Why I hate the Glass Bead Game

Games are designed to stimulate the mind. Chess has proved a long-lasting, peaceful substitute to, and simulation of, the brutal necessities of war. Although a simulation, games possess an inner logic which means that they can also be a substitute for reality. Addiction to computer games is now treated in clinics. Whether virtual reality/ integration is a mere game or an ontology is yet to be posed, but will be once the technology is sophisticated enough.

The glass bead game is a game of extraordinary elegance and freedom. It is an abstract rubric in which players range across human cultural history for material they can use in their 'moves.' The game is a product of a future Europe which has reached the end of its useful productive cultural life. In this way, Das Glasperlenspiel shares the cultural pessimism of Oswald Spengler, but replaces Spengler's vision of a future in which 'Caesarism' triumphs over culture with a future in which monastic-scholastic contemplation triumphs over experience. Although we do not know to what extent this monasticism exists as a general phenomenon or a peculiarity of the province in which glass bead game players study and play, the book gives us this alternative vision as a political solution to Spengler's problem, which was playing itself out in WWII as Hesse wrote the novel.

I get the feeling from Das Glasperlenspiel of a writer who has utterly repudiated his age, but who wishes to situate within it a retreat which is serene and intellectual and Spartan, and as aloof as Lhasa before the coming of the Chinese. It was published in 1943, so the age that is repudiated is the Third Reich. However, Hesse does not rejoice in the freedom that would be gained in the wake of the curtailment of the thousand-year regime, but instead replaces the discipline meted out under the swastika with a different kind of discipline. In the novel, the Castalians are the disciplined acolytes of the Game. They do not get married; they do not experience desire; they are not even creative in the ordinary sense of that word. They are merely conscientious scholars of world culture. The glass bead game itself is played under conditions of total renunciation. The world outside the kingdom of Castalia is only raised as a political threat to their monkish way of life; never as a temptation (as in, for instance, Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation, as well as most other ‘ascetic’-type communities such as the Amish). Hesse would have us believe that no one would want to go out into the world outside once they have been introduced to the purity of the Game.

As a red-blooded young man, I doubt this, but then the crux of my argument is that such renunciation is bad. But what I don't doubt is that Hesse was ill in Nietzsche’s sense. He didn’t take the Judean route - rebellion, rabble-rousing against Rome (cf. Genealogy of Morals) - but the Buddhist one. Hesse wasn't a rebel; he was an ascetic.
Hesse was physically frail - he was rejected for combat duty in the Great War - a fact which must be borne in mind when reading this novel of intellectual dislocation and disembodiment and retreat. His reaction to war was to move away from Germany to Switzerland - after the Fatherland lost the Great War, as if protesting against militarism by protesting against the distinctly non-militarist Weimar Republic was a bold gesture. Twenty years later, his plan for facing off against the Nazi regime was exactly the same as his support for Weimar - to stay exactly where he was. In Switzerland. Hesse's 'politics of detachment' was the politics of extreme individualism: 'Every Buddhist for himself'. Contrasted with that other Nazi-'detachee' Ernst Jünger, it is difficult to respect Hesse. Jünger sought inner emigration in the Wehrmacht. Hesse in cuckoo land.

Jünger's preface to the 1929 English translation of In Stahlgewittern reads:

Time only strengthens my conviction that was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart.

Experience is hot-blooded, in its heights and its depths. Murder - but so too romantic love. War - but also the beauty of self-sacrifice. Hesse's glass bead game players are the apogee of selfish individualists turned away from the world into a private contemplation. What is worse is that the glassbead game players aim low: their contemplation is not of some mystical, difficult apogee of human existence - of God, for instance - but of something much more staid - high cultural history.

The full title of the novel should be: The Glassbead Game - the torpid spiritual life of academic fantasist Joseph Knecht.