Editing Hermann Hesse (section)

=== Family background ===
Hermann Karl Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in the [[Black Forest]] town of [[Calw]], in [[Kingdom of Württemberg|Württemberg]], [[German Empire]]. His grandparents served in India at a mission under the auspices of the [[Basel Mission]], a Protestant Christian missionary society. His grandfather [[Hermann Gundert]] compiled a [[Malayalam]] grammar and a Malayalam-English dictionary, and also contributed to a translation of the Bible into Malayalam in [[South India]].<ref>{{cite book | url=https://archive.org/details/amalayalamanden00gundgoog | page=[https://archive.org/details/amalayalamanden00gundgoog/page/n50 14] | title=A Malayalam and English Dictionary| publisher=C. Stolz | last1=Gundert| first1=Hermann| year=1872}}</ref> Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born at such a mission in South India in 1842. In describing her own childhood, she said, "A happy child I was not ...". As was usual among missionaries at the time, she was left behind in Europe at the age of four when her parents returned to India.<ref>{{Citation | last = Gundert | first = Adele |trans-title=Marie Hesse: A life picture in letters and diaries | language = de | title = Marie Hesse: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebuchern}} as quoted in Freedman (1978) pp. 18–19.</ref>

[[File:Hermann Hesse House.JPG|thumb|Hesse's birthplace in Calw, 2007]]

Hesse's father, Johannes Hesse, the son of a doctor, was born in 1847 in [[Paide|Weissenstein]], [[Governorate of Estonia]] in the [[Russian Empire]] (now Paide, [[Estonia]]). His son Hermann was at birth a dual citizen of the German Empire and the Russian Empire.<ref>{{Citation | title = Weltbürger – Hermann Hesses übernationales und multikulturelles Denken und Wirken | language = de |trans-title=Hermann Hesse's international and multicultural thinking and work | type = exhibition | publisher = Hermann-Hesse-Museum | place = City of Calw | date = 2 July 2009 – 7 February 2010}}.</ref> Hermann had five siblings, but two of them died in infancy. In 1873, the Hesse family moved to Calw, where Johannes worked for Calwer Verlagsverein, a publishing house specializing in theological texts and schoolbooks. Marie's father, [[Hermann Gundert]] (also the namesake of his grandson), managed the publishing house at the time, and Johannes Hesse succeeded him in 1893.

Hesse grew up in a [[Swabia]]n [[Pietism|Pietist]] household, with the Pietist tendency to insulate believers into small, deeply thoughtful groups. Furthermore, Hesse described his father's Baltic German heritage as "an important and potent fact" of his developing identity. His father, Hesse stated, "always seemed like a very polite, very foreign, lonely, little-understood guest".<ref name="autogenerated414">{{Citation | first = Hermann | last = Hesse | title = Briefe | language = de |trans-title=Letters | place = Frankfurt am Main | publisher = Verlag Suhrkamp | year = 1964 | page = 414}}.</ref> His father's tales from Estonia instilled a contrasting sense of religion in young Hermann. "[It was] an exceedingly cheerful, and, for all its Christianity, a merry world ... We wished for nothing so longingly as to be allowed to see this Estonia ... where life was so paradisiacal, so colourful and happy."  Hesse's sense of estrangement from the Swabian petite bourgeoisie grew further through his relationship with his maternal grandmother Julie Gundert, née Dubois, whose French-Swiss heritage kept her from ever quite fitting in among that milieu.<ref name="autogenerated414" />