»Mein lieber Brüdi!«

Brüdi - that's how Martin, Hermann Hesse's youngest son, was called by the family.

When Hermann Hesse left his family in April 1919 to live an unattached life in Ticino on the south side of the Alps, his three sons were sent to foster families or to a home. A shock especially for Martin, just seven years old. Like Hesse's first wife Mia, who was repeatedly institutionalised due to a manic-depressive illness, Martin suffered from this mental illness, which probably ultimately led to his suicide in 1968.
The correspondence that began in 1919 and continued until Hermann Hesse's death in 1962 is an impressive document of a rapprochement between father and son, an attempt to rebuild lost trust through correspondence.
Here Hermann Hesse gradually finds his way back to the role of father he had initially refused to play. Father and son speak more and more openly of their unfulfilled hopes and growing doubts about life. Martin, the most artistically gifted and at the same time most unstable of the sons, who becomes a photographer, confesses: "I'm in the darkroom a lot, more than I'd like to be." Martin's photographs of his father, taken over decades and becoming icons, bear witness to a rediscovered closeness.
The correspondence is not only an event in biographical terms. The conversation between the two also creates a history of everyday life in Switzerland from 1919 to 1962.