Abstract
Hesse placed supreme importance on the value of the individual. From his youth he had rebelled against the imposition of social authority on the individual, and he continued this resistance throughout his adult life. The First World War had a profound impact on his thinking and writing. He described this as a ‘cruel awakening’ (Hesse, 1974c, p. 10) and in the years following the War he found himself utterly at odds with the spirit of his times in his native Germany. He spent much of his life in Switzerland. Hesse saw himself as an ‘unpolitical man’ and even when writing about the War, he wanted to guide the reader ‘not into the world theatre with its political problems but into his innermost being, before the judgement seat of his very personal conscience’ (p. 11).
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