I read Hermann Hesse’s Nobel Prize winning novel, Magister Ludi, also known as The Glass Bead Game, for the second time last week. I read it for the first time when I was about twenty. Now I’m seventy. The book is more relevant today than it was at the height of the Vietnam War and in the midst of the social upheaval of the 60s and 70s, but the book read better fifty years ago.
I read it first while still an undergraduate studying Chinese philosophy and literature. My German was better then, and I had read a few of Hesse’s German essays and stories in language classes. The book was popular among my friends in those days. I tried to read a German edition from the library, but I gave up and bought a translation. I remember I liked it, except that I thought it contained rather superficial references to the Chinese book of divination, The Book of Changes (I Ching), which was popular at the time. Not much else stuck with me, except a good feeling about the book.
In the intervening years, Hesse has gotten his share of criticism for misogyny and protagonists who only appeal to adolescents, and I agree.
First, Hesse needed a disciplined editor. The mass-market paperback I read last week, the same one I read in 1970, has over 500 pages of small print and narrow margins. It should have been cut to 300 pages.
I usually read for pleasure slowly, mulling over books as I read them, but I found myself skimming because Hesse used too many words, over-described, and repeated unnecessarily. Joseph Knecht, the protagonist of the novel, was a sincere and meticulous educational bureaucrat. We don’t need to be told, shown, retold, reshown in long paragraphs that seem to repeat every few pages. The Magister took too many contemplative walks and rhapsodized too much on the pleasures of nature. The novel was published in 1943 and set in the future 24th or 25th century. But it is populated with peasants, aristocrats, townsmen, and heating systems from a pre-Renaissance monastery. The pages of description do little to illuminate this odd setting.
The glass bead game is a made up game that required erudition and connoisseurship to play. The protagonist, Joseph Knecht is the master of the game. After striving to become a perfect academic manager, teacher, and player of game, and reaching the pinnacle of delectation of music, arts, philology, and mathematics, Knecht gives up his position, resigns from the order, and dies trying to outswim an adolescent in freezing lake.
As I read, I felt compelled to consult Hesse’s biography. I had to know if Hesse knew what he was talking about. Had Hesse ever experienced anyone like his hero? I haven’t known any bureaucrats who came even close to that mold and I’ve known hundreds. For me, the character and plot was unrealistic and hard to believe. In Hesse’s defense, realistic heroes have never been a requirement for a good story, but I could not empathize with Joseph Knecht.
And what about women? The story is about an all-male, celibate, elite order until we get to the final section, three short lives set in various eras and locations. The first life describes a matriarchy dominated by men. In the other lives, the women are spiritless toys. I suspect that Hesse might have been comfortable hanging with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who Hesse would have been happy to allow to buy his way into The Glass Bead Game, the way Epstein bought his way into MIT Labs.
I’m being negative—justifiably, I believe—but the book also raises important points and is worth reading. If you can ignore the male elitism (which is not easy), the story is about educated universal culture, populist nationalism, and governance, which is on many people’s minds today.
Hesse was born and grew up in Germany, but he spent much of his life as a Swiss citizen. Although he helped many Jewish and other dissident intellectuals out of Nazi Germany, he was not outspoken in opposition to Hitler’s Nazi state. Nevertheless, this book is clearly critical of nationalist fascism and was banned in Nazi Germany. In The Glass Bead Game, all the misogyny and juvenility aside, Hesse raises questions about the relationship between the rise of totalitarians like Hitler and educated elites that are relevant and pressing today. I didn’t see that fifty years ago.
I compare the Bead Game to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and J.K. Rowling’s Ministry of Magic. They all depict elites confronting forms of unreasoning and amoral nationalism. I doubt that The Glass Bead Game, due to its prolixity and dated misogyny, will ever be read popularly like Tolkien and Rowling, but it taps some of the same electricity and it carries a message that is more apt today than it was in the 60s and 70s when it was popular among young intellectuals.