1 - Novel Ideas: Notes toward a New Reading of Hesse’s Unterm Rad

Summary

In September 1968, as U.S. interest in Hesse was beginning to surge, British poet and critic D. J. Enright, writing in the New York Review of Books, posed two provocative rhetorical questions on Unterm Rad (1906; Beneath the Wheel, 1968). After providing a laconic plot summary — “the story of a gifted boy of humble birth who is sent from his village to a theological academy, sinks to the bottom of the class, breaks down, goes home, and dies” — Enright asks: “[B]ut why must Hans die? Surely not that Hermann may live?” “Hans” is the Swabian schoolboy Hans Giebenrath, the main character in Unterm Rad. “Hermann” is Hermann Heilner, Hans Giebenrath’s friend. But Enright’s “Hermann” is also Hermann Hesse himself. Enright pokes serious fun at all the aitches and aitch-aitches in the Hesse novels he discusses — Harry Haller, Hermann Heilner, Hermine, and H.H., the narrator in The Journey to the East — and confesses to having learned of Hesse’s tiresome penchant for such formulae in Theodore Ziolkowski’s 1965 monograph, The Novels of Hermann Hesse. Without Ziolkowski, Enright tells us, he would have read Unterm Rad as “simply a straight-forward warning, touching and telling, against the evils of subjecting a boy to the academic grindstone at a time when he should be giving himself up to the beneficent sway of nature” (6). Enright’s implication is that Hesse might have killed off Hans Giebenrath in order to set not only Hermann Heilner but also himself, Hermann Hesse himself, somehow free. And as Enright’s indignant tone suggests, he finds this notion — character assassination as authorial liberation — particularly unpalatable.

Enright here calls wittily into question the most sacred commonplace of criticism on Unterm Rad, the interpretive surmise on which nearly all readings of the novel have been based. The idea was mooted in 1927 by Hugo Ball, Hesse’s first biographer:

The portrayal of the state examination and of Hesse’s time as a seminary student in Beneath the Wheel is true to life [. . .]. Only the experience is divided up, through a kind of splitting of Hesse’s personality, between two characters and friends. Hermann Heilner’s flight from Maulbronn is Hesse’s own flight from the seminary. But the emotional confusion and sufferings of Hans Giebenrath, who remains behind, are also Hesse’s.