Knulp in His Luggage: “Journey to Nuremberg”
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? In Hesse, Gunnar Decker provides a deftly crafted biography of Hermann Hesse, whose critique of consumer culture continues to inspire millions of readers. Here is an excerpt on the travel essay “Journey to Nuremberg”.
The travel essay “Journey to Nuremberg” is what we might call the intermediate link between A Guest at the Spa and Steppenwolf. A provisional return to Germany from the end of September to the middle of November 1925, and also a trip to revisit the places of his childhood and youth. On November 16, Hesse wrote about Nuremberg: “The old city with its medieval and Gothic buildings has been entirely driven to the wall by industry and uncommonly loud traffic noise, and can no longer breathe. I have never seen so clearly that we have produced nothing to compare with these works of the old culture and that the only thing left for us to do is to completely destroy them with our utterly soulless technology.”
Hesse knew that this journey was special before he even set off on it: he could savor in it the excitement he had once felt at being on the move and his yearning for faraway places, and could conjure up the eroticism of travel. Although he would subsequently return to Germany on several occasions, this trip was an unusual journey into a kind of retrospection that the spa guest, whom he had long since become, would carry on into Steppenwolf. Yet it was also part of Hesse’s continuing focus on his own first steps, which had begun with Demian and A Child’s Soul. Hesse found himself confronted by the alarming prospect of turning fifty, beyond which he could not imagine a continued existence, and this only strengthened the tone of taking stock and summing-up in his writings. What had become of his boyhood friends in the interim? And what would the places he had known as a child now look like? There are long periods in life when one is preoccupied with looking forward, discovering one’s own identity and what one is capable of — without feeling the constant need for reassurance in one’s own origins. But there then comes a time when precisely that becomes important: namely, looking back, meeting people whom one once knew — and whom one has not seen for many decades. Hesse was now at that point in his life where he was starting to look backward more than forward.
It was only fitting that Hesse should have carried the third tale from the Knulp trilogy (Das Ende) with him in his bag as reading matter. Since he had been living in Ticino and felt, in his new chosen home, that he was also in the foreign country of his choice — in other words, since he had moved from living north of the Alps to their southern slopes — he had lost that urge which had regularly driven him south prior to the First World War. Wandering had been his final testament to this yearning while also being a melancholy celebration of his leave-taking from it.
He had agreed to travel to southern Germany and see Swabia again — but he embarked on his journey with very mixed feelings. Even so, he did not cancel, despite entertaining this as a possibility right up the very last moment. He knew that he had changed since the First World War, since he had become a hate-figure for German nationalists. But he had also simply grown older, more awkward, and more comfortable — and at any rate certainly more dedicated to solitude.
And so we can already catch a glimpse here of the notorious Steppenwolf, the avowed outsider, embarking on a journey into the past.
There was something within him that proved greater than all his abhorrence of all the inconveniences of travel. He himself could not put his finger on what that something was — and sensed that, in order to find out, he would have to go to Germany. Hesse, who like his three sons was now a Swiss citizen, was deeply preoccupied with the theme of the inscrutability of the German character; the intensity of his treatment of this subject was matched possibly only by Thomas Mann. Yet his initial concern was with the journey’s daily practicalities that he would have to shoulder if he wanted to get to its magic: “Much as I liked the idea of seeing an old friend who would be delighted by my visit, I am nonetheless a comfort-loving person who abhors journeys and crowds, for whom the idea of a long trip on small, remote country roads held little attraction. No, it was not friendship or even polite- ness that caused me to make that promise, there was more to it than just that; behind the place-name ‘Blaubeuren’ there lurked a charm and a mystery, and a welter of reminiscences, memories, and enticements.”
In Blaubeuren, according to Hesse, there was a monastery school like the one he had attended in Maulbronn, plus it was the setting of Eduard Mörike’s legendary tale about the spring called the Blautopf. It was also the heartland of the Swabian Pietism that made him what he was, and was steeped in that favor of romanticism, whose magic he now wanted to recapture — even though inwardly he was now very distant from it.
Hesse crossed the border into Germany in order to make his peace with those places he had once quit in rebellious mood. He wanted to en- counter the landscapes, towns, and people of old. He had put off this trip for a long time, and now he felt compelled to go. And to the best of his ability he steeled himself against the disappointment that he fully expected to feel.
What resulted was an account of his Nuremberg journey, the charm and intellectual weight of which has been persistently misjudged right up to the present day. Yet even at the time, the critic Hans Sahl identified “a heroic form of humor” in this work, which he called the “humor of the suffering man.” Without this apposite characterization, which Siegfried Unseld also quoted in an essay that recognized the high literary status of this travel report, Hesse’s Steppenwolf would not be comprehensible as a testimony to extreme despair with an ultimate homage to “humor as a survival mechanism.”
This report of his journey affords us a glimpse into the workshop of the author Hermann Hesse, in addition to being an acknowledgment of his neuroses and his physical handicaps (notably his constantly painful eyes!), which he nevertheless de ed in order to ultimately produce a body of work so extensive that many people have quite justifiably asked how a single individual could possibly have achieved such a workload. Hesse’s answer to this would have been: by living life at his own rhythm and by defending the idleness that was so vital to his ability to write with all the militancy that he could muster. Accordingly, he put pen to paper to describe his trip — and his feeling of being provoked by a spirit of the age that was solely geared to utilitarianism is plain for all to see:
As for myself, I believe that no decent and hardworking person would shake hands with me if he knew how little value I place on time, and how I can squander days and weeks, even whole months, and the kind of nonsense I waste my life with. No employer, no office, no rules prescribe when I must get up in the morning or when I am to go to bed at night, no deadlines are set for my work, and it makes not the slightest difference whether I take an afternoon or a quarter of a year to write a poem of three stanzas.
After this introduction, his announcement of what, in spite of this — or precisely because of it — he still has time for, comes as something of a surprise: “To be sure, I have time to do nothing, but I have no time for trips, or being sociable, or fishing or other pleasant things — no, I must always be close to my workroom, alone, undisturbed, and ready at any moment to get down to work if I need to.” So, in the interim, Hesse had also added travel to the list of major disruptions to the idleness he deemed necessary for achieving a high rate of work productivity, and whose tranquility was not to be violated by anybody or anything. Particularly not by traveling around doing book readings!
