Read Online Klingsor's Last Summer by Hermann Hesse - Free Book Online

continued to show him his branded, distraught criminal’s face, several times he had been forced to imagine this fourfold murder, or rather he had desperately fended off this wild and horrible vision, as it had then seemed to him. At those very times the thoughts, dreams, and torments had begun within him which, he now believed, had led by and by to the embezzlement and his flight. Perhaps—it was possible—not just the growing and ultimately intense dislike for his wife and his marital life had driven him from home, but even more the fear that one day he might after all commit this far more dreadful crime: might kill them all, slaughter them, and see them lying in their blood. And there was more to it: this fantasy too had its background. It had come to him now and then like a slight dizzy spell that makes you think you must let go and drop to the floor. But the vision, the image of the murders in his mind, sprang from a particular source. Incredible that he was only realizing that now.
    At the time, when the obsessional idea of killing his family had first gripped him, and he had been frightened to death by this diabolical vision, a trivial recollection had come to him, as if to mock him. It was this: Years ago, when his life was still harmless, almost happy, he and some office associates had begun discussing the horrible crime of a south German schoolteacher named W. (he could not recall the name right off) who had butchered his entire family in a horribly bloody way and then taken his own life. The question had been raised to what extent a man who did such a thing was responsible for his actions and whether there was any understanding and explaining such an act, such a gruesome explosion of human atrociousness. The subject had upset Klein greatly, and when one of his associates had attempted to give a psychological explanation of the killing Klein had exclaimed with extreme vehemence that faced with such an atrocious crime the only possible attitude for a decent man was outrage and abhorrence; such a deed could be conceived only in the brain of a devil, and no punishment, no tribunal, no torture could be harsh enough for a criminal of this type. He still recalled precisely the table at which they had been sitting, and the astounded, somewhat critical look with which that older associate had glanced at him after this outburst.
    Later, when he for the first time saw himself lost in a hideous fantasy of being the murderer of his family, and had shuddered away from the thought, he had at once recollected that discussion about the murderer W., although it had taken place years before. And strangely, although he could have sworn that at the time he had expressed his truest feelings with complete sincerity, there was now an ugly inner voice mockingly calling out to him: even then, even then, years ago, during the talk about the schoolteacher W., you understood his act in your heart, understood and approved it, and your outrage and agitation sprang only from your own philistine, hypocritical refusal to admit what you really knew inwardly. Those terrible punishments and tortures he had wished upon the murderer, the outrage with which he had reviled the man’s act, had really been directed against himself, against the germ of crime which undoubtedly had been present in him at the time. His intense agitation throughout this whole incident had its source solely in the fact that he saw himself in prison, accused of the murders, and that he was trying to salve his conscience by invoking on himself the charge and the verdict. As if by flaying himself he could punish or drive out the secret criminality within his own being.
    Klein reached this point in his thoughts, and felt that something terribly important for him was involved, in fact life itself. But it was inexpressibly toilsome to unravel these memories and thoughts and to put them into some kind of order. A faint forewarning of ultimate, redeeming insights underlay