaining her became hopeless, he soon began a more successful courtship of Maria Bernoulli. As in Gertrude Kuhn discovers the eponymous heroine at a musical gathering at the home of Mr. Imthor, so did Hesse meet his future wife, Maria, at a gathering at the Bernoulli residence.

  In June 1902 Hesse’s eyes began to bother him more than usual. (He had been exempted from military service for poor eyesight.) In August severe eyestrain and prolonged headaches forced him to take sick leave. After extended trips back to Cawl and then to Italy, he was able to finish writing Peter Camenzind (the story of a failed writer who embarks on a journey to discover the world and himself, a prototype of much of Hesse’s later fiction). He’d begun the novel in 1901 but worked on it slowly. When the novel was published in 1904, Hesse’s success as a writer seemed assured. The book became a bestseller and brought about a long association with the great Berlin publisher S. (Samuel) Fischer; it also brought him enough money to quit the book trade, become a full-time writer, and get married.

  While he worked on Unterm Rad (translated as Beneath the Wheel) as well as monographs on Boccaccio and St. Francis of Assisi, his fiancée, Maria Bernoulli, to whom he was engaged in the spring of 1903, began traveling the countryside in search of an acceptable rural retreat. Both Hermann and Maria had had enough of sophisticated city life. The charms of the countryside beckoned, and after much searching, Maria was able to find a suitable farmhouse for rent in the village of Gaienhofen, on the German side of the Untersee River. The couple were married in Basel on August 2, 1904, and soon began their life in the country.

  The half-timbered farmhouse had been built during the Thirty Years’ War. Animals still lived in the stables, and the living quarters had been vacant for some time and were in bad repair. The newlyweds labored for weeks to make their new home livable. Eventually a tranquility settled over the place. Hesse continued to write, to garden, and to seek his diversion in nature. Maria tended to household affairs and found her pastime in music and photography.

  During his years in Gaienhofen, Hesse fell in with a large circle of friends, primarily artists, many of whom were frequent guests in his home as he was in theirs. In 1904 he was introduced to Thomas Mann, with whom he would have a slowly evolving friendship that did not become close and lasting until Mann’s flight from Nazi Germany in 1933. In March 1905 Hesse’s friend Ludwig Finckh came to live with the Hesses in Gainhofen. The two men were inseparable and spent much of their leisure time exploring the area on foot or in boat, and hiking and swimming. Their odd dress and unusual lifestyle marked them as different, but eventually the locals accepted them as a couple of harmless eccentrics.

  When the Hesses’ first son, Bruno, was born in December 1905, it became apparent that the farmhouse no longer met their needs. Also, neither of the Hesses was enchanted with Gaienhofen, especially after Hesse’s failed attempt at farming, a dream that turned sour when put into practice. Nevertheless, they bought a plot of ground in the township and had a house built that overlooked the village. The new house had everything the farmhouse lacked: running water, a bathroom, a wine cellar, even a darkroom for Maria’s photography, plus ample room for a growing family, into which the Hesses’ second son, Heiner, was born in March 1909.

  Hesse was becoming the fêted writer he’d always dreamed of being, but it was obvious that he could not be both a creative dreamer and a solid citizen—a Phantasiemensch and Bürger, as he put it. His life felt like a burden, especially his marriage. The realization was sinking in that he could not have chosen a less compatible mate than Maria Bernoulli. She was equally strong-willed and self-focused, nine years his senior, and as set in her ways as he. He was temperamental and flighty; she, withdrawn, dour, and self-sufficient. She had little interest in his writing, and he cared little for family matters. They eventually began to go their separate ways although they would have a third son before divorcing in 1923.

  Of the novels Hesse attempted while living in Gaienhofen, he was able to finish but one, Gertrude, and only after two previous aborted attempts. According to a letter to Thomas Heuss, who would become the first President of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II, Hesse began Gertrude in the winter of 1906-07 and completed it in the winter of 1908-09: “There are two big desks where I hide my manuscripts; they hold two attempts, each about 100 pages.”[5] The novel was published serially in September and November 1909 and in book format the following year in Munich.

