Hermann Hesse - Joseph Mileck

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Résumé :
Moral conviction, not political inclination, determined Hermann Hesse's participation in German sociopolitical matters. The belief that artists, the ever-alert guardians of human values and cultural heritage, were society's admonishing conscience, determined Hesse's sociopolitical engagement, fashioned his considerable body of political articles, and made him a chronic persona non grata in Germany. It was likewise not the spiritual lure of the Orient that drew Hesse eastward - for him, the East was less a spiritual journey than an aesthetic adventure. Although Hesse remained a Westerner in thought and belief, his art acquired an enriching exotic cast and his essays and reviews an added Eastern dimension.
This bipartite study focuses upon these two evolving major engagements - Hesse's continuous adult sociopolitical involvements and his lifelong preoccupation with Eastern thought and belief, both firmly rooted in his family's passionate Pietist dedication to the service of God and humankind - and their impact upon both Hesse and his writings.

Biographie:
The Author: Born in Sanktmartin, Roumania, Joseph Mileck received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a member of the German department at the University of California, Berkeley, for four decades. In addition to the publication of some forty literary articles and four previous books about Hesse, among them Hermann Hesse: Life and Art (1978), Mileck has edited two cultural-historical books about a typical German community in Roumania, Sanktmartin (1993) and Zum Exodus der Rum?niendeutschen (Peter Lang, 1999), and has written a linguistic study of that community's German dialect, Samatimerisch: Phonetik, Grammatik, Lexikographie (Peter Lang, 1997).