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

Adele's death, he felt deprived of his juvenile years, 'iiber die ich jetzt mit
niemandem mehr reden und Erinnerungen austauschen kann' ('Gedenkblatt fur
Adele' SW 12, 458). 20 Moreover, Hesse would often reluctantly part from those
personal effects with which he used to surround himself, since objects can resuscitate
segments of people's past (see 'Spaziergang im Zimmer' in KF, 254): 'und ich habe
meine Sachen gern, ich trenne mich nicht gleichgiiltig und unbewegt von ihnen, ich
bin ihnen treu und suche sie zu retten und sie mir lange zu erhalten' ('Kofferpacken'
in KF, 212). Hesse shared Adele's inclination to preserve and rescue things from time:
'Adele hatte, ebenso wie ich, in sich eine Neigung und einen Auftrag zum Bewahren'
('Gedenkblatt fur Adele', SW 12, 461). As Hesse himself maintains, this tendency is
fundamental to his writing:
soweit ich mich erinnern kann, habe ich als die Funktion des Dichters immer
vor allem das Erinnern gesehen, das Nichtvergessen, das Aufbewahren des
Verganglichen im Wort, das Heraufbeschwdren des Vergangenen durch
Anruf und liebevolle Schilderung. ('Epigraph' to KF, 5)
The power words have to evoke what is otherwise doomed to fade away lies at the
forefront of Hesse's concern as an artist. Hesse cherishes his memories, and memory
generally maintains a positive connotation throughout his works. However, the
urgency of forgetting surfaces in his correspondence and diary entries, as well as in
his works. His characters are sometimes confronted with the need to forget and break
the mould of their own identity (e.g. Veraguth's final choice to part from his wife and
the bourgeois lifestyle he has lived, in Rofihalde). 21 Hermann Lauscher, whose memory
retains his past faithfully, experiences that 'only what never ceases to hurt remains in
the memory' (Weinrich, 131). 22 War memories and the difficulty in dealing with them
intrude into the pages of Der Steppenwolf:
20 Although Hesse was particularly afraid of dying prematurely, he lived long enough to write numerous
memorial pages for relatives and friends who had passed away. On such occasions, he would search his memory
for a memorable aspect of the personality of the deceased, as in the case of his friend and singer Ilona Durigo:
'Von alien Erinnerungsbildern aber, die sich mir beim Denken an die Durigo aufdrSngen, ist das starkste und
schonste dieses' (Musik, 213).
21 The work of "memory" also involves a complex process of negotiation between remembering and forgetting,
between the destruction and creation of the self (King, 180).
22 'Mein [...] GedSchtnis war scharf und peinlich treu' (Musik, 121)
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