"
Strange News
" is a collection of newly translated fairy tales written by
Hermann Hesse
during
World War One
. The book, which is a
Collector's Item
contains:
Strange News from Another Star
,
Faldum
Iris
Fine Dream Sequence
A Difficult Path
The Poet
Augustus
, and
Flute Dream
. The book title was inspired by Hesse's timeless classic "
".
Hesse
wrote this short fairy tale in April 1915, one year after the start of the
First World War
. At the time of writing,
was working as an
army nurse
tending to wounded soldiers. In the fairy tale, two stars are juxtaposed.
On one star
, life is valued, beauty is appreciated, reason is respected, humane traditions are cultivated, love and happiness are experienced and peace prevails.
On the other star
, jealousy, hatred and despair are cultivated, wars are waged incessantly, battlefield murder is officially condoned, the countryside is left strewn with unattended cadavers and fear prevails. The latter is clearly our world as
saw it, rendered mythical, and the former is an idealized world that ours could be. Unlike his earlier works, the story does not lend itself to rational interpretation. It is essentially a fairy tale dealing with the subconscious, magic and the dream world. The fairy tale represents an intermediate stage between
's initial ambiguous stance to the war, as an internationalist who tolerated war and a pacifist who looked forward to a German victory, and his later active anti-war campaign. Later in his life,
changed his initial naive view, that the war is nobody's fault and that it occurs by itself. He came to acknowledge the detrimental role that the military-industrial complex plays in promoting wars, a view that brought him into conflict with supporters of the war, his country and its government. Looking at the world today, seeing military conflicts raging in many pockets around the globe, with no discernible reason or end strategies in sight, while daily life goes on as usual around us, we tend to appreciate
's prophetic and timeless vision.