“Both Mann and Hesse were charged with … energy. Mann, the resident of cities (particularly his beloved Munich) poured his uncertainty and his corrosive insights into his great first novel, Buddenbrooks, which was published in 1901 and sold an astonishing one million copies. The bourgeois writer had exposed most of the fault lines in bourgeois society, not only in Germany, but in most of Europe. At twenty-six, he was famous, proclaimed by many as a coming master of the literary twentieth century…., Hesse had solidified his literary reputation with Siddharta and Steppenwolf. One of their most attentive readers was Thomas Mann. . .. the best of the letters present us with two fundamentally decent, sophisticated men grieving for the ruined world. In the 1930s and 1940s, they rail against the stupidity of war and the cowardice of diplomats, against the social savagery of the Nazis, against the blind forces of abstraction and nationalism. They brood about the fate of Germany and of Europe after the last shots have been fired. They have lived through a time of extraordinary horror and yet they have not surrendered to despair or nihilism. Reading the letters, I feel like some privileged guest in a special room, sitting off to the side somewhere, listening while these men talk. A fire burns in a fireplace. Through the windows I can see snow falling against a dark sky. We are in the country of exile. Neither man has given up hope. Art will prevail, they insist. Civilization will prevail. Music will drive off the explosive rumble of artillery. Life will defeat death. Listen to them: they are speaking truth. Nothing else matters. “ From the Introduction by Pete Hamill “For all differences between north and south, between urban and rural, between epic narrator and lyric confessor, between sophisticated cosmopolite and briskly recluse, Hesse and Mann shared a common experience that provided the basis for their eventual feeling of colleagueship. Reduced to its simplest terms, this experience was based on the insight that their common bourgeois heritage….was exhausted…. According to their diagnosis, it was an unthinking alliance to outmoded and sterile bourgeois ideals that enable the “law and order” mentality of the fascist so easily to take over in Europe. In opposition to that mentality ..Hesse and Mann proclaimed their faith in a humanism predicated upon belief in the integrity of the individual” From the Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski

The Hesse-Mann Letters The Correspondence of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann 1910-1955

History

thomas-mann

Hermann, Hesse

Military

Harper

Narziss and Goldmund

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Penguin Classic

Also published as Death and the Lover, this new edition features a foreword from the musician and artist Graham Coxon Narcissus is a teacher at Mariabronn, a monastery in medieval Germany, and Goldmund his favorite pupil. While Narcissus remains detached from the world in prayer and meditation, Goldmund runs away from the monastery in pursuit of love. Thereafter he lives a picaresque wanderer’s life, his amatory adventures resulting in pain as well as ecstasy. His eventual reunion with Narcissus brings into focus the diversity between artist and thinker, Dionysian and Apollonian.

Narcissus and Goldmund

Penguin Books Ltd; New Ed Edition

General FictionLarge Print EditionSteppenwolf is the profoundly memorable and affecting story of Harry Heller which embodies one of Hesses most personally felt themes  the wrenching conflict between the needs of the flesh and of the spirit. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, Hermann Hesse commands a prominent place in the ranks of modern literatures masters.

Steppenwolf (Twentieth Century Classics)

Classics

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The Prodigy, originally dating from 1905, is Hermann Hesses's bitter indictment of conventional education. It is the story of Hans Giebenrath, the brilliant young son of provincial bourgeouis in southern Germany who becomes the first boy from his town to pass into a prestigious Protestant theological college. His spirit, however, is systematically broken by his parents and teachers; over anxious about his success, they forget to consider his health and happiness. Subsiding into a fatal apathy, he is taken home for medical reasons. Here he falls in love, becomes an engineer's apprentice, learns to drink alcohol and eventually dies by drowning. Out of his attitude to the treatment that he perceived was common within the German schooling system at the turn of the century, Hesse developed his own deeply personal views on the value of Eastern education in developing the self.

The Prodigy

Penguin Classics

Peter Camenzind A Novel

Biographies & Memoirs

Narcissus & Goldmund

Literary

Few American readers seem to be aware that Hermann Hesse, author of the epic novels Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, among many others, also wrote poetry, the best of which the poet James Wright has translated and included in this book. This is a special volume―filled with short, direct poems about love, death, loneliness, the seasons―that is imbued with some of the imagery and feeling of Hesse's novels but that has a clarity and resonance all its own, a sense of longing for love and for home that is both deceptively simple and deeply moving.

Poems; selected and translated from the German by James Wright (Cape editions, 46)

Poetry

CAPE.

This is the first British edition of Herman Hesse's prose, poetry and watercolour sketches.

Wandering: Notes and Sketches

James Wright [tr.]

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

Reflections

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

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