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Translated from the German by W.J. Strachan
The Prodigy, originally dating from 1905, is Hermann Hesses’s
bitter indictment of conventional education.It is the story
of Hans Giebenrath, the brilliant young son of provincial
bourgeois in southern Germany who becomes the first boy from
his town to pass into a prestigious Protestant theological
college. His spirit, however, is systematically broken by
his parents and teachers; over-anxious about his success,
they forget to consider his health and happiness. Subsiding
into a fatal apathy, he is taken home for medical reasons.
Here he falls in love, becomes an engineer’s apprentice,
learns to drink alcohol and eventually dies by drowning.
Out of his attitude to the treatment that he perceived was
common within the German schooling system at the turn of the
century, Hesse developed his own deeply personal views on
the value of Eastern education in developing the self.
‘A gentle and insidiously persuasive plea for the
flight from academicism and the re-establishment of the simple
values of the workman’s life.’ — Sunday
Times
‘It is unusual for a writer to begin with sincerity alone
and to advance to a more complex apprehension of life without
surrendering his pristine innocence. This has been Hermann
Hesse’s achievement.’ — Observer
‘Written with deep sympathy . . . certainly makes you
willing to read more of Herr Hesse.’ — New Statesman
Counted among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century,
HERMANN HESSE was born in 1877. Rebelling against a stern
monastic education, he worked as a locksmith and a bookseller
before embarking on a 65-year writing career. Having travelled
as far as India, he settled in Switzerland in 1911 in opposition
to German militarism. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1946, he
died in 1963 aged eighty-five. |
