Can Hermann Hesse Be Considered A "Prophet."

by Rapunzel 19 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Rapunzel

  I just finished reading Hesse's Steppenwolf; and as anyone who has read it can tell you, it is a truly vertiginous book. It makes the reader dizzy for several reasons, including the fact that it is full of profound psychological, aesthetic, and cultural insights. It is also dizzying due to its continually shifting narrative perspective. In my opinion, Steppenwolf is first and foremost a psychological study or treatise; it is also primarily - if not totally - autobiographical. The protagonist [and also the myriad antagonists], who goes by the name "Harry Haller"in the novel, represents Hesse himself. The novel is chock full of doppelgangers and doublings. Hesse uses mirrors as a doubling device to an extent that I had never read previously.

  But in this post, I want to mention three very eerie passages which struck me as being prophetic in that they seem to foretell Auschwitz and the other extermination camps that the Nazis would construct.

  It is important to point out that Steppenwolf was first published in the year 1927, in the city of Berlin. This is right in the center of the interbellum [the interwar period] of 1918-1939. In other words, Steppenwolf was published a full decade before the formal outbreak of hostilites in Europe that marked the beginning of World War Two.

  In his criticism of the abusive article in the "reactionary jingo" newspapers of his district, the character Harry Haller states: "...the end and aim of it all is to have the war over again, the next war that draws neared and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last [...] Nobody wants to avoid the next war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the next holocaust if this be the cost." [p. 117, in the English "Picador" edition].

  And on page 159, Haller proclaims: "This modern man has energy and ability. He is healthy, cool and strenuous - a splendid type, and in the next war he will be a miracle of efficiiency."

  A few pages later (page 162) Haller is commenting on a movie he has just seen that depicts Moses parting the Red Sea, allowing the Jews to cross, while drowning the Egyptians who are in pursuit. Haller remarks: "My God, rather than come to such a pass, it would have been better for the Jews and everyone else, let alone the Egyptians, to have perished in those days and forthwith of a violent and becoming death instead of this dismal pretence of dying by inches that we go in for today."

  I want to point out that the emphasis (the italics and boldface) in the preceding quotes are mine, not Hesse's. The passage that I find especially eerie is the one about modern man becoming a "miracle of efficiency." There had been mass-slaughters, and even genocides, prior to the Nazi era. What distinguishes the Nazi's genocide is precisely the systematic efficiency with which they perpetrated it. It was the Nazis who took genocide, and "bureaucratized" it.
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  hamilcarr

  Interesting thoughts! I perfectly agree that The Steppenwolf is a riveting read. It has always struck me that the imminence of a universal war is a recurrent motif in some of the great literary works of the 1920s (amongst others TS Eliot). "Efficient bureaucratic cruelty" is also a topic in Franz Kafka's novels. Many other intellectuals thought that the leading role of the Occident (das Abendland) was shortly to end, awaiting a new philosophy from the East. Hesse is one of these "Morgenlanders" who denounced Judeo-Christian theologies by providing ignorant European readers with the notion of a fragmented human being. So, Hesse was a prophet too in heralding postmodernism.

  hamilcaRR
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  Rapunzel

  Thanks for your response, hamilcarr; I appreciate it. Your mentioning T.S. Eliot reminds me of when I taught his "Wasteland" to my students. I like all of his poetry; I found his series - "The Hollow Men" - to be equally impressive. Did you ever see the film, Apocalypse Now? In it, the character of Kurtz reads a selection from "The Hollow Men." Very moving. T.S. Eliot certainly knew how to address the spiritual malaise of Western culture. Eliot was a member of that "blasted" generation.

  I also taught Kafka's The Metamorphosis. In your post, were you thinking of The Trial, or of The Castle?

  I am in total agreement with your observation that Hesse was on the vanguard of postmodernism. In Steppenwolf, Hesse refers to Nietzsche, who is generally considered to be a precursor to postmodernism. When I was typing the post above, I was thinking about this fact. Because I wanted to "keep it simple," I omitted the following quote from Steppenwolf (pp. 57-8 in the "Picador" edition): "For there is not a single human being...not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles...but between thousands and thousands [...] Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lens of delusive formulas and artless simplifications - and most of all himself."

  If I'm reading this decidedly difficult sentence correctly, Hesse is stating that the conception that a man has of himself is mediated - is refracted, and thus distorted - through the lens of himself; all people see everything (including themselves) through a lens which, in its very nature of being a lens, distorts their perception. And this lens is themselves.

  Hesse continues: "For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grieviously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again." Furthermore, Hesse claims that if ever [as all genius must] "they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to the aid, and establishes schizomania and protects humanity from hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate individuals."

  For Hesse, "every ego, far from being a unity is a maniflod world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities."

  In my opinion, this sounds very much like postmodern theory. However, I have to admit to having a problem with the term, postmodernism, or rather, its etymology. This word is derived from combining the Latin prefix post - which means "after" - with the Latin word modus, which I believe means "now," or "the present moment." So, quite literally, the term means "that which is after now [or the present moment]." It's quite a handy phrase, but it's like a person saying - "I am asleep." Of course, a person could say this, but what does it mean? Perhaps, postmodernism has become a catch-all expression a tout faire.

