Hesse
The Wanderer and His Shadow
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
A deftly crafted biography of the author of Siddhartha, whose critique of consumer culture continues to inspire millions of readers.
Against the horrors of Nazi dictatorship and widespread disillusionment with the forces of mass culture and consumerism, Hermann Hesse’s stories inspired nonconformity and a yearning for universal values. Few today would doubt Hesse’s artistry or his importance to millions of devoted readers. But just who was the author of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian?
Gunnar Decker weaves together previously unavailable sources to offer a unique interpretation of the life and work of Hermann Hesse. Drawing on recently discovered correspondence between Hesse and his psychoanalyst Josef Lang, Decker shows how Hesse reversed the traditional roles of therapist and client, and rethinks the relationship between Hesse’s novels and Jungian psychoanalysis. He also explores Hesse’s correspondence with Stefan Zweig—recently unearthed—to find the source of Hesse’s profound sense of alienation from his contemporaries.
Decker’s biography brings to life this icon of spiritual searching and disenchantment who galvanized the counterculture in the 1960s and feels newly relevant today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Decker (Francis von Assisi) offers what will likely be the definitive biography of German author Hermann Hesse (1877 1962). Keen to trace the autobiographical elements in Hesse's writings, Decker gives a nuanced study of his subject as, variously, a youth rebelling against his parents' devoutly religious beliefs to devote himself to art; an intellectual skeptical of the rhetoric driving two world wars; and a choleric expatriate who "spent most of his life living in Switzerland," despised fame (winning the Nobel Prize, Hesse lamented, only made "my life four times more onerous than previously"), and could barely tolerate people. Decker also intertwines observations on Hesse's unique spiritual convictions a pantheism drawn from Goethe, an interest in Eastern philosophy expressed most clearly in Siddhartha, and a late Romantic humanism with his own headily philosophical reflections on literature and art (e.g., "It is the mythical dimensions of reality, the truth of the legend, that literature lays bare"). In Hesse's private life, he explores Hesse's pain over being deprived of affection from his mother, who scorned his work as sinful, and his deeply contradictory nature, which combined a longing for admiration with an aversion to intimacy. Decker restores depth and context to an author much maligned in his own time and much misinterpreted by later eras.
