Klingsor’s letzter Sommer is part of a new kind of fiction that occupied Hermann Hesse immediately after the First World War. Along with Siddhartha and the lesser known Klein and Wagner, this brilliant novella explores the inner life through a correspondingly subjective language. These three works form a sequence: they appeared individually in the aftermath of the war and were re-published in 1931, as a collection called Weg nach Innen (The Way Within or The Inward Way), a title that pinpoints Hesse’s intention precisely. Hesse took this title from a fragment in Novalis’s collection called Blütenstaub: “Nach Innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg” (Inward leads the secret way). Siddhartha projects a transformation of an individual life caught within a larger world of Buddhist and Taoist religions, while Klein und Wagner portrays an actual change in identity, a “Jekyll and Hyde” syndrome, as yet another aspect of a self transforming itself. In Klingsors letzter Sommer the famous painter Klingsor recreates himself in art as well as in death.

A lost war and a chaotic present provided an overriding theme: the need for a fresh beginning by turning within, “transforming” the inner life into a new kind of “outer” life in another, imagined environment — true to the model of German Romanticism to which the “new” Hesse still owed a considerable debt. It remained the task of this generation to explore not only ways of portraying the inner life but also of transforming this inner life into artistic and spiritual figures.

Among all of Hesse’s writings at this time, Klingsors letzter Sommer stands out as his sharpest “critique” of individual and societal crisis. For what could be more like “crisis” than the naked threat of death?

In Klingsor, the painter facing the end of his life, Hesse created an overpowering figure, in part a product of his imagination, in part taken from people he knew in his self-imposed exile in southern Switzerland. Magic determines the painter’s name: “Klingsor” alludes to the figure of the magician in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, who was able to see sounds and hear colors, as well as to “Klingsohr,” the magical teacher of poetry in the Romantic novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Novalis.