  As Umberto Eco claims, the word should be understood as referring to a viewpoint or mindset. After all, there have been people who claimed that Euripides can be thought of as "postmodern"
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  SirNose586

  I didn't know he wrote Steppenwolf. I can remember being forced to read Siddhartha and consequently having a distaste for Hesse.
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  Narkissos

  I hesitated to comment because (1) I haven't got the English translation and (2) this particular work is tied in with perhaps the major turning point in my life, which makes it difficult for me to discuss it "objectively" (I read it while I was in Bethel, twice within a few weeks, with the breathtaking sensation that it had found me exactly where I was; and looking back I can see it was instrumental in breaking a certain "circle" where I had been trapping myself.)

  "Prediction" is only a side aspect of "prophecy" -- and the "prophet," whether he foretells the future or not, is primarily the one who speaks what wants (in the double sense of "desires" and "lacks") to be spoken. In a sense it's always about the future even though not necessarily about definite and remarkable events like WWII. What major thinkers from the pre-Socratics to the 20th century are dealing with will always be "future" to the "historical man". Which brings us back, in an unexpected way, to the etymological paradox of "post-modernism".

  Btw, practically all the so-called "post-modernist" thinkers have been reluctant to the concept of post-modernism... I wonder if the (equally aporetic) notion of "post-humanism" (in the sense of Foucault's "end/death of man") might be slightly better...
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  hamilcarr

  Hi Rapunzel,

  Thanks for your comments. I was thinking about the last part of Eliot's Waste Land in which he predicts an impending occidental disaster:

  What is that sound high in the air / Murmur of maternal lamentation / Who are those hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth / Ringed by the flat horizon only / What is the city over the mountains / Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal

  The ending words show that the only solution is to be found in the East:

  Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih

  In his own notes, Eliot explains that this is the formal ending to an Upanishad and can be freely translated as 'the peace which passeth understanding' (another thread proposal? )

  I also taught Kafka's The Metamorphosis. In your post, were you thinking of The Trial, or of The Castle ?

  I was thinking of The Trial in particular, but you're perfecly right that this is a dominant theme in The Metamorphosis as well.

  Narkissos, What about the term post-structuralism?
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  Caedes

  I have never thought about that, although I did enjoy steppenwolf. I preferred Demian, that had a profound impact on me when I left home and was finally free of the witness thing.
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  hamilcarr

  I have never thought about that, although I did enjoy steppenwolf. I preferred Demian, that had a profound impact on me when I left home and was finally free of the witness thing.

  Indeed, I think Demian is definitely a must-read for any born-in JW. Passages like these are so obvious:

  I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely the artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil.

  Der Vogel kämpft sich aus dem Ei. Das Ei ist die Welt. Wer geboren werden will, muss eine Welt zerstören. Der Vogel fliegt zu Gott. Der Gott heisst Abraxas."
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  Narkissos

  What about the term post-structuralism?

  It's registered already.

  And I was thinking of something comparable in scope to "post-modernism" (as "modernity" and "humanism," in spite of the semantic evolution of both terms/notions, can be construed as roughly coextensive in time). But maybe it is precisely too broad a scope.
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  Rapunzel

  hamilcarrr - You mention the term post-structuralism [as opposed to "postmodernism"?]. I'm hardly an expert on the matter, and perhaps there are those here who disagree, but I see post-structuralism as inclosed in - subsumed by - postmodernism. In other words, postmodernism is the broader of the two terms; it includes post-structuralism within its broader scope. Given this fact, there is indeed an overlap in the meanings of the two words.

  As I see it, post-structuralism refers primarily [but by no means exclusively] to the domain of linguistics. Post-structuralism is a response to - and to some extent, a reaction against - structuralism, also called "descriptive linguistics," a field of study defined largely by Ferdinamd de Saussure. Other linguists who greatly contributed to the theory of strucuralism are Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin. And just as post-structuralism can be applied to fields of knowledge and "sciences" other than linguistics, so can the term structuralism. For example, the French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, is often labeled a "structuralist" anthropologist. Levi-Strauss was a renowned lecurer at the University of Paris. In addition to many other works, he wrote The Raw and the Cooked.

  Notice how, in the title of his famous anthropological study, Levi-Strauss establishes a binary opposition. And while simplifications pose a conceptual "trap" and "snare" [especially if they are gross and facile], what I just said may have some value because structuralist linguists and philosophers did concern themselves with indentifying and establishing binary oppositions, either within the text (if they were linguists) or within the domain under study.

  In regard to post-structuralism, it could be said that post-structuralist thinkers go one step farther than structuralists. Post-structuralists do indeed establish binary oppostions, but they then attempt to "transcend" these oppositions by "subverting" them. Many post-structuralist thinkers are French: Derrida; Lacan; Foucault: and Kristeva come to my mind.

  A related field of study is that of semiotics - the study of "signs." The grand doyen of semiotics is Umberto Eco who is, in my opinion, one of the world's greatet living "polymaths." Speaking only for myself, it is - in general - not a pleasure for me to read Derrida or Lacan. I find their writing decidedly not "reader friendly;" using their own terminology, I find that they produce writing which is "scriptible" and not "lisible." However, it is a pleasure to read Umberto Eco.