"For all differences between north and south, between urban and rural, between epic narrator and lyric confessor, between sophisticated cosmopolite and briskly recluse, Hesse and Mann shared a common experience that provided the basis for their eventual feeling of colleagueship. Reduced to its simplest terms, this experience was based on the insight that their common bourgeois heritage….was exhausted…. According to their diagnosis, it was an unthinking alliance to outmoded and sterile bourgeois ideals that enable the “law and order” mentality of the fascist so easily to take over in Europe. In opposition to that mentality ..Hesse and Mann proclaimed their faith in a humanism predicated upon belief in the integrity of the individual”

From the Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski