I was born in Calw in the Black Forest
on July 2, 1877. My father, a Baltic German, came from Estonia;
my mother was the daughter of a Swabian and a French Swiss.
My father's father was a doctor, my mother's father a missionary
and Indologist. My father, too, had been a missionary in
India for a short while, and my mother had spent several
years of her youth in India and had done missionary work
there.
My childhood in Calw was interrupted
by several years of living in Basle (1880-86). My family
had been composed of different nationalities; to this was
now added the experience of growing up among two different
peoples, in two countries with their different dialects.
I spent most of my school years in
boarding schools in Wuerttemberg and some time in the theological
seminary of the monastery at Maulbronn. I was a good learner,
good at Latin though only fair at Greek, but I was not a
very manageable boy, and it was only with difficulty that
I fitted into the framework of a pietist education that
aimed at subduing and breaking the individual personality.
From the age of twelve I wanted to be a poet, and since
there was no normal or official road, I had a hard time
deciding what to do after leaving school. I left the seminary
and grammar school, became an apprentice to a mechanic,
and at the age of nineteen I worked in book and antique
shops in Tübingen and Basle. Late in 1899 a tiny volume
of my poems appeared in print, followed by other small publications
that remained equally unnoticed, until in 1904 the novel
Peter Camenzind, written in Basle and set in Switzerland,
had a quick success. I gave up selling books, married a
woman from Basle, the mother of my sons, and moved to the
country. At that time a rural life, far from the cities
and civilization, was my aim. Since then I have always lived
in the country, first, until 1912, in Gaienhofen on Lake
Constance, later near Bern, and finally in Montagnola near
Lugano, where I am still living.
Soon after I settled in Switzerland
in 1912, the First World War broke out, and each year brought
me more and more into conflict with German nationalism;
ever since my first shy protests against mass suggestion
and violence I have been exposed to continuous attacks and
floods of abusive letters from Germany. The hatred of the
official Germany, culminating under Hitler, was compensated
for by the following I won among the young generation that
thought in international and pacifist terms, by the friendship
of Romain Rolland, which lasted until his death, as well
as by the sympathy of men who thought like me even in countries
as remote as India and Japan. In Germany I have been acknowledged
again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed
by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet
been republished there.
In 1923, I resigned German and acquired
Swiss citizenship. After the dissolution of my first marriage
I lived alone for many years, then I married again. Faithful
friends have put a house in Montagnola at my disposal.
Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often
went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since
then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I
have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.
I survived the years of the Hitler
regime and the Second World War through the eleven years
of work that I spent on the Glasperlenspiel (1943) [Magister
Ludi], a novel in two volumes. Since the completion of that
long book, an eye disease and increasing sicknesses of old
age have prevented me from engaging in larger projects.
Of the Western philosophers, I have
been influenced most by Plato, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and
Nietzsche as well as the historian Jacob Burckhardt. But
they did not influence me as much as Indian and, later,
Chinese philosophy. I have always been on familiar and friendly
terms with the fine arts, but my relationship to music has
been more intimate and fruitful. It is found in most of
my writings. My most characteristic books in my view are
the poems (collected edition, Zürich, 1942), the stories
Knulp (1915), Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Der Steppenwolf
(1927) [Steppenwolf], Narziss und Goldmund. (1930), Die
Morgenlandfahrt (1932) [The Journey to the East], and Das
Glasperlenspiel (1943) [Magister Ludi]. The volume Gedenkblätter
(1937, enlarged ed. 1962) [Reminiscences] contains a good
many autobiographical things. My essays on political topics
have recently been published in Zürich under the title
Krieg und Frieden (1946) [War and Peace].
I ask you, gentlemen, to be contented
with this very sketchy outline; the state of my health does
not permit me to be more comprehensive. 
Prémio
Nobel de Literatura de 1946