Hermann Hesse: The Awakened Have One Aim—To Become Themselves

In 1921, Hermann Hesse’s life went dark. His marriage had collapsed, one of his children had died young, and the war had shredded his nerves. He was so broken he thought about ending his life. That summer he sought help from the psychologist Carl Jung, after having already undergone seventy-two sessions of analysis with Jung’s gifted disciple, Dr. Josef Lang. Hesse was already a celebrated writer, but in a world racked by upheaval his inner world was just as ravaged. He asked, with a kind of grief:

What I long for is simply to live out the nature that is pressing to break free inside me. Why is that so hard?

He wanted to be himself, yet the world kept pressing in, trying to flatten him into its own frenzy and disorder. He held his ground. He came through—calmer, steadier, turned inward in the best sense. As he would write:

The awakened person has a single duty: to find the self, hold fast to the self, and walk one’s own road—wherever it leads.

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01

On July 2, 1877, as the evening light warmed the hills, Hesse entered the world and felt, perhaps, his first touch of that warmth he would spend a lifetime seeking—the warmth that radiates from the soul. He was born in Calw, in Germany’s southwest, into an intellectual household steeped in faith and rules. His father, a devout missionary, taught him to honor every serious effort. His mother loved literature and the arts; clearly, her influence ran strong, because from early on Hesse was drawn to that fertile ground of uncertainty and creation.

The person he most admired at home was his grandfather, both a missionary and a linguist, a man who seemed to Hesse like a conjuror unveiling a secret world. In that world, everything is made through one’s own agency—God may supply the raw material, but it’s on us to shape it. Hesse dreamed of being a little magician himself.

When he was four, the family moved to Basel, Switzerland. There were deep woods and open meadows, small bridges over running water, trains shuttling past, and butterflies cutting their bright paths through the air. Before long he had a passion: collecting butterflies. At eight or nine he’d roam the forest with a net, ready to dash after a flash of color. Whenever he caught one he loved, he was giddy with joy. Those were his happiest childhood hours.

After five years in Basel the family returned to Calw. School age had come, and he was sent to a boarding school—proper, orderly, a place built to produce the same standardized product over and over. Hesse had already decided otherwise. He would be a poet. He would not live to someone else’s prescription, nor let his life be stamped into a mold.

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02

“As early as thirteen,” Hesse said, “I knew that if I wasn’t to be a poet, I would be nothing at all.”

Once you have a direction, fewer things can knock you off course. Hesse studied hard at school but cared little for exam results. He wanted knowledge, inner richness—not a number on a page. A classmate asked, “What if you don’t pass?” Hesse shrugged: pass or fail, it didn’t matter—he meant to be a free writer. As it happened, he placed second, won a scholarship, and entered a theological seminary.

Very quickly he found it was a cage—rigid rules, no patience for a student’s individuality. Worst of all, the school’s aim ran headlong against his own. After six months he began to run away. The first time, they dragged him back and put him in solitary for eight hours. He tried again, was caught again, and again spent eight hours in confinement. In that cell he wrote a poem and sent it to a magazine; he titled it “The Lockup.”

Twice he fled, twice he was seized, but he would not yield to the rulebook. As Montaigne might say, the greatest thing in the world is to belong to oneself. Hesse fell ill and had to withdraw to recover. His teachers didn’t understand him. Back home his parents couldn’t, either; to them he was a problem child, and he was sent to a psychiatric clinic. He wrote to his father, firm and unbending:

I refuse to obey now, and I will not obey in the future.

He held to a conviction: as Schiller put it, only Nature is our true maker. Hesse would not be fashioned by convention or tradition; he meant to live as he felt called to live. He would not sink into numb mediocrity. He wanted to become himself—no standard-issue version, but the real, singular thing. To be oneself has no fixed template; the only measure is how faithfully you stay close to your own soul.

03

After a few months in the psychiatric hospital, nothing about Hesse looked “fixed.” When it became clear that this sort of treatment wasn’t helping, his parents tried a different cure: school. They hoped a return to conventional education would smooth him out, make him “normal.” Hesse, weary to the bone of cookie-cutter schooling, lasted only a short while before dropping out again—this time for good. He didn’t even finish high school.

