HERMANN HESSE’S THREE LOVES: the great writer in search of the archetype
Hermann Hesse in Montagnola, Switzerland, circa 1962 / pixels.com
Hermann Hesse remains the most widely read German-language writer to this day. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1946, the post office in Montagnola, where he lived, had to buy a new cart to carry his mail. By that time, an extraordinary woman was already by his side — Ninon Auslander, who was born in what is now Ukraine.
LOVE AND MADNESS
Many of Hermann Hesse’s works serve as a kind of illustration of the concepts of depth psychology. In particular, he gives literary form to Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes. Jung viewed literary creativity from the perspective of pathology, as the embodiment of the author’s hidden motives and desires. But Hesse consciously endowed his characters with archetypal qualities and would hardly have agreed to regard creativity as an illness. Although the writer’s acquaintance with psychoanalysis evolved from curiosity into a genuine necessity.
In 1916, schizophrenia was diagnosed in Hesse’s first wife, Mia Bernoulli, who had given birth to his three children. Mia came from a unique ancient family whose history in the Swiss city of Basel can be traced back to the 15th century. It was a family of true geniuses. It gave the world around 30 outstanding figures in science and art, among them great mathematicians and physicists.
It is thanks to them that humanity has probability theory, mathematical analysis, hydrodynamics, and the kinetic theory of gases. The Bernoullis’ mathematical abilities were so extraordinary that for more than 100 years they headed the mathematics department at the University of Basel. But with Mia Bernoulli, some kind of genetic failure occurred, something akin to “the tragedy of an overactive mind”.
IN SEARCH OF THE ARCHETYPE
Trouble never comes alone: his wife is admitted to a psychiatric clinic, Hesse’s eldest son and father die, the First World War is raging across Europe, inflation wipes out all the savings in German bank accounts… In the end, Hesse finds himself on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Not only does his marriage collapses, but his entire life, the whole world around him. Salvation comes in the person of Dr. Josef Lang and his psychoanalytic sessions. To better understand himself, Hesse immerses himself in the works of Freud and Jung. Eventually, psychoanalysis merges with his creative method, and under its influence, Hesse creates female characters that consistently reproduce Jungian archetypes.
In Gertrude, Rosshalde, Demian, and Steppenwolf, we encounter four female archetypes: the Anima, the Great Mother, the Maiden (Kore), and Demeter. These are often tall women who combine masculine and feminine traits and possess a subtle sensitivity to music: the musicality of Hesse’s heroines is both a gift of Apollo and a “hallmark” of Faustian civilization.
These women are alluring and dangerous, constantly balancing on the edge between life and death, joy and pain. But Hesse continued searching for “the one” not only in his work, but also in his personal life. In 1924, the search resulted in a second marriage — to Ruth Wenger. The young woman was the daughter of a famous writer, twenty years younger than Hesse, and sang and painted beautifully. Alas, this carefree creature lacked the most important thing — the archetypal quality of a keeper of the hearth. Besides, Ruth, like an eternal child, was constantly looked after by her parents, who endlessly visited the newlyweds. After three years, Hesse could no longer endure it and divorced her.
THE IDEAL FATHER
The great writer’s third and final marriage, registered on 14 November 1931, in a sense ‘linked’ him to Ukraine. Ninon Auslander was born in Chernivtsi in 1895, a woman who came to embody his archetypal ideal of womanhood. Her father, Jacob, was a well-known lawyer and head of the Bar Association of Chernivtsi, which was then part of the Habsburg Empire. The family was very wealthy. In the building where the Auslanders lived, the ground floor housed a law office, whilst the first floor contained a spacious seven-room flat. Jacob was a devout Jew, yet he regarded religion as a private matter for each individual, and so never imposed his views on life upon his wife and two children.
For example, he calmly observed a strict fast whilst his household feasted on far from frugal dishes. For Ninon, Jacob remained an example of the ‘ideal father’, who never overpowered her with his authority. At that time, this was unusual for a wealthy and influential man in a remote, patriarchal province. At the same time, her father managed to instil in his daughter a love of art, spending hours discussing culture and creativity during their walks. Every morning, the two of them would walk through the park together, after which they would part ways until the evening: he would go to work at the regional court, and she would go to study at the grammar school.
