Hermann Hesse

Biography
Family background

Hermann Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in the Black Forest town of Calw in Württemberg, Germany. Both of Hesse's parents served in India at a mission under the auspicesof the Basel Mission, a Protestant Christian missionary society. Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born at such a mission in India in 1842. In describing her own childhood, she said, "A happy childI was not..." As was usual among missionaries at the time, she was left behind in Europe at the age of four when her parents went to India.[2] In her teens she attempted to rebel against herauthoritarian father, Hermann Gundert, but finally submitted.[3]

Hesse's father, Johannes Hesse, the son of a doctor, was born in 1847 in the Estonian town of Paide (Weissenstein). In his own way, Dr Hessewas just as tyrannical as Dr Gundert.[4] Once Johannes Hesse was married, he moved into his father-in-law's house. Due at least in part to the crowded conditions there, in 1889 he suffered his firstbout of deep depression. He continued to have such attacks of "melancholia, weeping and headaches" for the rest of his life.[5]

Since Johannes Hesse belonged to the sizable German minority in thatpart of the Baltic region, which was then under the rule of the Russian Empire, his son Hermann was at birth both a citizen of the German Empire and of the Russian Empire.[6] Hesse had five siblings,two of whom died in infancy. In 1873, the Hesse family moved to Calw, where his father worked for the Calwer Verlagsverein, a publishing house specializing in theological texts and schoolbooks. Hesse'sgrandfather Hermann Gundert managed the publishing house at the time, and Johannes Hesse succeeded him in 1893.

Hesse grew up in a Swabian Pietist household, with its strong tendency to insulatebelievers into small, deeply thoughtful groups. Furthermore, Hesse described his father's Baltic German heritage as "an important and potent fact" of his developing identity. His father, Hesse...