Hesse’s Wives

Hermann Hesse is one of the world’s most widely-read authors. His works, including such canonical fixtures as Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, sell more than one million copies each year. His books are praised, his personal life examined and discussed, and yet little is known about his wives.

As Ruth Wenger, Hesse’s second wife, bitterly wrote, almost half a century after their divorce: »In every biography, the meaning I had in Hermann Hesse’s life was hushed up, erased, silenced.«

Supported by documents from the estate, including several unpublished letters, Bärbel Reetz delves into the lives of Hermann Hesse’s wives: the photographer Maria Bernoulli, the singer Ruth Wenger, and the art historian Ninon Dolbin-Ausländer.

Though each of these women shared a portion of his life, Hesse swept through them almost recklessly, and their imprints upon each other have been similarly swept from history. Maria Bernoulli, Hesse’s first wife and mother of his three sons, wrote to a friend, »I don’t feel connected to him anymore. I could never again submit to his superiority. That’s all over; now he only has meaning for me as a writer.«

As she penned these lines in March of 1925, Hesse had been married for ten months to the singer Ruth Wenger, a woman twenty years younger than himself, whom he divorced in 1927. Four years later, he would marry Ninon Dolbin-Ausländer.

Through the portraits of the women he loved and ultimately pushed aside, Bärbel Reetz offers an incisive look into a so far little-explored facet of Hermann Hesse himself.