The Glass Bead Game - As Utopian Literature

As Utopian Literature

Freedman wrote in his biography of Hesse that the tensions created by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany directly contributed to the creation of the Glass Bead Game as a response to the oppressive times. "The educational province of Castalia, which provided a setting for the novel, came to resemble Hesse's childhood Swabia physically while assuming more and more the function of his adopted home, neutral Switzerland, which in turn embodied his own antidote to the crises of his time. It became the "island of love" or at least an island of the spirit." Freedman opined that in the Glass Bead Game "ontemplation, the secrets of the Chinese I Ching and Western mathematics and music fashioned the perennial conflicts of his life into a unifying design."