The Engaged Outsider: Hermann Hesse's Spiritual Revolution

Unlike his contemporary Thomas Mann, German-Swiss Nobel-prize winning author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) lived a life of retreat and self-imposed isolation. As a tireless communicator with the outside world he wrote an estimated 60,000 letters. This public engagement aimed to strengthen the life of the spirit in an age of social disintegration and political turmoil that shook the first part of the twentieth century. Hesse’s symbols for new beginning were internal states of spiritual and psychological struggles but also performative play and ritual. In two of his most important novels Hesse’s characters played out the inner struggle of spiritual life in the performative playful theatres and games. This paper explores the content and the spiritual meaning of the ‘magical theatre’, the key to his novel Steppenwolf and the meaning of play and ritual in the novel Glass Bead Game, his chef-d’oeuvre. It ends on some thoughts about how Hesse’s anti-intellectualism can contribute to founding a new political spirituality.