Hermann Hesse-Museum Calw

Hermann Hesse who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946 was a son of our town. He was born on July 2, 1877 in a house opposite the town hall and he lived in Calw for the greater part of his youth.


Hermann Hesse`s life as well as the effect he and his works had on the world is shown in nine different rooms.

We will accompany you on your tour through the museum and will present the themes of the different rooms to you.

1. In the first room you will find some information

about Hesse`s parents and
grandparents and some of their books, as well as the distribution and publications
of the Calw Publishing House, which was directed by Dr. Gundert and Johannes Hesse.
Dr. Hermann Gundert and Julie Dubois, who were Hesse`s grandparents on his mother`s side, had worked for a long time in India as missionaries of the Basler Mission. To
this day Dr. Hermann Gundert is well known as a linguist. Hesse`s grandparents on his father`s side, doctor Hermann Hesse and his wife Jenny, lived in Weißenstein/Estonia. They were practising Christians. Hermann Hesse`s parents, Johannes Hesse and Marie Gundert, the widow of Mr. Isenberg, were also missionaries and writers of religious literature.

2. In the second room the numerous publications and translations of Hesse`s works are shown. Worldwide there are more than 90 million publications. As you know, Hesse also became famous for his letters (more than 35 000) and for being the editor of other writers. In a special display case you can see his writing utensils with the inscription "Was man schreibt, das immer bleibt" (written words remain forever).
In the sixties Hesse and his works became increasingly important, primarily in the USA and in Japan. This period is reflected by Andy Warhol the prophet of the flower-power and hippie-movement.
Hesse wrote more than 50 novels and stories, as well as at least 600 poems, which have been translated into nearly every language of the world.

3. The probably most beautiful room of the museum is dedicated to Hesse`s childhood and youth in Calw: his school years in the Latein Schule and the Monastery school of Maulbronn. Adolescence problems made him spend some time in a psychiatric institution in Stetten in the Rems Valley. He then started an apprenticeship as a mechanic at Perrot`s in Calw and later became an apprentice in a second-hand bookshop in Tübingen (Heckenhauer`s Bookstore).
This room shows what Calw meant to Hesse "... die schönste Stadt von allen aber, die ich kenne, ist Calw an der Nagold, ein kleines, altes, schwäbisches Schwarzwaldstädtchen" ("... of all the towns I know, Calw on the banks of the river Nagold is the most beautiful - a small, old, Swabian town in the Black Forest"). To Hesse Calw was the "Urbild aller Menschenheimat und Menschengeschicke" ("symbol of all the homes and fates of mankind").

4. Hesse lived in Tübingen, Basle and Italy until his first novel "Peter Camenzind" was finally and succesfully published. After that he was a free-lance writer. Together with his first wife Mia Bernouilli (1869 - 1963), a professional photographer, he moved to Gaienhofen on Lake Constance (1904). His three sons were born there (Bruno in 1905, Heiner in 1909 and Martin in 1911).
Hesse became co-editor of the magazine "März" and co-author of the "Simplicissimus".
In 1911 he felt very depressed and travelled to India. He returned disappointed, dissatisfied and sick.

5. The beginning of World War I changed his life significantly. Hesse moved to Bern (Switzerland) to live in the house of his friend Welti. In 1914 he volunteered as a soldier, but was not accepted because he was very shortsighted. Hesse felt a deep need to help people. He worked for the spiritual welfare of prisoners of war in France; he wanted to make people understand, that it is necessary to look after the body as well as the soul. Hesse`s life continued to be filled with agony: when his articles about the war were not allowed to be published he took on the pseudonym of "Emil Sinclair", and it was not easy to get "Demian" published. His father`s death in 1916 together with all his personal problems finally made Hermann Hesse undergo psychoanalytical treatment.

6. The next room is dedicated to the Ticino, especially to the village of Montagnola, his pleasure in painting water colors, his working in the garden, which to him was mystifying and it also balanced his intellectual work. The story of "Siddhartha" was developed here "...Here (in the Ticino) life was livable ...", "... how beautiful it is to cross borders". Here he started his life all over again. So this room is the link to the following and final 35 years of Hesse`s life.

7. Most important in these years were his second marriage to Ruth Wenger and the third marriage to Ninon Dolbin - Ausländer. You will be able to follow the writer`s development from the "Steppenwolf" to the "Magister ludi" of the "Glasperlenspiel". Hesse indirectly suggests to use self-criticism to criticize contemporary history. His "way to one`s inner self" is the way from the magical theatre and alternative utopia of those travelling to the Orient in the "Glasperlenspiel".

