Man of mystery and mysticism

Nobody has ever quite known what to do with the German-language novelist Hermann Hesse. Born in 1877 and living until 1962, he rather deliberately refused to experience most of the traumatic events of his culture.

His tiny home town was Calw, in the Black Forest, and he lived mostly in backwaters, and latterly for decades in Switzerland. He only visited Berlin once, and hated it. His work strenuously avoided making any comment on the larger events of the time, insisting on a kind of neutrality. Some readers took him for a mystic Nazi; others for an enemy of German culture; others still for a communist. He was a substantial bestseller in his lifetime, though many more elegant writers, such as the Austrian Robert Musil, thought him simply terrible. After his death, his fame spread beyond the German-speaking world, and the LSD guru Timothy Leary introduced him to America as the author of Steppenwolf, an anticipation of the psychedelic experience and advocate of dropping out.