Marriage engagement

Author: Hermann Hesse
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: Most of Hesse's early short stories are set in his birthplace, Calw, much like Keller wrote about the people of Seldwyla, Joyce about the people of Dublin, Hesse wrote about the people he called "the little world" of Calw, or "Gelbersdorfers" in the book. This collection includes six works depicting the inhabitants of this microcosm, such as The Engagement, Hans Dielram's Apprenticeship, and Emil Kolb. German scholar Max Heiman-Nasse once precisely summarized such novels: "The pre-war German small-town atmosphere, its chaos and disorder, its not entirely harmless nature, are depicted with both delicate and rigorous realism. It truly was the abundant zoo of God in those days... People, each in their own way, live out their unchangeable, unique destinies here in a seemingly uneventful daily life. It can coexist with the ordinary happiness that ends in an engagement, just as it can with being ultimately imprisoned, or with the loss of inner balance, even despair over the meaning of existence. Because in this small world, people's demands for heaven and hell are no less intense or profound than their demands for the peaks and pools in their own region. Tragedy and comedy in life always flow silently and subtly, sparkling with various lights, revealing the meaning, dignity, and reality of eternal existence. The question is whether there is a sincere writer who can track them down and understand how to shape them." The other part of the Calw stories consists of autobiographical novels or essays, including seven works such as Childhood Memories, Latin School Student, The Big Butterfly, and The Big Whirlwind, perhaps even Nihilism, whose main plot takes place in Munich. All are Hesse's recollections of his childhood, student days, and apprenticeship or boyhood life, seemingly mundane yet deeply moving, as his contemporary writer Tuco said: "Few can write like Hesse. He can not only depict a summer evening and a refreshing sea bath, but also the fatigue and relaxation after physical exertion—perhaps not an easy feat. Yet, he can make our hearts feel hot, cool, and fatigued as well." The protagonists in these works always oscillate between natural instincts and traditional behavioral norms. Hesse once explained his fondness for writing about childhood memories: "Among all the things one encounters, only the feelings of one's youth are completely fresh and clear, and they can last until the age of thirteen, fourteen, yet be remembered for a lifetime." From these works, we can see the psychological depiction of adolescents wavering between freedom and restraint, which foreshadows the development of the "bipolarity" theme in many of Hesse's later important works, especially in The Glass Bead Game. The rest of the early works in this collection vary in content, showcasing the author's diverse talents. The Wolf recounts a true story that happened in the Uri Alps of Switzerland in 1900, where a lone wolf was chased and killed by farmers. The beauty and misfortune of this solitary beast inspired aesthetic thoughts among fellow loners. The issue raised by The Wolf later became the theme of Hesse's mid-career masterpiece The Waste Land Wolf, and also the theme of The Waste Land Wolf Legends in this collection. The Transformation of Casanova and Robert Agion are two novels rich in legend, drawing on Italian and Indian materials that Hesse read extensively but was not familiar with, yet they are written with the same delicacy and vividness as Literary Evening, equally showcasing Hesse's playful yet harmless irony and humor. The City is an allegorical essay that reveals the author's critical attitude toward the cracks in modern civilization. It elaborates on Hesse's cosmology, which holds that human life should "be integrated into the order of rhythm between humanity and nature, and the entire universe." The European and Childhood were written during World War I, when Hesse was still living in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, and engaged in prisoner-of-war relief work. The European expresses the author's desire to explore the commonalities among different ethnic groups in the world through metaphors: although humans exist in various races, languages, and cultures, their material and spiritual needs are the same; all spiritual efforts are internally consistent, and the goals of all spiritual workers are the same. The theme of The European later evolved and developed into Hesse's important masterpiece Siddhartha several years later. Childhood returns to Calw life, telling the story of an eleven-year-old boy who steals and lies, causing him immense inner torment, and once again plays the mournful melody of the conflict between desire and reason. The difference from previous works is the tender affection for his recently deceased father. Returning to peacetime after wartime work in years, Hesse wrote a large number of works at an astonishing speed. Klein and Wagner and Klingsohr's Last Summer were both completed in the same summer, both having a virtual spiritual self-autobiographical nature, and both used the method of complementing each other in positive and negative ways or between friends to portray the division of the same personality and the conflict between the person and the environment. Klein and Wagner portrays a dualistic character image: one is the practical individualistic self, and the other is the transcendent humanistic self. Klein's ordinary daily life is always accompanied by Wagner's spiritual level of life. Klein prefers to live a life of compromise, while Wagner tends toward physical extinction. The dualistic Klein is the prototype of Halle in The Waste Land. Klingsohr's Last Summer describes this bipolar phenomenon through the image of a pair of friends. Some German critics believe that the painter Klingsohr is modeled after Van Gogh, while his friend the poet Hermann is the author's ironic self-portrait. The genius painter Klingsohr is willing to approach the brink of soul fragmentation and madness for the sake of art, rather than living in a flat realm without peaks or depths, while the poet Hermann is content with the ordinary secular reality. These two works, along with Childhood, were later included in Hesse's self-selected collection titled The Path to the Inner Self. The preface mentions how he drew on and applied ancient Chinese philosophical wisdom to transform it into Western thought. The appearance of Chinese thought in Klein and Wagner and the mention of Li Bai and Du Fu in Klingsohr's Last Summer are therefore not accidental. The last three works in this collection, Strange Cities in the South and The Waste Land Wolf Legends, were written during the Weimar Republic period, when people were enthusiastic about discussing the German spirit before Hitler came to power. Strange Cities in the South and The City share the same theme, being sister pieces that describe the cracks in modern civilization. Hesse criticized the uniformity of the modern city model as early as the 1920s, and his keen insight is astonishing. The Waste Land Wolf Legends were written a year after the publication of The Waste Land, narrating the difficult coexistence between the half-man, half-wolf Halle and the real world. On one hand, it reveals the suppression of human individuality and creativity by objective reality; on the other hand, it shows resigned self-mockery. Here applies a passage by French writer Jean-Paul Sartre when he evaluated The Path to the Inner Self: "Hesse possesses all the rarest artistic qualities I believe in: he so skillfully combines beauty and depth, artistic rules and creativity. He has the ability to mock himself, he is not sharp or sarcastic, but maintains a joyful irony at a distance." The Interrupted Lesson is the only work in this collection written after the 1930s, during Hesse's later reclusive life. It is a childhood memory of a seventy-one-year-old man. At the beginning of the story, the joy of leaving the dull classroom on the teacher's orders, and at the end, the doubt and self-blame toward the teacher's orders—various childhood feelings remain unchanged by the long passage of time, and the author's natural talent is vividly portrayed.