7 - The American Reception of Contemporary German Literature

Summary

Translated by Sally E. Robertson

THE “HESSE CRAZE” AND ITS ROOTS

American readers' interest in German literature in the first two decades after World War II fixed largely on the question of the German dictatorship and its legacy. In the books of exiled authors such as Thomas Mann and numerous postwar writers ranging from Ernst Wiechert to Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, Americans sought answers to questions about the Germany of the past thirty-five years and what had become of the country in the years following the war.

By the mid-1960s, however, Americans were preoccupied with themselves. The war in Vietnam and the riots in urban ghettos shook the nation. American youth were in rebellion. This manifested itself both in political activism and the essentially apolitical hippie and flower child movement. The latter made possible the sudden enthusiastic revival of an author who had been dead since 1962 and some of whose works had been written sixty years earlier: Hermann Hesse. His novels had begun to appear in America in the 1920s without attracting particular attention. As late as 1947, one critic was convinced that a new edition of Steppenwolf would not achieve a very large circulation. Twenty years later, however, a wave of Hesse works began to flood the American market. In 1969, Journey to the East (Die Morgenlandfahrt), the first volume of the ten-volume Hesse edition produced by the renowned publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, appeared. Other Hesse novels, from Siddhartha to Magister Ludi (Das Glasperlenspiel), were issued in new editions or as paperbacks.