  Unlike his previous work, the publication of Gertrude elicited negative reactions from the critics. In an undated letter to Conrad Haussmann (a prominent liberal statesman in Swabia) and Bernhard Zeller (Hesse’s biographer), Hesse wrote:

  “In addition to searing criticism [of Gertrude], reviewers have expressed strong praise. . . . and now the press has a kind of revenge—screaming for so long my genius as a writer until they grew tired and suddenly declared me an idiot.”[6]

  Peter Camenzind and Gertrude were each a response to an urgent psychological need on the part of the author. Narrative in both was an argument for an already chosen way of life: Peter Camenzind was an attempt to account for Hesse’s asocial withdrawal in Basel; Gertrude was an account of the author’s life in Gainhofen. Peter Camenzind delved into the misfortunes of a troubled young writer; Gertrude centered around a similarly troubled young composer. Both artistic misfits were projections of their author; their problems, his.

  In Gertrude both the inner and outer world of Hesse’s violinist composer Kuhn drew freely from the author’s personal history and his love of music. Music was important to Hesse. As a child he loved to listen to the church organ, learned to play the violin, and developed a passion for Chopin. His interest in music and painting and his lifelong association with musicians and painters greatly informed his writing. In Gertrude Kuhn is the person Hesse was in Basel as he becomes Hesse the disenchanted artist of Gainhofen, intent on making life acceptable. Toward the end of the novel Kuhn embraces a fatalistic philosophy of life combined with a Nietzschean theory of the irreconcilable elements of art: the Dionysian versus the Apollonian, a major theme in Hesse’s later masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game.

  As a work of fiction, Gertrude disappoints: it remains more portrait than story. Like Peter Camenzind the narrative is only loosely grounded in space and time; fragmented by protracted dialogue, constant rumination, and a dramatic arc which doesn’t so much conclude as terminate. For all its shortcomings, however, Hesse found in Gertrude the approachable voice that would be the hallmark of his writing style for the rest of his career: a syntactically streamlined language uncluttered with adjectives and adverbs and unadorned with excessive figures of speech. Yet Hesse’s settings are still not very particularized, nature almost an insignificant backdrop; and most characters are sketchily drawn, their interior lives indistinct. The overall effect is that of an inner drama of emotions revolving around a protagonist at some distance from society.

  Hesse’s pre-World-War-I heroes are esthetes who live only in their own world of dreams, who shrink before bold action. Temperamental artists, they are paralyzed by their chronic indecision and consumed by loneliness—timid souls to whom the art of
life and the art of love are forever unobtainable. They ask little of life and expect much. Such is the nature of the child of nature, Peter Camenzind, and the timorous composer, Kuhn. Such too was Hermann Hesse.

  Thomas Fasano

  August 2012

  Thomas Fasano is an English teacher and freelance writer in California. He’s the author of A Concise Guide to MLA Style and Documentation and the editor of Great Short Stories by Great American Writers.

  [1]. Adele Gundert, Marie Hesse. Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern (1934), p. 208 (translation mine).

  [2]. Marie Hesse (1934), p. 231 (translation mine).

  [3]. Kindheit und Jugend vor Neunzehnhundert. Hermann Hesse in Briefen und Lebenszeugnissen 1877–1895 (Frankfurt a. M., 1966), pp. 250–251 (translation mine).

  [4]. A letter comment of June 1, 1895, Kindheit und Jugend vor Neunzehnhundert (1966), p. 468 (translation mine).

  [5]. From a letter to Th. Heuss (Nov. 17, 1910), Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 1, 1973, p. 184 (translation mine).

  [6]. From a letter to Conrad Haussmann, Bernard Zeller, Hermann Hesse in Selbstzeusgnissen und Bilddokumenten, Rowohlt, 1963, p. 60 (translation mine).

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The text for this edition of Gertrude is taken from Adele Lewisohn’s translation of 1915, Gertrude and I, published in New York by The International Monthly. Gertrude was the first novel by Hermann Hesse published as an individual book in English.