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UNDERSTANDING HERMANN HESSE: THE MAN, HIS MYTH, HIS METAPHOR. By Lewis W. Tusken. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xiv + 253; 11 illustrations. $29.95.
This book appears in a series designed for undergraduates, graduate students, and nonacademic readers, and is intended to provide an introduction to the life and writings of Hesse, as well as an explication of his most important works (series editor James Hardin's preface, p. ix). Tuskin provides a lengthy biography, drawing heavily on Hesse's correspondence, as well as detailed plot summaries of nine Hesse novels (as Tuskin refers to them), each of which merits its own chapter: Peter Camenzind, Unterm Rad, Rosshalde, Demian, Siddhartha, Der Steppenwolf, Narciss and Goldmund, Reise nach Osten, and Das Glasperlenspiel. Interspersed are chapters entitled "Gaienhofen and Bern: Idylls and Realities," and "World War I: The Awakening."
In the 1960s Hesse was of course extremely popular in the industrialized societies of the United States and Japan, and Tusken explains this influence, in part, by declaring: "It has seemed Hesse's fate to appeal primarily to those who want `freedom from,' as was illustrated with his 'discovery' in the United States during the Vietnam era. But his real message is `freedom to,' with its incumbent responsibilities" (p. 3). This understanding serves well as a binding motif for portraying a writer whose life and works exhibit profound struggles and a long succession of self-overcomings. "In today's vernacular," Tusken writes, "Hermann would be characterized as a `hyper child' or, possibly, as having an attention deficit disorder" (p. 10). As he matured, however, Hesse's "self-will" (Eigensinn) "became his guiding principle" (p. 11). Tusken presents a detailed portrait of the juvenile Hesse and the oppositional forces that shaped him intellectually, such as the family's Pietism, mostly unsympathetic and pedestrian teachers, and the predictable social pressures that characterized the utilitarian age, on the one hand, and the fact that, on the other, Hesse, as an emotionally fragile child, had to learn from an early age how to assert his love for music, literature, and thought in a climate that to him appeared only hostile and confining. Tusken concludes his biography with the early Basel period, by which time Hesse was engaging in arguments with his father merely for the sake...