So wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Germany’s William Shakespeare, and Hesse’s first literary idol. A loathing of institutions, as well as a profound emotional turbulence, would stay with Hesse throughout his life. He kept running away from school and began threatening to find a revolver and shoot himself. His teachers, judging him to be ‘full of febrile thoughts and excessive emotions’, were severe. His mother deemed his early poems ‘poison’ because, she felt, they displayed an interest in the sinful world of man, rather than God. His father published books with titles such as The Heathens and Us. His family were devout Pietists, devoted to the study of the Bible and the Christian life. Hermann Karl Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, a pretty town on the edge of Germany’s Black Forest. But managing it wisely can be a challenge, and Hesse, in his life and work, constitutes a study in the double-edged sword of dwelling on one’s inner worlds. Many of us are familiar with this desire it animates almost every young person, in one way or another.

Hesse’s work was attuned to a youth culture animated by an amorphous desire for a breakthrough in consciousness precisely because such a desire gripped him throughout his entire life. Hesse went on to become the bestselling German author of the 20th century, and sits below only the Brothers Grimm and Karl Marx as the most translated German writer of recent decades. But by 1968, as Der Spiegel observed, the hippies had pulled this fading writer ‘out of the doldrums’. But the 1960s embrace of Hesse ranks with the weirdest of them all. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) was originally a flop. Franz Kafka died in 1924 believing that his manuscripts would be burnt. But the novels he left behind, Leary declared in The Psychedelic Review, were a ‘priceless manual’ for navigating the acid trip. Hesse had died a year earlier, at the age of 85. In 1963, Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD, anointed a German author, Hermann Hesse, the ‘poet of the interior journey’.

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