24/01/2025| German Studies, Literature

https://boydellandbrewer.com/blog/german/how-do-you-measure-hermann-hesses-global-impact/

Guest post written by Ingo Cornils and Neale Cunningham, editors of Hermann Hesse’s Global Impact

Determining an author’s impact, that is, their difficult-to-define influence on their readers’ thoughts, emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and world views, seems to be a near impossible task.

In the case of German/Swiss author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), we attempted something even more ambitious: to delineate and evidence his impact around the world. We felt it was time, in an era of ‘permacrisis’, to acknowledge this remarkable author’s varied and often profound influence that goes beyond the rather limited concepts of ‘reception’, ‘afterlife’, and ‘legacy’.  

For Hermann Hesse’s impact on his readers is taking place today, more than 60 years after his death. In a series of ‘impact case studies’, our contributors present their evidence: that Hesse is shaping our understanding of the ‘democratizing’ value of world literature, that he is read in internet discussion groups and schools around the world, that his fellow writers at home and abroad have picked up his ideas and integrated them into their own works.

His key works (Demian, Siddhartha, Narzissus and Goldmund, Steppenwolf, The Journey to the East, The Glass Bead Game) have been, and continue to be, translated into all world languages and are adapted for the silver screen (most recently by Oscar-winning director Stefan Ruzowitzky).

Beyond the literary realm, we can observe his cultural and philosophical impact, for example in the songs of K-Pop group BTS or on mainland China’s intellectuals. The reason for this wide acceptance can be found in the way Hesse anticipated and found ways to cope with the collectively felt challenges of human existence in the 21st century: the fragmentation of the self, the commodification of every aspect of human life, alienation, mental health struggles, and the destruction of our environment.

Perhaps the greatest impact Hesse had, and continues to have, is on the way he encourages his readers to resist pressures of conformity and ‘become themselves’.

Hesse’s works offer practical, psychological, and spiritual guidance to cope with our current challenges of war, disease, inequality, migration, and climate change, but also encourage a critical mindset to engage with technological and scientific progress (from digitalization via genetic engineering to artificial intelligence) and its socioeconomic repercussions.

While Hesse is no longer regarded with uncritical eyes as he was during the ‘Hesse Boom’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he has moments of sublime illumination, which he shares with his readers in his trademark style of no-holds-barred self-examination. Like all epiphanies and conceptional breakthroughs, these never last long and require a serious effort to comprehend and capture, even for a moment. But their impact on the lives of his readers, from subtle to sustained, from unconscious to openly acknowledged, can be profound.

Our volume, the product of a sustained collaboration across continents that in itself reflects its central premise, goes beyond the well-worn narratives and often stereotypical interpretations of Hermann Hesse as the ‘outsider’, the ‘wanderer’, the ‘natural counterpart to Thomas Mann’, the ‘guru on the mountain’, or the ‘visionary of a planetary (cyber-)culture’. It seeks to understand what Hesse meant and continues to mean to readers who often encounter his works in translation (after the Brothers Grimm, he is the most often translated of all German writers with global sales of over 150 million books) and may know little of their cultural, political, and historical context, yet somehow find an almost intuitive connection.

Perhaps the greatest impact Hesse had, and continues to have, is on the way he encourages his readers to resist pressures of conformity and ‘become themselves’. In more than 30,000 letters, he responded to pleas for help from his readers, who in turn acknowledged the role he played, and continues to play, in their lives. Reading Hesse’s works today means stocking up on ‘spiritual capital’: untapped resources of empathy, patience, and serenity.

INGO CORNILS is Professor of German Studies at the University of Leeds.
NEALE CUNNINGHAM is a Specially Appointed Professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan.