Rosshalde by Hermann Hesse

First published: 1914 (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Kunstlerroman

Time of work: The early 1900’s

Locale: A manor house near Berne, Switzerland

Principal Characters:

• Johann Veraguth, a famous painter
• Adele Veraguth, his estranged wife
• Pierre, his seven-year-old son
• Albert, his grown son
• Otto Burkhardt, his friend, a Malayan planter

The Novel

Rosshalde is the story of an unhappy marriage, perhaps Hermann Hesse’s own unhappy marriage. Written after his return from India, it may depict the incompatibility between him and his wife that led to his trip to the East in the first place. The manor house, Rosshalde, is based on the house of a deceased painter which the Hesses rented in 1912 just outside Berne. Adele Veraguth is patterned after Hesse’s own wife, Maria. Yet the novel is more than an autobiographical fiction; it is also a thesis novel which argues that the artist is not suited for marriage, for his necessarily detached role as an observer and recorder of life renders him incapable of the kind of intimacy that marriage requires.

Rosshalde is an account of a brief period in the life of a famous painter, Johann Veraguth, who because of incompatibility with his wife lives in a bachelor’s studio on the grounds of his manor house. His wife, Adele, and their seven-year-old son, Pierre, the darling of both parents and the only link between them, live in the main house. Their older son, Albert, has been sent away to boarding school.

Although Veraguth has been living apart from his wife for several years, this situation, which has become increasingly intolerable to him, comes to a head in the novel as a result of two factors: Albert, who is devoted solely to his mother and who hates his father, returns from school and Veraguth’s old friend Otto Burkhardt arrives from his plantation home in India. Veraguth’s awareness of the intensity of Albert’s hatred for him and Burkhardt’s efforts to convince Veraguth to come back with him to the East make Veraguth’s dissatisfaction with his current situation more intolerable. It is little Pierre, however, who has kept Veraguth from leaving before.

Veraguth tells Burkhardt that he is living among ruins and that Pierre is all that he has, to which Burkhardt argues that Veraguth has been living among dead things too long and has lost his contact with life. In his torment over trying to decide about leaving Pierre, Veraguth creates a large painting which reflects his situation; it depicts a man and a woman self-immersed and alien to each other and a child playing tranquilly between them. Burkhardt’s invitation for Veraguth to return to India with him torments Veraguth, for although he feels his joyless existence coming to an end, he fears the loss of the boy.

This conflict intensifies when Pierre becomes mysteriously ill. Yet, in spite of Pierre’s illness, Veraguth is primarily dominated by his sense that his life is driving toward the future and freedom for the first time in years. While Veraguth believes that he can begin living again, the prognosis for the boy is just the opposite; his sensitivity to sounds and smells leads the doctor to diagnose his illness as meningitis and to warn the parents that he does not have long to live.

Veraguth’s first reaction to this news is despair, but then a new thought occurs to him—that the boy’s death will be his ultimate suffering, that after his death nothing else will remain to bind him or hurt him, and that he will go forward with no peace and inertia but with a kind of all-consuming creative joy. Thus, when his wife promises him that if Pierre lives, then Veraguth may keep Pierre with him, the painter finds it absurd that the child should be his at the moment when he is doomed to die.

At the novel’s conclusion when, after prolonged agony, the boy does die, Veraguth believes that he has never loved as much as he had during the boy’s last days. Only his art remains for him now. Thus, Veraguth has the consolation of an outsider with the paradoxically barren yet fruitful passion to observe and to create. The residue of his existence will be the cold and lonely delight of art, which he will follow for the rest of his life without detour.

The Characters

The focus throughout the novel is on Veraguth; it is his psychological state in which Hesse is most interested. Veraguth, however, is not presented as a complex, multifaceted character. Rather, he is the artist par excellence—at least as Hesse sees the artist. Although Veraguth tells Burkhardt that Adele was never what he wanted from a wife, that she was too solemn and heavy rather than lively, it becomes clear that Veraguth’s artistic temperament makes him singularly unsuitable for the intimacy that marriage requires. Burkhardt realizes that the dark springs of Veraguth’s art are his inner loneliness and self-torment; it is this which constitutes the source of his power to create as well as the source of the strange sadness which one often sees in great works of art.

The fact that Veraguth can so easily accept the imminent death of his beloved son is one of the indications of the thesis-bound nature of this novel. Indeed, Veraguth senses as soon as the boy becomes ill that he must die, that his death will be that which will finally release him from any human involvement and will leave him free to be the observer and the creator only. His love for Pierre will now become fuel for his art. If Veraguth were presented as a complex and multifaceted human being in a realistic novel, rather than an embodiment of Hesse’s views of the artist’s relationship to life in what is basically the illustration of an aesthetic idea, then such a cold and fatalistic attitude would seem unbelievable.

Adele and Albert are closely aligned with each other. Although both are musicians, they are aloof and detached. Albert is filled with hatred for his father, although the novel never makes it clear why he hates him so much. Adele is overly possessive of her children and formal and reserved with her husband.

Although Veraguth is the central psychological focus of the novel, Pierre is also presented as a complex character, particularly after he becomes ill.His complexity, however, is more a result of his function as a symbolic figure who must be sacrificed for the sake of his father’s art than of his inner psychological self. The illness makes him look prematurely aged, and indeed he seems preternaturally wise in the sense that he knows that his death and his father’s departure will occur simultaneously. The other primary symptom of the disease—his sensitivity to smells and sounds, in short his inability to bear any input to the five senses—suggests a parallel to his father’s life as an artist, for the father also cuts himself off from any real contact with the external world.

All the characters in the novel, therefore, seem primarily governed by the role they must play in the freeing of Veraguth from involvement with the world so that he may fulfill his life as an artist. They do not seem to exist in their own right; they exist as figures in a fable. Such an approach gives the novel a quality of simplicity and starkness that renders all the characters (with the exception of the victim Pierre) unsympathetic.

Critical Context

Rosshalde marked a turning point in the Hesse canon, for in it he signaled his own freedom from efforts to divide himself between bourgeois family life and the demands of his work. After he returned from India, Hesse knew that his married life could last no longer; Rosshalde was written to exorcise that particular demon. Most critics find it to be one of the best of his prewar novels; it is certainly one of the most realistic and most structurally tight of his novels. Some critics find it to be the work of a playwright, because of the dramatic unities of time, place, and character that it embodies. The plot line is classically and tragically simple in its inevitability. Most of the story is carried by dialogue, with a minimum of description of the external world. In its straightforward style and the simplicity of its basic situation, it lacks the mysticism that made such Hesse works as Demian (1919; English translation, 1923) so widely popular in the 1960’s in the United States.

The general critical opinion of the novel is that while it is the work of a consummate craftsman, it does not match the penetrating psychological portraits of such masterpieces as Siddhartha (1922; English translation, 1951) and Der Steppenwolf (1927; Steppenwolf, 1929). It is also inferior to his great Kunstlerroman, Narziss und Goldmund (1930; Death and the Lover, 1932; also as Narcissus and Goldmund, 1968). Consequently, although Rosshalde has an important place in the artistic career of Hermann Hesse, it lacks both the stylistic facility and the mystic profundity of the later works which made him one of the most widely read German authors of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Boulby, Mark. Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art, 1967.

Field, George Wallis. Hermann Hesse, 1970.

Mileck, Joseph. Hermann Hesse: Life and Art, 1978.

Sorell, Walter. Hermann Hesse: The Man Who Sought and Found Himself, 1974.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure, 1965.