Heiner Hesse

Son and promoter of Hermann Hesse

Heiner Hesse, designer, illustrator and editor: born Basle, Switzerland 1 March 1909; married (four children); died Arcegno, Switzerland 7 April 2003.

Heiner Hesse was for more than 35 years the administrator of the literary estate of his father, the Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse, and collaborated in the editing of his four-volume collected letters.

He was born in Switzerland, in Basle, in 1909, the second of the three sons of the (German-born) writer and his first wife, the Basle photographer Maria (Mia) Bernoulli. He spent his earliest years in the German town of Gaienhofen on the Bodensee, but in 1912, on the death of his father's friend the painter Albert Welti, the family moved to Berne, where they lived in Welti's picturesque house on the Melchenbühlweg.

In 1916, Hesse's mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia; in the same year, his younger brother became seriously ill and his father, suffering from chronic depression, entered Jungian psychoanalysis. In 1918, Maria Hesse was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and in 1919 Hermann Hesse left the family to live in the southern Swiss village of Montagnola. Heiner, now aged 10, together with his brothers, the 14-year-old Bruno and eight-year-old Martin, was placed in the care of family friends. His parents were divorced in 1923, and in 1924 his father married the singer Ruth Wenger.

Heiner Hesse remained in Switzerland, and as a young man worked in Zurich as an interior designer and book illustrator. He is said to have resembled his father, both physically and temperamentally, more than did either of his brothers. His father died in 1962, but it was not until 1966, on the death of the writer's third wife, the writer and art historian Ninon Dolbin-Auslander, that Heiner Hesse took control of his literary estate.

This coincided with the rehabilitation of the author's works in Germany following their banning during the Nazi years, the awarding of the Nobel Prize, and their championing by Siegfried Unseld at the Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt. Hermann Hesse's novels became enormously popular in the youthful countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s. The royalties from their huge sales – some 100 million copies – allowed Heiner Hesse to devote his time to promoting his father's artistic legacy, and he remained active in doing so until the last year of his long life.

The writer had been an enthusiastic watercolourist, and Heiner Hesse brought together more than 2,000 of his artworks. He wrote a great many essays on his father's work, and, most importantly, contributed to the collection and editing of his correspondence, Gesammelte Briefe (1973-86). (A selection appeared in English translation under the title Soul of the Age in 1991.)

In recent years, he attempted to acquire the Casa Camuzzi, the little castle in Montagnola where his father had lived after leaving the family in 1919. The author had lived in the castle's tower until 1931, and had been visited there by leading figures in German literature, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. The castle is immortalised in his story Klingsor's Last Summer (Klingsors letzter Sommer, 1920), and his son wished to establish it as a museum dedicated to his memory.

His bid was not successful, and the castle was converted into a number of apartments, one of them the tower in which the writer had lived. This Hesse did acquire, and on 2 July 1997, the 120th anniversary of the writer's birth, it became Switzerland's first Hermann Hesse Museum.

Heiner Hesse died in the village of Arcegno near Ascona, close to the Swiss-Italian border. Control of Hermann Hesse's estate now passes to Heiner's eldest son, Silver.

Veronica Buckley