HERMANN HESSE AND THE DIALECTICS OF TIME Salvatore C. P. ...

efuge from clashes with everyday reality. Hesse's and his characters' childhoods
thus appear as 'crystallised' legends shaped by memory. Hesse was however aware
of this process of idealisation and distortion, which he lucidly unmasks in Der
Steppenwolfby self-quotation:
«O selig, ein Kind noch zu sein!» Der sympathische, aber sentimentale Mann,
der das Lied vom seligen Kinde singt, mochte ebenfalls zur Natur, zur
Unschuld, zu den Anfangen zuriick und hat ganz vergessen, dafi die Kinder
keineswegs selig sind, dafi sie vieler Konflikte, dafi sie vieler
Zwiespaltigkeiten, dafi sie aller Leiden fahig sind. 16 (SW 4, 65)
4.4 The need to remember and forget: Memory and morality
In the opening of this chapter, we briefly hinted at the 'memory crisis' marking the
end of the nineteenth century. Whitehead contends that major authors of the time
such as Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson and Proust are all 'intensely concerned with a
memory that has become somehow pathological, so that it seems that there is too
much memory and that it threatens to overwhelm the present' (7-8). Weinrich,
commenting on Nietzsche's firm opposition to historicism, argues that
history [...] becomes more and more complex and lies like a burdensome
mass on the historically educated person's memory until the sheer weight of
remembrance causes him to lose the elementary ability to live and act. (127)
The dialectical opposition of remembering and forgetting receives a great deal of
attention not only at the end of the nineteenth century but also during and after the
two World Wars. 17 With their escalation of violence, death, and destruction, these
large-scale conflicts transform memory into an extremely poignant matter.
Individuals as well as nations are confronted with the urgent need to remember (e.g.
commemorate the victims and punish the perpetrators of crimes) and with the
16 Significantly, he cites the same line he used to glorify childhood in 'Kindheit des Zauberers'.
17 Whitehead underlines the inextricability of remembering and forgetting and their 'salutary' interplay
underlining that '[fjorgetting is an active agent in the formation of memories, and it is because memory and
oblivion stand together, are entirely "complicit" with one another, that both are necessary to enable life' (121).
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