Born in Calw, Germany, in 1877, Hermann Hesse was influenced by his family's mix of background and beliefs. His father, a Pietist-Lutheran, believed that man is basically evil and requires austere discipline. His parents and grandparents had been missionaries in India and the Far East, and their homes yielded the flavors of Indian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan cultures. Hesse said, "From the time I was a child I breathed in and absorbed the spiritual side of India just as deeply as Christianity."

Hypersensitive, imaginative, and headstrong, Hermann behaved rebelliously while yearning to be a poet and magician. School authorities doubted his sanity, and he even fared poorly at schools for mentally challenged and emotionally disturbed children. Instead, he stayed at home, gardening, assisting in his father's publishing house, and reading books on Eastern philosophy and religion in his grandfather's library.

In 1899, Hesse, who had become something of a misfit, moved to Basel, Switzerland, determined to learn the art of living with other people. In 1904, he married and moved to remote Gaienhofen. Seven years later, he left for a trip to the East, expecting to find wisdom in India, which he considered to be a centerplace of innocence; he also hoped to discover answers to his personal problems. Finding only poverty and commercialized Buddhism he returned, suffering from heat exhaustion, dysentery, and disillusionment.

World War I left an already unsettled Hesse badly shaken. Nationalistic enough to hope for a German victory, he also abhorred war and argued for internationalism. That he volunteered his services to the German embassy in Bern and coedited two weeklies for German prisoners of war did little to dissuade his detractors among both the militarists and the pacifists. His father's death in 1916 further compounded his growing despair. At this time Hesse underwent Jungian psychoanalysis, a process that put him in touch with the irrational forces that lurk beneath both individuals and society at large as well as with the idea of a self-quest through synthesis of these forces.

In 1919, he settled alone in Montagnola, where Siddhartha was written. Persuaded that a postwar Germany was susceptible to change, Hesse helped to found and edit a periodical devoted to social reform, pacifism, and internationalism. Resurgent nationalism and spreading communism caused him to terminate his association with the monthly in 1921. Indignities and waning faith in Germany's political future persuaded Hesse to become a citizen of Switzerland in 1924. During this period, Hesse divorced his first wife and, after a brief second marriage, married Ninon Dolbin, with whom he lived until his death.

ANOTHER LOOK AT HESSE....NEVER STOP WITH JUST ONE BIOGRAPHER'S SYNOPSIS...

Hermann Hesse was born in the town of Calw in Württemberg, Germany on July 2, 1877. Hesse’s parents were both missionaries with a Basel, Switzerland Mission to India. Hermann‘s father, Johannes Hess, was born the son of a doctor. His mother, Marie Gundert, was the daughter of a missionary as well.

Hesse’s formal education began at the Latin School in Göppingen, where he first showed promise. His second boarding school was the Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1891. It was in March of 1892 that Hesse ran away from the Seminary. Similar to characters in his books, Hesse rebelled against traditional education and his parents’ strict religious upbringing. Hesse’s book Beneath the Wheel is an autobiographical novel about a young man coming to terms with the artist inside him. As the struggles of the story unfold, the protagonist runs away from the seminary school he is attending. In the less autobiographical, more allegorical Siddhartha, our protagonist is fully aware of his intentions, and his departure is symbolic and contrived rather than characterized by frustration. Many of Hesse’s works contain autobiographical elements, and the events of his early life can be recognized in works such as Beneath the Wheel, Siddhartha, Demian, and Steppenwolf. Steppenwolf

Due to the death of his father and other pressures, Hesse underwent psychoanalysis in 1915 with a student of Carl Jung, Dr. Josef Lang. This was Hesse’s introduction to psychoanalysis, which led to an interest that strongly influenced his writing.

The writing of Siddhartha began on the same incredibly prolific summer that Hesse wrote Klingsor’s letzer Sommer ( Klingsor’s Last Summer), which is a collection of short stories. Siddhartha was completed the following year, in May 1922.

During World War II, Hesse was again vilified by the German right-wing press. The bitterness and shock caused by the extermination of his wife's family by the Nazis stayed with Hesse for the rest of his life. Until his death from leukemia in 1962, he remained in Montagnola, rarely leaving it and never going outside of Switzerland, not even when he was awarded the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt am Main and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

Biographical information relevant to Siddhartha

All of Hesse’s books are autobiographical to some extent, and Siddhartha is no exception. Both Siddhartha and Hesse avoided a parental dictate putting them into the priesthood. The writing of Siddhartha also coincided with a personal preoccupation with Indian culture, and began at the end of one very prolific summer. The first eight chapters were written rapidly, and then Hesse stopped writing, unsure of how to finish. This period lasted for eighteen months, during which Hesse did his own searching, similar to his character, Siddhartha. Hesse spent much of the time reading from The Upanishads, The Bhagavad-Gita, and Buddhist scriptures.

At this stage in Hesse’s life and at this stage in the book’s development, Hesse looked to a comrade and growing influence, Carl Jung. Ever since his treatment by Jung’s student, Dr. Josef Lang, Hesse had developed an interest in Jung’s theories. Hesse corresponded with Jung for years, and during the writing of Siddhartha, he called on his friend for counsel.