The Journey to the East is an obscure novel telling of an eccentric secret league of artists, philosophers, writers, and others that surpasses time and space, and is engaged in a meandering journey that appears to have no definite goal. In easy, intriguing prose, Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East tells of a journey, both geographic and spiritual. H.H., a German choirmaster, is invited on an excursion with the League, a secret society. The parties transit both space and time, encountering Noah's Ark in Zurich and Don Quixote at Bremgarten. The pilgrims' ultimate terminus is the East, the "Home of the Light," where they desire to find spiritual revival. Yet the concord that supervised at the beginning of the trip soon worsens into an opening conflict. Each traveller finds the rest of the group unbearable and heads off in his direction, with H.H. bitterly accusing the others for the collapse of the journey. It is only long after the trip while poring over catalogues in the League archives, that H.H. uncovers his role in the abolishment of the group and the sinister importance of the expedition itself.
Author
Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946. Other best-known works of this poet, novelist, and painter include The Glass Bead Game , which, also known as Magister Ludi, explore a search of an individual for spirituality outside society. In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country, received enthusiastically Peter Camenzind , first great novel of Hesse. Throughout Germany, people named many schools. In 1964, people founded the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis, awarded biennially, alternately to a German-language literary journal or to the translator of work of Hesse to a foreign language. The city of Karlsruhe, Germany, also associates a Hermann Hesse prize.