Hesse was attacked and slandered by Germany`s national socialists but his prevailing trend comes to light in the typoscript of 1933: " It is better to be killed by the fascists than to be a fascist; it is better to be killed by the communists than to be a communist". Especially his "Criticism of Literature", published in Sweden, shows his position: he did not differenciate between the refugees and those who stayed behind nor between Jews and Christians.
The first President of the German Federal Republic, Dr. Theodor Heuss rehabilitated Hesse and thus helped him to become an esteemed writer and poet in Germany once again.
The huge photograph in the door frame shows Hesse`s upright figure looking back upon his life and work. Hesse died on August 9, 1962 in his house in Montagnola and was buried in the cemetery of San Abbondio, Switzerland.

8. In the museum`s entrance hall it is planned to show in special exhibitions different topics and works of the most popular German writer of this century, of Hermann Hesse.

9. Another room is reserved for reading to enable visitors to get to know Hermann Hesse`s works.
We hope this little tour was a pleasant introduction to this famous son of our town and we also hope that you will enjoy the exhibition. The official catalogue, The Marbacher Magazin about Hesse is available in the museum, as well as the English version of "Die Stadt als literarisches Museum, Hermann Hesse-Stätten in Calw" ( "The Town as a Literary Museum, Hermann Hesse-Memorials in Calw").

Autobiography of Hermann Hesse

I was born in Calw in the Black Forest on July 2, 1877. My father, a Baltic German, came from Estonia; my mother was the daughter of a Swabian and a French Swiss. My father's father was a doctor, my mother's father a missionary and Indologist. My father, too, had been a missionary in India for a short while, and my mother had spent several years of her youth in India and had done missionary work there.

My childhood in Calw was interrupted by several years of living in Basle (1880-86). My family had been composed of different nationalities; to this was now added the experience of growing up among two different peoples, in two countries with their different dialects.

I spent most of my school years in boarding schools in Wuerttemberg and some time in the theological seminary of the monastery at Maulbronn. I was a good learner, good at Latin though only fair at Greek, but I was not a very manageable boy, and it was only with difficulty that I fitted into the framework of a pietist education that aimed at subduing and breaking the individual personality. From the age of twelve I wanted to be a poet, and since there was no normal or official road, I had a hard time deciding what to do after leaving school. I left the seminary and grammar school, became an apprentice to a mechanic, and at the age of nineteen I worked in book and antique shops in Tübingen and Basle. Late in 1899 a tiny volume of my poems appeared in print, followed by other small publications that remained equally unnoticed, until in 1904 the novel Peter Camenzind, written in Basle and set in Switzerland, had a quick success. I gave up selling books, married a woman from Basle, the mother of my sons, and moved to the country. At that time a rural life, far from the cities and civilization, was my aim. Since then I have always lived in the country, first, until 1912, in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, later near Bern, and finally in Montagnola near Lugano, where I am still living.

Soon after I settled in Switzerland in 1912, the First World War broke out, and each year brought me more and more into conflict with German nationalism; ever since my first shy protests against mass suggestion and violence I have been exposed to continuous attacks and floods of abusive letters from Germany. The hatred of the official Germany, culminating under Hitler, was compensated for by the following I won among the young generation that thought in international and pacifist terms, by the friendship of Romain Rolland, which lasted until his death, as well as by the sympathy of men who thought like me even in countries as remote as India and Japan. In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

In 1923, I resigned German and acquired Swiss citizenship. After the dissolution of my first marriage I lived alone for many years, then I married again. Faithful friends have put a house in Montagnola at my disposal.

Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.

I survived the years of the Hitler regime and the Second World War through the eleven years of work that I spent on the Glasperlenspiel (1943) [Magister Ludi], a novel in two volumes. Since the completion of that long book, an eye disease and increasing sicknesses of old age have prevented me from engaging in larger projects.

Of the Western philosophers, I have been influenced most by Plato, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as well as the historian Jacob Burckhardt. But they did not influence me as much as Indian and, later, Chinese philosophy. I have always been on familiar and friendly terms with the fine arts, but my relationship to music has been more intimate and fruitful. It is found in most of my writings. My most characteristic books in my view are the poems (collected edition, Zürich, 1942), the stories Knulp (1915), Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Der Steppenwolf (1927) [Steppenwolf], Narziss und Goldmund. (1930), Die Morgenlandfahrt (1932) [The Journey to the East], and Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) [Magister Ludi]. The volume Gedenkblätter (1937, enlarged ed. 1962) [Reminiscences] contains a good many autobiographical things. My essays on political topics have recently been published in Zürich under the title Krieg und Frieden (1946) [War and Peace].