Pseudonyms of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), Nobel Prize Novelist (1946): Were they alternate personalities? Do they imply he had multiple personality?

As discussed in many past posts in regard to various writers (search “pseudonyms”), pseudonyms may be the names of alternate personalities. However, when female authors have used pseudonyms, there has been a tendency to explain it as an avoidance of gender discrimination, even when they continue to use the pseudonym after everyone knows who they are. And when male authors have used pseudonyms, the reason given is sometimes silly; for example, that Samuel Clemens called himself Mark Twain because he liked the steamboat navigational term.

Pseudonyms, in and of themselves, don’t prove anything, but it is reasonable to at least consider multiple personality when you see the following:

“Hinterlassene Schriften und Gedichte von Hermann Lauscher  [Hidden writings and poems by Hermann Lauscher] ostensibly edited by H. Hesse, appeared in December 1900. This was the first of a number of times that Hesse resorted to this type of subterfuge. When he published his Demian in 1919, he used the pseudonym Emil Sinclair. In 1927 he purported to be the editor of Der Steppenwolf, a manuscript left to him by a vagrant Harry Haller. And in 1943 he appeared as the editor of Das Glasperlenspiel [The Glass Bead Game] the biography and literary remains of Josef Knecht, another manuscript which had fortuitously fallen into his possession. Hesse’s reasons for this artifice varied from instance to instance” (1, p. 20).

Meng Hsiä was “a kind of pseudonym or Chinese mask Hesse assumed in his later years when he wanted to convey a special message. Meng Hsiä means ‘dream writer’ ” (2, p. 330).

1. Joseph Mileck. Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography, Volume 1. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1977.

2. Hermann Hesse. Soul of the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse, 1891-1962. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.