Hermann Hesse's "Die Morgenlandfahrt" and the servant leadership concept

In his story "Die Morgenlandfahrt", the German writer Hermann Hesse creates a special image of service. From this, the American thinker Robert K. Greenleaf developed the idea of servant leadership. According to this, a leader who enjoys the trust of their followers is first and foremost a servant.

From Prof. Dr. Patrick PetersVice-Rector for Research and Teaching Material Development at the Allensbach University

The German writer and Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse (1877 to 1962) is known to a wider audience primarily for his novel "The Steppenwolf", published in 1927, and his stories "Siddhartha" and "Narcissus and Goldmund". However, hardly anyone knows that Hermann Hesse influenced a particular leadership concept with his story "Die Morgenlandfahrt". This goes back to the American Robert K. Greenleaf, one of the most important personalities in the fields of leadership, education and management. In 1977, Greenleaf wrote the book "Servant Leadership", in which he suggested that a leader who enjoys the trust of his or her followers is first and foremost a servant. To be a true servant leader, one must simply serve.

"Die Morgenlandfahrt" is about a group of people who embark on a spiritual journey to the Orient in search of knowledge and inner fulfillment. This secret covenant of the Oriental travelers is just as fairytale-like as the entire constellation of the story: the Oriental travelers roam Swabia, Italy and the Orient, spend the night in the tenth century, stay with patriarchs and fairies and meet literary figures such as Parzival and Klingsor from the Middle Ages, encounter Hohenstaufen crown guards who want to capture the covenant for the conquest of Sicily, Irish monks and Spanish knights.

Servant is the chief of the chiefs of the covenant

The figure of the servant Leo is crucial to the development of servant leadership. He accompanies the Oriental travelers quietly and calmly and one day simply disappears. As a result, the covenant falls into a serious crisis and the travelers lose faith and confidence. And the main character H.H., a musician and actually a loyal member of the covenant, also has such doubts that he leaves the covenant. However, he wants to tell the story of the covenant, which he does not succeed in doing adequately, so he sets off in search of the servant Leo, whom he eventually finds and who turns out to be the head of the covenant's superiors. After a personal purification process, H.H. is accepted back into the covenant and recognizes his own transgressions in his "desperate, stupid, narrow-minded, suicidal life" (Hesse 2021, p. 90) of the past years.

Service is the law

At the heart of the covenant is the concept of service, which the main character H.H. only understands late on, but which Leo - the highest who makes himself the lowest - lives by continuously. For Leo, service is a law: "What wants to live long must serve. But what wants to rule does not live long. [...] There are few who are born to rule; they remain happy and healthy. But the others, who have made themselves masters merely through nerdiness, they all end in nothingness." (Hesse 2021, p. 34) The fact that the Morgenland journey ends so tragically and desperately after the disappearance of the servant-leader Leo can only mean that with the loss of the servant, the inner structure and the actual cohesion of the group has also been broken: "'It was the absence of the servant Leo that suddenly and cruelly revealed to us the abysses of disunity and helplessness, which tore apart our hitherto apparently so solid cohesion'" (Hesse 2021, pp. 97f.), the main character reads in another report on the unfortunate events in the gorge of Morbio Inferiore.

The leader was first a servant

So how does Robert K. Greenleaf derive his Servant Leadership idea from the literary work? He begins by writing, "[F]or me, this story clearly says that the great leader is seen first and foremost as a servant, and that simple fact is the key to his greatness. Leo was actually the leader all along, but he was a servant first because that's what he was deep down. The leadership role was given to a man who was a servant by nature. It was something given or assumed that could be taken away. His servant nature was the real man, not given, not assumed and not to be taken away. He was first a servant." (Greenleaf n.d., p. 2)

Definition of servant leadership

This brings us to a definition of servant leadership (based on Spears 1996 and Smith 2005). With its supposedly obvious conceptual contradiction of servant leadership, the model invites us to rethink the nature of leadership. Servant leadership is a new kind of leadership model - a model that puts service to others first. Servant leadership also emphasizes a holistic approach to work, fostering a sense of community and sharing power in decision-making. Servant leadership begins when a leader assumes the position of a servant in interactions with his or her followers. It challenges organizations to rethink the relationships between people, organizations and society as a whole and questions the institution's ability to provide human services.

Only a community in which individuals are responsible for each other can fulfill this function. Effective servant leadership is best demonstrated by cultivating servant leadership in others. By fostering a participative, empowering environment and encouraging the talents of followers, the servant leader creates a more effective, motivated workforce and ultimately a more successful organization.

Focus on the process of serving

This means that servant leadership is a philosophy and a set of practices that enrich the lives of individuals, build better organizations and ultimately create a more just and cohesive world. The ten principles of servant leadership are therefore: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, conviction, conceptualization, foresight, accountability, commitment to growth and community. The central constructs of servant leadership include an innate value and desire to serve, the willingness to act on this desire and the trust of those being led. The leader's foresight and ability to apply this knowledge constructively when given the opportunity are derived from their ethics and are a fundamental component.

This results in the following premises for servant leadership:

The leader is a servant first. It starts with the natural feeling of wanting to serve first.
The servant first ensures that the priority needs of others are met.
Success is when those who are served become healthier, freer, more autonomous and wiser and thus become servants themselves.
A servant can only become a leader if the leader remains a servant.

Humility is needed for real advancement

Greenleaf wants to express that serving and leading are not opposites. The aptitude for leadership arises from the willingness to serve. As we can see from the example of Leo ("the former servant and porter" (Hesse 2021, p. 85)) in "Die Morgenlandfahrt", leadership is a special category of service. Humility is needed in business in order to rise to the upper echelons. H.H. recognizes that his endeavour to write a history of the covenant, which he did not understand, was "namelessly foolish, namelessly ridiculous" (Hesse 2021, p. 83) and that he, "withered to a speck of dust" (Hesse 2021, p. 83), rises anew from this self-knowledge:

"But I was even more moved, shocked, dismayed and delighted by the great discovery of that day: that the covenant was as unshaken and powerful as ever, that it was not Leo and not the covenant that had abandoned and disappointed me, but that I alone had been so weak and so foolish as to misinterpret my own experiences, to doubt the covenant, to regard the journey to the Orient as a failure, and to consider myself the survivor and chronicler of a history that had come to an end and faded into the sand, while I was nothing but a runaway, a deserter who had become unfaithful." (Hesse 2021, p. 85f.)

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This article appears as a shortened preliminary version of an article by the author in the Journal for Interdisciplinary Economic Research Allensbach University of Applied Sciences Konstanz in December 2023.

Greenleaf, Robert K. (n.d.): The Servant as Leader. Accessed on June 20, 2023 at http://www.ediguys.net/Robert_K_Greenleaf_The_Servant_as_Leader.pdf.

Hesse, Hermann (2021): The journey to the Orient. 20th edition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag.

Smith, Carol (2005): Servant Leadership: The Leadership Theory of Robert K. Greenleaf. Accessed on June 20, 2023 at https://www.boyden.com/media/just-what-the-doctor-ordered-15763495/Leadership%20%20Theory_Greenleaf%20Servant%20Leadership.pdf.

Spears, Larry (1996): Reflections on Robert K. Greenleaf and servant-leadership. In: Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 17(7), pp. 33-35.