That October he was placed as an apprentice in a bookshop. Three days in, he quit, suddenly classified as an unemployed misfit. Back at home, he refused to let his life idle. Unsure what to do next, he threw himself into books—reading widely, reading hungrily, building up the inner resources he’d need to find himself. Without a certain wakefulness and a bit of wisdom, a person is swept along by the current. Hesse read his way through the whole landscape of German literature, letting those works become the nutrients of his inner life. Slowly, he felt himself gathering strength to face the world.

In June 1894, he tried again as an apprentice. This time he didn’t bolt; he focused on becoming financially independent. He moved into the world of secondhand books, living among stacks and dust and surprise discoveries. The first year he earned 80 marks, the second 90, the third 95. Modest, yes—but it freed him from dependence on his parents. More importantly, the shop gave him access to far more books than any classroom. Years later he’d sum up the lesson: For the life of the mind, only constant contact with what is past—what has already become history, what is old—truly opens the door.

Determined to make literature his vocation, Hesse kept a rigorous program of self-study while clerking in the shop—filling notebook after notebook with poems. In those years he plowed through roughly half the treasures of world literature and read widely in philosophy and beyond. On his walls he pinned more than a hundred portraits, over half of them writers. When his apprenticeship ended, he didn’t rush off; he stayed on, earned a little more, then traveled whenever he could—writing as he went. We don’t become ourselves overnight. Without time to steep and settle, we rarely become ourselves at all.

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04

While traveling in Italy, Hesse was also hard at work on Peter Camenzind. In April 1903 he finished the manuscript and mailed it to a publisher. An editor read it and was immediately taken. When the book came out, it sold out in just fourteen days. Reprints followed; before long it had sold fifty thousand copies—an extraordinary number for the time. Hesse was suddenly famous, and with recognition came money: the book brought in 2,500 marks, enough to live on for at least two years—the sum total of four years’ apprentice wages. He was twenty-seven. It had been fifteen years since he’d first fixed on the life of a writer. The success of Peter Camenzind convinced him he could try it full-time. He decided to become a professional author.

In Italy he had met the pianist Maria, eight years his senior. Their temperaments matched, and they fell quickly, deeply in love. Her family wasn’t thrilled—especially her father, who objected to the age gap. The two ignored the disapproval and, while her father was away, slipped off to register their marriage. By the time the paternal thunderclouds gathered from afar, the wedding was done. The couple withdrew to a quiet countryside home: lake at the doorstep, hills rising green across the water. It was a lovely, secluded life. He wrote; she played the piano and took photographs.

In 1905 Hesse published Unterm Rad (Under the Wheel), a novel about a bright young man crushed beneath the grinding gears of his age—bound tight by rules from early childhood, living timidly within them, desperate to escape yet unable to find the strength. It was Hesse’s indictment of conventional schooling. The novel took off, and Hesse was tagged a subverter of tradition. Keepers of the old order scolded and jeered, accusing him of sacrilege for challenging the rules their forebears had handed down.

Hesse knew those strictures firsthand. He wanted to be a writer, yet the schooling he endured tried to turn him into a cog—efficient, obedient, and unimaginative. And one has to wonder: doesn’t our own standardized-testing culture still function like a giant wheel, rolling right over the gifts of some of our most creative kids?

05

The uproar outside never really dented Hesse’s inner calm. There were days he walked down the street and people literally spat at him from every direction. He let it pass. He simply kept writing what he felt compelled to write. Fame didn’t make him wealthy; he remained a poor man of letters, paying the bills with his pen. Their life in the countryside was spare and unpretentious, without a trace of city gloss. Hesse worked like a smallholder: he broke ground for a vegetable patch, set flowers in the garden, and when the pages tired him out, he’d step outside to weed the lettuce or prune the roses. He hauled in fallen branches, sawed them by hand, split the logs with an axe.

But in that simple life, cracks spread through the marriage. Hesse felt he poured all his strength into the household and wasn’t understood. The rural retreat became untenable. To outpace the ache of it, he kept moving. Walking, traveling—that was how he wrestled with pain and with the helplessness of daily life. So began his long years of wandering. After crossing much of Europe, he turned his gaze eastward and went on to India. Something, he felt, had gone wrong in the core of European culture; to see it clearly, he needed to step outside it. When you’re submerged in a problem, you rarely see the shape of it.

