Veneration and revolt: Hermann Hesse and Swabian Pietism
2009; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 46; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5860/choice.46-6680
ISSN1943-5975
Tópico(s)Moravian Church and William Blake
Resumo77-year-old Hermann Hesse described in 1954 the feelings Bach's Passions evoked in him; they are also the words Barry Stephenson aptly chose to characterize the conflicted relationship the author had to his pietist upbring ing. The topic is certainly one worthy of investigation. Hesse's pietist back ground is well-known: both his father, Johannes Hesse, and his maternal grandfather, Hermann Gundert, were missionaries in India. Upon his re turn from India Johannes Hesse settled in Calw in the southwest German kingdom of Wiirttemberg and worked with Gundert in the Calmer Verlag, a religious publishing house with ties to the Basel Missionary Society, under whose auspices both he and Gundert had served in India. There he mar ried Gundert's recently widowed daughter. Hesse grew up in this intensely religious environment and was supposed to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather by becoming a theologian. These plans came to an end with Hesse's precipitous flight from the monastery school of Maulbronn at the age of 15. The path from his ecclesiastical calling to becoming an author was beset with conflict. But from his first to his last novel, argues Stephenson, Hesse sought to clarify his own position vis-a-vis his pietist upbringing, not merely by extricating himself from its narrow confines, but by finding rapprochement in commonly shared convictions and values. The task of clarifying Hesse's relationship to Wiirttemberg pietism is enormously complicated, and this is where Stephenson's discussion falls short. The author begins with an inchoate overview of pietism: he mentions Spener, conventicles, the speculative mysticism of Swabian Pietism with its roots in Albertus Magnus and Heinrich Suso, then J. V Andreae, the Rosicrucians, Swedenborg, Bohme, Jung-Stilling, Bengel, Oetinger, Halle and pietism's commitment to social service, and radical millenni alist tendencies in the 18th century. Passing mention is also made of pietist
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