Birth of Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in Calw. A German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter, Hesse was born in southern Germany, left a theological seminary and worked in bookshops before succeeding as a writer. He became a Swiss citizen in 1923. His novels, including Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game, explore the individual search for self-knowledge and the tension between spirit and instinct, and show his interest in psychoanalysis and Indian and Chinese thought. He opposed militarism and nationalism, which led to hostility in Germany. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, and his books were widely read by the counterculture generation of the 1960s. He spent his last decades in Montagnola, in Ticino.

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