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PLEASE NOTE. As of June 2004 these pages and the links herein are no longer being updated or maintained. Disclaimer : Oakland Unified School District is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. Book Description: Published in 1922, Siddhartha is the most famous and influential novel by Nobel prize-winning (1946) German author Hermann Hesse. Though set in India, the concerns of Siddhartha are universal, expressing Hesse's general interest in the conflict between mind, body, and spirit. While people have contemplated this conflict since time immemorial, it took on a special urgency for Hesse. Psychoanalysis had exploded onto the European intellectual scene in the first decades of the 20th century, and its investigations into the fundamental well-springs of human behavior revolutionized the our self-conceptions; the sovereignty of reason was crumbling as the Id emerged supreme. As a result, a new understanding of the whole human animal had to be worked out. Also, political conflicts in the second decade let to a war in which technological inventions, monuments to human reason and ingenuity, were used to slaughter people in terrible ways. This also called for a reexamination of the relationship between the various aspects of ourselves. These two events, the emergence of psychoanalysis and World War I, then, set the intellectual and moral context in which Siddhartha was written. More... (© Classic Notes) Booknotes about Siddhartha:
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