Bokelskere.no

Romain Rolland to Paul Amann

January 26, 1928.

.....- No, I haven't seen Hermann Hesse for a long time. He always withdraws. I wait for his unstable mood to bring him back to his starting-point. His art becomes always more perfect. In - Steppenwolf - there are some moving confessions. But basically he is so weak, this false wolf! This lamb from the Parnassus of the Golden Hill (Lugano). He follows every trend - be it literary, moral, or beyond morality - however depraved or mundane it may be. - And he is so naive! I am very much afraid that as the good German he is, he does in earnest what our young people merely voice. That's enough intoxication and more! If he were now to use cocaine!...
The whole ending of "Steppenwolf" distresses me ( also from a literary, or rather intellectual point of view) and makes me shrug my shoulders. Thats's fine when one is 20 years old! But at the age of 50! - It's no good, no matter what they say, to be (or to want to be) a perpetual adolscent - with all the problems of a brain between seventeen and twenty-five years old. We must have courage to act our age. Nothing lost by it. But our man in his fifties is obsessed by middle age love and even old age love..... I have read some of Hesse's recent poetry which is admirable and poignant.
- Fortunately by nature an artist is like a cat which, when it's thrown out of the house, always lands on its feet. But he must be careful! A tragic old age is in store for him.

Romain Rolland's Diary

(November1917)
....Almost simultaneous visits from Stefan Zweig and Mrs. Cruppi. - ....He (Zweig) cautions me (I didn't need to be warned) against almost all German writers who are in Switzerland. There are hardly any who are not more or less in collusion with their goverment. This is the case with Schickele and members of his review who are considered heroes of civic courage in Germany. Zweig says: " I know that to think of that kind of courage." Among the German writers who are in Switzerland he makes hardly any exceptions - except for Hermann Hesse whom he likes very much, (Zweig just met Hesse in Berne and likes him very much, as well as Fritz von Unruh.) - ........