00:14Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
00:20Hermann Hesse
00:22The Nobel Prize in Literature 1946 was awarded to Hermann Hesse for his inspired writings,
00:29which, while growing in boldness and penetration,
00:33exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style.
00:40Hermann Hesse was born on June 2, 1877, in Kalf, Württemberg.
00:46His father worked for the publishing house directed by his maternal grandfather Hermann Gundert,
00:51a scholarly orientalist.
00:53Both his parents as well as his grandfather had seen service as missionaries.
00:58With the Basel mission in the East Indies.
01:02The atmosphere in which Hesse grew up was therefore pious,
01:06but the household was, nonetheless, an educated one and relatively urbane.
01:12In 1893, Hesse won a scholarship to the Protestant Theological Seminary at Mauld Braun.
01:19But he soon rebelled against the intellectual and clerical discipline there and ran away.
01:25This experience of light was, evidently, of decisive significance in his imaginative development,
01:31and it recurs in one form or another in almost all his major works.
01:37After some time at another high school and a short period as a machine shop apprentice,
01:42Hesse found employment in the book trade.
01:45He read widely German and foreign literature and began to write lyric poetry, sketches and stories.
01:52His first published works, Romantische Lieder 1899 and Einestunde Hintermitte Nacht 1899,
02:01are mannered tributes to the neo-Romantic conventions of the day, pseudo-exotic, melancholic and tinged with irony.
02:10During World War I, Hesse lived in neutral Switzerland, wrote denunciations of militarism and nationalism,
02:19and edited a journal for German war prisoners and internees.
02:24He became a permanent resident of Switzerland in 1919 and a citizen in 1923, settling in Montagnola.
02:34A deepening sense of personal crisis led Hesse to psychoanalysis with J.B. Lang, a disciple of Carl Jung.
02:42The influence of analysis appears in Demian 1919, an examination of the achievement of self-awareness by a troubled adolescent.
02:53This novel had a pervasive effect on a troubled Germany and made its author famous.
02:59Hesse's later work shows his interest in Jungian concepts of introversion and extroversion, the collective unconscious, idealism and symbols.
03:11Hesse also came to be preoccupied with what he saw as the duality of human nature.
03:17Der Steppenwolf, 1927, describes the conflict between bourgeois acceptance and spiritual self-realization in a middle-aged man.
03:28In Narzis und Goldmund, 1930, an intellectual ascetic who is content with established religious faith is contrasted with an artistic sensualist pursuing his own form of salvation.
03:43Hesse's last and longest novel, The Glass Bead Game, 1943, is set in the 23rd century.
03:56In it, Hesse again explores the dualism of the contemplative and the active life, this time through the figure of a supremely gifted intellectual.
04:06He subsequently published letters, essays and stories.
04:10After World War II, Hesse's popularity among German readers soared, though it had crashed by the 1950s.
04:18His appeal for self-realization and his celebration of Eastern mysticism transformed him into something of a cult figure to young people in the English-speaking world in the 1960s and 70s.
04:31And this vein of his work ensured an international audience for his work afterward.
05:01His work's been very well-known by his work has already been published by John
05:03I'm a journalist who has had a great boyhood on the American world and visiting the meadow in the palace of Australia.
05:08For those of you, I've been working on an international association for the past 10 years,
05:11He was a philosopher who is a scientist.
05:13He had to be a doctor who has been to reach out to the world of the past 10 years.
05:18He was a doctor who was a typhonic, he was a poet, one of the first even when he was a man of the past 10 years,
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