After that journey, his aversion to Germany’s militarist mood only deepened, and he moved his family to Switzerland. “That feeling of unease,” he said, “led me, two years before the war broke out, to step away from many of Germany’s ties and traditions.” Every era lays its demands and limits on us; Hesse’s quiet victory was to refuse them in his own life. In Switzerland he stayed far from big cities, out where his only neighbors were fields, ridgelines, and trees—and that was all he needed. He wrote, and what he wrote kept circling the same theme: the irreducible uniqueness of the individual.

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06

In 1914 the Great War erupted, shattering Hesse’s peaceful plan of writing in solitude. All around him people were intoxicated by nationalism, singing hymns to country and to war. Hesse had no patience for it. He loathed war, yet he volunteered—not to fight, but to work in prisoner relief. Romain Rolland, a fellow anti-war voice, put it starkly:

Even in wartime, if a fine mind bends its thought to compromise, that itself is a sin. The life of the spirit is light; our duty is to hold it high above the storm and scatter the clouds.

Most of the world, though, cheered the war on. In his relief work Hesse met too many men missing arms, missing legs. Against the sheer brutality of the battlefield, what he could do felt heartbreakingly small. In 1916 his father died, and Hesse’s nerves finally snapped. Suddenly nothing meant anything—though not so long before he’d still felt the world’s beauty. He tried a psychiatrist, to no avail, and then turned to one of Jung’s students, Josef Lang: roughly one session every three days for six months—sixty visits in all—before he clawed his way through.

His anti-war stance made him a pariah back home. The German consulate told him to choose: either stop publishing works that criticized the times, or give up his relief work. He refused both options. He couldn’t even publish under his own name anymore; Demian appeared under the pseudonym “Sinclair.” Out of that suffering, his spirit hardened in the right way. He resolved to honor and persist in his own path—never to drift with the tide, never to let the age turn him into a tool.

“In this world,” he wrote, “the most frightening road is precisely the road that leads toward oneself.” And again: Europe has strained its genius to forge the most powerful new weapons in human history, while in thought it has sunk into a bottomless, startling emptiness. Europe conquered the world—and in the process, lost its soul.

07

Speaking about why he wrote Demian, Hesse put it plainly:
It’s a fight for individuation—a fight to become truly human.

When the First World War ended, so did his first marriage. He kept writing, but the siren call of beauty in everyday life never stopped tugging at him. Stepping out of the marriage, he began a season of reevaluation. When the work stalled, he turned to painting—not to reinvent himself as a painter, but because painting, in itself, felt wondrous. Of course, doing what you love can ruffle other people. Friends and readers said he ought to stick to novels and not “waste time” with brushes. Hesse’s answer was simple:
If I feel the need, I’ll change—often.
He was right. We live for our own becoming, not to fit someone else’s template.

As that first marriage was collapsing, a young woman named Ruth came into his life. From the start, Hesse doubted he was built for domesticity; it always unsettled him. The breakup, meanwhile, worsened his mental health. He stopped writing for more than a year and returned to Jung for therapy. While he was in treatment, Ruth tended to him with quiet devotion, a shaft of light through a dark window. Even so, his failed marriage left him wary. A writer, he thought, isn’t necessarily husband material; he no longer trusted himself in that role. But he loved Ruth, and they married.

It didn’t last. In 1926 Ruth filed for divorce without telling him; the blow rattled him to the core. The following year the court dissolved the marriage, noting:
The defendant (Hesse) is inclined to a reclusive life, cannot act according to the will of others, and dislikes society and travel.
Hesse was fifty. The pain didn’t lift, but the greater the pain, the stronger his urge to break free. Life wounds us, yes—but pain also forces the soul to wake and look hard at the world. He kept thinking it through until he could say:

Wisdom, at bottom, is a readiness of the soul—an ability, a mysterious art that can bring each moment of life into harmony, and also breathe in that harmony.

Knowledge can be handed down. Wisdom can’t.