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

Chapter 6 draws to a close precisely on this aspect of Hesse's oeuvre, which
acknowledges the blurred boundaries between good and evil without abdicating
responsibility or renouncing a moral choice. As opposed to Thomas Mann and other
German intellectuals who were intoxicated by the belligerent frenzy sparked at the
outbreak of World War I, Hesse voiced his opposition to the conflict with
determination, and it is probably in this respect, as Magris suggests, that Hesse's
stature and modernity rests:
Hesse's entire life stands as an important moral example; it is the exemplary
life of a man whose discernment allowed him to resist the lures of the
irrational. [...] While much inferior to Mann on a poetic level, Hesse was able
to see deeper than Mann did, and right from the start, into both the European
crisis and the shipwreck of reason. 9 (Magris 1977, XVIII and XIX, my
translation)
This, we acknowledge, is one of the most compelling elements of Hesse's legacy and
one of his most convincing claims to eternity.
9 Mann retrospectively, and with irony, captures the feelings of that historical moment in the fiction ofDoktor
Faustus: 'O blOde Ode! O Hundedasein, wenn man nichts machen kann! Gabes doch nur Krieg da drauBen,
damit was los war!' (1947, 237).
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