Siddhartha Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Translation
SIDDHARTHA
In the 1960s, especially in the United States, the novels
of Hermann Hesse were widely embraced by young
readers who found in his protagonists a reflection of their own
search for meaning in a troubled world. Hesse’s rich allusions to
world mythologies, especially those of Asia, and his persistent
theme of the individual striving for integrity in opposition to
received opinions and mass culture appealed to a generation in
upheaval and in search of renewed values.
Born in southern Germany in 1877, Hesse came from a family of
missionaries, scholars, and writers with strong ties to India. This
early exposure to the philosophies and religions of Asia—filtered
and interpreted by thinkers thoroughly steeped in the intellectual
traditions and currents of modern Europe—provided Hesse with some
of the most pervasive elements in his short stories and novels,
especially Siddhartha (1922) and Journey to the
East (1932).
Hesse concentrated on writing poetry as a young man, but his first
successful book was a novel, Peter Camenzind (1904). The
income it brought permitted him to settle with his wife in rural
Switzerland and write full-time. By the start of World War I in
1914, Hesse had produced several more novels and had begun to write
the considerable number of book reviews and articles that made him
a strong influence on the literary culture of his time.
During the war, Hesse was actively involved in relief efforts.
Depression, criticism for his pacifist views, and a series of
personal crises—combined with what he referred to as the “war
psychosis” of his times—led Hesse to undergo psychoanalysis with J.
B. Lang, a student of Carl Jung. Out of these years
came Demian (1919), a novel whose main character is torn
between the orderliness of bourgeois existence and the turbulent
and enticing world of sensual experience. This dichotomy is
prominent in Hesse’s subsequent novels,
including Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927),
and Narcissus and Goldmund (1930). Hesse worked on his
magnum opus, The Glass Bead Game (1943), for twelve
years. This novel was specifically cited when he was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Hesse died at his home in
Switzerland in 1962.
Calling his life a series of “crises and new beginnings,” Hesse
clearly saw his writing as a direct reflection of his personal
development and his protagonists as representing stages in his own
evolution. In the 1950s, Hesse described the dominant theme of his
work: “From Camenzind to Steppenwolf and Josef Knecht [protagonist
of The Glass Bead Game], they can all be interpreted as a
defense (sometimes also as an SOS) of the personality, of the
individual self.”
Joachim Neugroschel (translator) has won three PEN
translation awards and the French-American translation prize. He
has also translated Thomas Mann's Death in
Venice and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, both for
Penguin Classics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Ralph Freedman (introducer), Professor Emeritus of
Comparative Literature at Princeton University, is acclaimed for
his biographies Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis,
and Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke.
By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
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