© Suhrkamp Verlag
"From my thirteenth year on, it was clear to me that I wanted to be either a poet or nothing at all."
(Hermann Hesse in his "Life Story Briefly Told")
Hesse's first major breakthrough as a writer came with the novel Peter Camenzind in 1904, which was followed by Unterm Rad, a book teeming with autobiographical references that remains one of his most important works even today. With books such as Der Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and, of course, the later work, Das Glasperlenspiel, Hesse secured himself a firm place in the history of world literature. In 1946, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Even during his own lifetime, his works had already been translated into all of the world's major languages. Yet only in the past thirty years have his works generated a response unlike that given to those of any other writer in the history of German literature. Hesse is generally considered to be the most translated German author since the Brothers Grimm. In America and Asia in particular, he has millions of readers. Worldwide, over 100 million copies of his books - now translated into close on 60 languages - have been published, with German-language editions accounting for just under a quarter of this figure. Even today, Suhrkamp Verlag produces 30,000 copies of books by Hesse each month. Hesse is a source of great fascination for each new generation, and younger readers, in particular, see his books as a challenge enabling them to examine their own identity and the eternally relevant question of the meaning of life. In an age of increasing disorientation, Hesse's oeuvre combines ethics and aesthetics, tradition and modernity, with an open and forward-looking view of the world.