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

ecalled in 'Die Novembernacht', a section of Hermann Lauscher (see Mileck 1961,
171). The seminary of Maulbronn, a place of great significance for Hesse, appears in
various guises in his novels.44 Relatives, friends, and people Hesse admired are
occasionally referred to in coded form. In Das Glasperlenspiel, Hesse's nephew Karl
Isenberg is disguised behind the latinized Carlo Ferromonte. The character of
Magister Ludi, Thomas von der Trave, is an admiring reference to Thomas Mann,
who was born in Llibeck crossed by the river Trave and, as I note in my
Introduction (note 16), the name of the historian Jacob Burckhardt, whom Hesse
admired greatly, is transliterated as Pater Jakobus. As Mileck observes, '[the]
disfiguring of actual names has always been a favorite disguise for Hesse[, it
constitutes] a capricious fusion of fact and fancy' (1961,168). 45
In his biography of 1979 Freedman suggests that the camouflage of names and
other autobiographical references are a crucial element of Hesse's work, which, taken
as a whole, amounts to a fictional history of the writer's life:
Reshaping personal feelings and encounters into artefacts is, of course, the
task and craft of artists. But in Hesse, far more than in most modern writers,
this process can be illuminated in quite an extraordinary and incomparable
way [...] In fact, what he did do was to construct in his published and
unpublished writings a single 'creative autobiography'.46 (1979, 4)
Critics generally point in the same direction and contribute to the identification of
further autobiographical references. However, opinions are in some cases strikingly
divergent (see below in this section). Moreover, while some-especially early critics,
like Mileck, are very confident about the imprint of Hesse's biography on his fiction:
44 'The monastery of Mariafels harks back to the monastery of Mariabronn in Narzifi und Goldmund (1930),
which, in turn, was a playful disguise for Maulbronn, the seminary Hesse attended briefly in the early nineties.
[...] When Knecht arrives in Escholz, he is assigned to Haus Hellas, the same House to which Hans Giebenrath
of Unterm Rad( 1905-1906) is assigned, and the very House in which Hesse lived while at Maulbronn' (Mileck
1961, 177-78).
45 The scholar also observes the evolution and refinement in Hesse's use of fictitious names for real places and
figures over the years: 'Hesse now makes less use of the actual or slightly disguised names of his friends, and his
former rather obvious direct or ironic characterizations now tend to give way to more complicated symbolic
appellations. [...] In Glasperlenspiel, he continues to be just as deliberate in his selection as previously, but now
becomes even more inventive' (Mileck 1961, 171 and 174).
46 Thomas Mann offers a similar view when he describes the German tradition of'autobiographisch erfullte[n]
Bildungs - und Entwicklungsroman[e]' ('Der autobiographische Roman'; 1960, 702).
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