Read Online Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse - Free Book Online Page B

farmers’ sons from city boys, the well-to-do from the poor. The sons of the truly wealthy of course entered the academy only rarely, a fact that let you make an inference about their pride, the deeper wisdom of their parents, or about the innate talent of their children—as the case might be. Nonetheless, a number of professors and higher officials, remembering their own years at the monastery, sent their sons to Maulbronn. Thus you could detect many differences in cloth and cut among the forty-odd black-suited boys. What differentiated them even more clearly from one another were their manners, dialects and bearing. There were lanky fellows from the Black Forest, who had an awkward gait; strutting youths from the Alb; flaxen-haired, wide-mouthed, nimble lowlanders with free and easy manners; well-dressed Stuttgarters with pointed shoes and a degenerate—I mean, overly refined—accent. Approximately one-fifth of this select group wore spectacles. One, a slight, almost elegant mother’s boy from Stuttgart, wore a stiff felt hat and behaved very politely; he was completely unaware that his unusual decorousness had already laid the ground for future ribbing and bullying from the more daring of his companions.
    A more discerning observer could certainly see that this timid little group represented a fair cross section of the youth of the land. Alongside a number of perfectly average faces, those you could spot as earnest drudges even from a distance, you discovered no lack of delicate or sturdy heads behind whose smooth brows presumably existed the still half-asleep dream of a higher life. Perhaps there was among their number one of those clever and stubborn Swabians who would push his way into the mainstream of life and make his ideas, inevitably somewhat dry and narrowly individualistic, the focal point of a new and mighty system. For Swabia supplies the world not only with a fair number of well-prepared theologians but is also graced with a traditional aptitude for philosophical speculation that on more than one occasion has produced noteworthy prophets, not to mention false prophets. And so this productive land, whose politically great tradition has long since passed, still exerts its influence on the world if only through the disciplines of theology and philosophy. You will also find that the people in general are endowed with an age-old taste for beautiful form and for poetry that from time to time has given birth to poets and versifiers of the first order.
    Nothing specifically Swabian could be observed in the outward customs and furnishings of the academy in Maulbronn. On the contrary, side by side with the Latin names left over from the time when it had served as a monastery, a number of new classical labels had been affixed. The students’ rooms were labeled Forum, Hellas, Athens, Sparta, Acropolis, and the fact that the last and smallest was called Germania seemed to signify a good reason for transforming the Germanic present, if possible, into a Greco-Roman utopia. Yet even these designations were merely decorative—Hebrew names would have been just as scholastically appropriate. As chance would have it, the study called Athens was allotted not to the most articulate and free-spirited boys but to a handful of honest dullards; Sparta did not house warriors or ascetics, but a bunch of happy-go-lucky students who lived off-campus. Hans Giebenrath and nine other pupils were assigned to Hellas.
    Contrary to his expectations, a surprisingly strange feeling gripped his heart when he entered this cool, sparse dormitory with the nine others for the first time and lay down in his narrow schoolboy’s bed. A big kerosene lamp dangled from the ceiling. You undressed in its red glow. At a quarter to ten it was extinguished by the proctor. There they lay now, one bed beside the other, between every second bed a stool with clothes on it. Along one of the pillars hung the cord which rang the morning