Hermann Hesse’s novel Narziss und Goldmund was published in 1930 and became the most successful book during his lifetime. The novel is set in the Middle Ages and depicts the story of a friendship between two men, whose personalities are veritable case studies in character opposites. Whereas Narziss finds an intellectual home and spiritual sense of belonging in the cloister of Mariabronn, Goldmund seeks fulfillment in his perennial vagabonding through the world. At the end of his adventurous life he returns to the cloister in order to settle down as a sculptor, striving to transform his worldly experiences into works of exquisite art. During Goldmund’s extended absence, Narziss has risen to the lofty position of abbot, in which capacity he represents and reflects the powers and the teachings of his Catholic Church. Why would this medieval story of two very different friends, leading lives of, respectively, the vita contemplative and the vita activa be such a success with modern readers? One of the answers probably lies in Hesse’s thematic structure of the novel. The Romantics of the nineteenth century had already cultivated a deep affinity with the Middle Ages, and their relationship to that earlier time period became a congenial mode of reflection for Hesse, the neo-Romantic author of the twentieth century. Like a distant mirror, its medieval imaginaries project across the centuries central aspects of our modern and postmodern realities. Focusing on the development of intellectual history, this narrative mirror reflects specifically Adorno and Horkheimer’s “dialectics of enlightenment,” Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of values,” and last but not least, the eclipse of all reason, which characterized the genius and the insanity of Germany’s cultural history. This essay will trace this trajectory and illustrate the various reflections of the novel’s medieval modernity.

Essential for the understanding of the exemplary differences in the character formation of Narziss and Goldmund is the recognition that they are modeled after cultural archetypes. Narziss represents the patriarchal world order of an androcentric culture, whose societal hierarchy is based on male authority, maintained by social and sexual repression, and focused on spiritual values that find their quintessential apotheosis in God the Father, residing in heaven. Goldmund, by contrast is associated with the matriarchal myth of a gynocentric utopia, whose ideal state is characterized by female authority, based on social equality and sexual permissiveness, and centered in the material world, which finds its symbolic representation in the pagan Mother Goddess, living on earth.