A CORRESPONDENCE THAT LASTED A LIFETIME
The Auslander family took a lively interest in the latest literary trends. This was how, at the age of fourteen, Ninon became acquainted with the novel Peter Camenzind by the then still young and little-known writer Hermann Hesse. The novel made a tremendous impression on her; it helped her realize that every person has their own path, and therefore their spiritual needs and life interests may easily not coincide with those of the people around them. Without much hesitation, right there in the hammock in her parents’ garden, she dashed off a letter to Hesse: “Walks, dances, charity events — all of that is dreadful to me! I can do nothing about it, and young men repel me with their clumsy manners and boring conversations! I refuse them whenever possible”.
Ninon did not expect a reply. But the incredible happened — to her immense surprise, Hesse answered! The young provincial girl did not yet know that Hesse loved the epistolary genre and corresponded with his readers on an almost industrial scale — no fewer than 35,000 letters remained after him! A correspondence lasting fifteen years began between the teenage girl and the writer, who was eighteen years older than she was. Interestingly, it unfolded on equal terms: Ninon admired Hermann’s talent, but this did not prevent her from making critical remarks.
THE SOLIDARITY OF TWO SOLITUDES
In 1913, Ninon moved to Vienna. There she studied medicine, art history, archaeology, and philosophy. Her acquaintance with the caricaturist Fred Dolbin ended in marriage, which, however, did not bring Ninon happiness. Dolbin was quite successful, publishing in numerous German and Austrian magazines and newspapers, for which he received handsome fees. Equally successful and numerous were the artist’s extramarital affairs. Ninon felt betrayed not only by her husband but by the entire world.
Immersing herself completely in the study of art, she traveled to Paris and Berlin. And in 1922, she arrived in Montagnola — a picturesque village near Lugano, on the border between Switzerland and Italy. It was there that her first face-to-face meeting with Hesse took place. In March 1926, while both were going through divorce proceedings, a romance began between them. Soon they married, settled in Montagnola at the Casa Camuzzi villa, and thereafter hardly ever parted — until the writer’s death in 1962.
What was their marriage like? Biographers call it “the solidarity of two solitudes”. And it was certainly not only happy, but also creatively fruitful, because it represented an exceptionally rare balance of love and freedom in human relationships — a gift Ninon had inherited from her father. And in his attitude toward her, Hermann Hesse resembled Jakob Ausländer.
TO RESPECT IN ANOTHER WHAT THEY TRULY ARE
The Casa Camuzzi villa was built especially for Hesse. The house was divided into male and female quarters. If either spouse wanted to be alone, they simply locked the doors. They continued writing letters to each other. In them, Ninon addressed her husband as “my dear fledgling” and “my beloved”, essentially combining several archetypal images — mother and wife, lover and keeper of the hearth.
The years she spent by his side proved to be Hesse’s most fruitful period. It is no coincidence that the novel Siddhartha, written even before their marriage, was dedicated to her. In the novel Journey to the East, which became a kind of prologue to the famous The Glass Bead Game, on which Hesse worked for eleven years, he wrote: “I met and loved Ninon, nicknamed the Foreigner; her eyes gazed darkly from beneath her dark hair. She was jealous of Fatma, the princess of my dream, but perhaps she herself was Fatma without knowing it”.
These lines, also dedicated to Ninon, hint at the meaning of the surname Ausländer — foreigner. With Ninon’s arrival in his life, Hesse seemed to discover the presence of that “other” about which Jung wrote: the anima is the woman within us, and the animus is the man within us. The writer himself formulated the meaning of the relationship between man and woman as follows: “Our task is not to draw closer to one another, just as the sun and moon, the sea and the land cannot be brought together. Our goal is not to merge into one another, but to know one another and to see and respect in the other what they truly are: opposite and complement”.
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