I. Prelude: Hesse in the Age of Wilhelm II

During the time in which Hermann Hesse was coming of age, the mass print media were just emerging as a force in German life. This had far-reaching consequences for the monarchy. According to Martin Kohlrausch, ideological tensions between the imperial state of Wilhelm II and sectors of the press peaked in 1906, when 4,000 daily newspapers in Germany were publishing 25.5 million copies for a population of over 60 million, shaping opinions and the national mood.

The history of Germany’s Second Empire was characterized by mass phenomena. The new state’s founding in 1871 was followed by the rise of political parties and their organizations, of labor unions, industrial trusts, religious associations, sports clubs, youth leagues, and the like. This in turn created a substantial market for publications catering to interest groups and political movements. Mandatory education and increased cultural awareness created large numbers of readers, a public of unprecedented size. Young Hesse was keenly interested in German periodicals of all kinds. He was reading important literary journals before 1900 and later contributed to them as an author and reviewer. From the beginning he studied — for instance as a bookseller in Basel around 1900 — how the print media functioned, the interests controlling them, and how they were manipulated. Later, he intended that his book reviews should educate his readers.

Hesse’s experiences with journals dedicated to culture and politics began in 1907, when he joined März, a biweekly that he and Ludwig Thoma founded together with Conrad Haußmann, an attorney and member of the Reichstag for the German Democratic Party. It was backed by Albert Langen, who also published Simplicissimus, a Munich satirical journal that, like März, commented with extreme criticism and ridicule on events in Berlin surrounding Kaiser Wilhelm II from a south German perspective. The editors avoided appearing provincial by inviting French, Austrian, and Swiss authors to contribute, an international approach unusual in that nationalistic epoch. Hesse’s commitment to März must also be read as a gesture of resistance to the power of Berlin’s newspapers, whose ability to shape the public’s opinions and tastes he never underestimated. How highly Hesse valued exchanging ideas and working with writers elsewhere in Europe, especially in France, can be seen in his turning away from März following the death of Langen, its cosmopolitan publisher, which caused the journal to become increasingly “German.”