Hesse's debut book. The novel uniquely describes the subterranean anxieties of the youth who sacrificed themselves at the slaughter of the Great War, between fatuous well-being, the absence of a future and the waiting of history. The genius, in all the manifold manifestations of the mind, finds in its perennial actuality one of its fundamental postulates. The book was a publishing case that shocked Europe: the young people who had returned from the great war saw themselves represented so well and with such accuracy that they believed that the author, precisely under a pseudonym, was their contemporary, one as their survivor of the carnage of trench. The work was welcomed by an almost unanimous consensus even in the swampy milieu of continental culture: Thomas Mann called it a small masterpiece, regretting that it could not contact that mysterious author hidden under a false name. A book that attempts an existential path very similar to what we are looking for today.
