My second contribution to German Literature Month (hosted by Lizzy Siddal) after A Simple Intervention by Yael Inokai. This was my first time reading the German-Swiss Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse (1877–1962). I had heard of his novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, of course, but didn’t know about any of his shorter works before I picked this up from the Little Free Library last month. Knulp is a novella in three stories that provide complementary angles on the title character, a carefree vagabond whose rambling years are coming to an end.

“Early Spring” has a first-person plural narrator, opening “Once, early in the nineties, our friend Knulp had to go to hospital for several weeks.” Upon his discharge he stays with an old friend, the tanner Rothfuss, and spends his time visiting other local tradespeople and casually courting a servant girl. Knulp is a troubadour, writing poems and songs. Without career, family, or home, he lives in childlike simplicity.

He had seldom been arrested and never convicted of theft or mendicancy, and he had highly respected friends everywhere. Consequently, he was indulged by the authorities very much, as a nice-looking cat is indulged in a household, and left free to carry on an untroubled, elegant, splendidly aristocratic and idle existence.

“My Recollections of Knulp” is narrated by a friend who joined him as a tramp for a few weeks one midsummer. It wasn’t all music and jollity; Knulp also pondered the essential loneliness of the human condition in view of mortality. “His conversation was often heavy with philosophy, but his songs had the lightness of children playing in their summer clothes.”

In “The End,” Knulp encounters another school friend, Dr. Machold, who insists on sheltering the wayfarer. They’re in their forties but Knulp seems much older because he is ill with tuberculosis. As winter draws in, he resists returning to the hospital, wanting to die as he lived, on his own terms. The book closes with an extraordinary passage in which Knulp converses with God – or his hallucination of such – expressing his regret that he never made more of his talents or had a family. ‘God’ speaks these beautiful words of reassurance:

Look, I wanted you the way you are and no different. You were a wanderer in my name and wherever you went you brought the settled folk a little homesickness for freedom. In my name, you did silly things and people scoffed at you; I myself was scoffed at in you and loved in you. You are my child and my brother and a part of me. There is nothing you have enjoyed and suffered that I have not enjoyed and suffered with you.

I struggle with episodic fiction but have a lot of time for the theme of spiritual questioning. The seasons advance across the stories so that Knulp’s course mirrors the year’s. Knulp could almost be a rehearsal for Stoner: a spare story of the life and death of an Everyman. That I didn’t appreciate it more I put down to the piecemeal nature of the narrative and an unpleasant conversation between Knulp and Machold about adolescent sexual experiences – as in the attempted gang rape scene in Cider with Rosie, it’s presented as boyish fun when part of what Knulp recalls is actually molestation by an older girl cousin. I might be willing to try something else by Hesse. Do give me recommendations! (Little Free Library)

Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim.

[125 pages]

Mini playlist:

1. “Ramblin’ Man” by Lemon Jelly
2. “I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash
3. “Rambling Man” by Laura Marling
4. “Ballad of a Broken Man” by Duke Special
5. “Railroad Man” by Eels

I have also recently read a 2025 release that counts towards these challenges, The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler (Europa Editions; translated by Katy Derbyshire; 192 pages). The protagonist, Robert Simon [Robert S., eh? Coincidence?], is not unlike Knulp, though less blithe, or the unassuming Bob Burgess from Elizabeth Strout’s novels (e.g., Tell Me Everything). Robert takes over the market café in Vienna and over the next decade or so his establishment becomes a haven for the troubled. The Second World War still looms large, and disasters large and small unfold. It’s all rather melancholy; I admired the chapters that turn the customers’ conversation into a swirling chorus. In my review, pending for Foreword Reviews, I call it “a valedictory meditation on the passage of time and the bonds that last.”