Hermann Hesse
1877 CE–1962 CE · Novelist · Calw
Hermann Hesse was a German-born novelist and poet who took Swiss citizenship in 1923. Raised in a Pietist missionary household in Calw — with a five-year childhood interlude in Basel, where the family had ties to the Basel Mission — he fled a Protestant seminary at Maulbronn and trained as a bookseller in Tübingen and Basel before publishing his first works. His novels — Peter Camenzind, Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game — explore individual self-realization, spiritual searching, and the tension between discipline and instinct, weaving European and Asian religious thought. From 1919 he lived in Montagnola, in Swiss Ticino, where he also painted. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 and died there in 1962.
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Calw
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The world in their lifetime
Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Hermann Hesse’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Luminaries & Explorers world
- Jean Sibelius· 1865 CE–1957 CE
- Frank Lloyd Wright· 1867 CE–1959 CE
- W. E. B. Du Bois· 1868 CE–1963 CE
- Henri Matisse· 1869 CE–1954 CE
- Robert Frost· 1874 CE–1963 CE
- Thomas Mann· 1875 CE–1955 CE
- Béla Bartók· 1881 CE–1945 CE
- Pablo Picasso· 1881 CE–1973 CE
- Igor Stravinsky· 1882 CE–1971 CE
- James Joyce· 1882 CE–1941 CE
- Virginia Woolf· 1882 CE–1941 CE
- John Maynard Keynes· 1883 CE–1946 CE
- Diego Rivera· 1886 CE–1957 CE
- Le Corbusier· 1887 CE–1965 CE
- T. S. Eliot· 1888 CE–1965 CE
- Fernando Pessoa· 1888 CE–1935 CE
- Ludwig Wittgenstein· 1889 CE–1951 CE
- Sergei Prokofiev· 1891 CE–1953 CE
- George Gershwin· 1898 CE–1937 CE
- Federico García Lorca· 1898 CE–1936 CE
- Bertolt Brecht· 1898 CE–1956 CE
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry· 1900 CE–1944 CE
- George Orwell· 1903 CE–1950 CE
- Simone Weil· 1909 CE–1943 CE
Jewish world
Scientists
Islamic world
Buddhist world
Hindu world
Rulers world
- Winston Churchill· 1874 CE–1965 CE
- Herbert Hoover· 1874 CE–1964 CE
- Konrad Adenauer· 1876 CE–1967 CE
- Adolf Hitler· 1889 CE–1945 CE
- Hideki Tojo· 1884 CE–1948 CE
- Joseph Stalin· 1878 CE–1953 CE
- George VI· 1895 CE–1952 CE
- Ibn Saud (Abdulaziz Al Saud)· 1875 CE–1953 CE
- Franklin D. Roosevelt· 1882 CE–1945 CE
- Jawaharlal Nehru· 1889 CE–1964 CE
- Muhammad Ali Jinnah· 1876 CE–1948 CE
- Reza Shah Pahlavi· 1878 CE–1944 CE
- Harry S. Truman· 1884 CE–1972 CE
- Kemal Ataturk· 1881 CE–1938 CE
Works
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