“He held all these books in his hands – that makes you think,” Dettwiler comments. Bern has not only much of his correspondence, but also 6,000 books from the library Hesse built up over the years in his home in the village of Montagnola in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino. This is where Hesse’s papers are stored, along with much else. On this hot summer’s day, it is refreshingly cool six floors underground in the archives housed in the Swiss National Library. Hesse himself kept 40,000 letters he had been sent. The archive receives a steady stream of postcards and letters that have turned up in attics and old chests by people whose families had contact of some kind with the famous writer. The donation came from the grandson of family who regularly put up Hesse in their home in Zurich in the 1920s and 1930s. He points to a collection of around 50 postcards and letters that are mostly of a practical nature, dealing with such matters as forwarding post and his woollen socks. "We received this donation in July from the United States,” Lukas Dettwiler, who has looked after the Hesse archives since 2003, tells swissinfo.ch. Hesse spent much of his life in Switzerland, which is also where he died and is buried. Part of his correspondence is held in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.
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