Knulp

"Drop-out: detach yourself from the external social drama which is as dehydrated and ersatz as TV. Turn-on: find a sacrament which returns you to the Temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high. Tune-in: be reborn. Drop-back-in to express it. Start a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision." Timothy Leary Hermann Hesse wrote Knulp in 1915, one year after the break of the First World War. He was still living in Germany at the time and was assigned to service involving the care of prisoners of war. Being a pacifist, Hesse thought that his best means of protest was civil disobedience, to drop out, to actively refuse to obey the laws of the state or the demands of the dysfunctional society that caused and cheered the war. Being an artist, Hesse created Knulp, his free spirited alter ego who went on a life-long mission of passive civil disobedience. One of the first Make Love Not War anti-war heroes. Knulp was an eternal drifter, a true drop-out of an earlier time. A Big Lebowski of some sort. When Knulp was first published in Germany, it became an instant hit and was Hesse's most popular book in the years before he published Demian. During the 1950's, the book was influential on Jack Kerouac author of "On the Road" and "The Dharma Bums" as well as other Beat Generation authors. During the 1960s and 1970's, Hermann Hesse became a cult hero among young American readers and, in 1968, the Californian rock group Steppenwolf, which was named after Hesse's other classic, released Born to be Wild, which was featured in Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper's film Easy Rider. Today, the winds of war are gathering momentum again, and the one percenters are preparing to send us to slaughter. A simple press of a bottom or an obtuse tweet and we all may end in a Virtual Nightmare.

About the Author :
Hermann Hesse, who is ranked with the great masters of contemporary literature, was born in Wurttemberg in 1877. He intended to follow in the footsteps of his father, a Protestant pastor and missionary, but rebelled against traditional academic education and worked as a bookseller, antique dealer and mechanic. After his first novel, Peter Camenzind, was published in 1904 he devoted himself to writing. In 1919, as a protest against German militarism, he moved to Switzerland, where he lived in self-imposed exile until his death in 1962. Hesse was strongly influenced by his interest in music, the psychoanalytic theories of Jung, and Eastern thought. He wrote: "My political faith is that of a democrat, my world outlook that of an individualist." Hesse's best-known works include Knulp, Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Klinsor's Last Summer, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. In 1946, Hermann Hesse received the Nobel Prize in Literature.