Klein and Wagner

Humans fear many things; they fear pain, and the judges who condemn them, they fear the pain in their hearts, they fear sleep and wakefulness, they fear being alone, they fear the cold, madness, and death, and most especially they fear death, which is the greatest terror. But all these things are nothing but masks and veils hiding one thing only that we should fear, which is our fear of giving up what we possess, to fear the leap, a daring leap into the unknown, and to take one step beyond all the deceptive appearances of certainty that surround us. Kleiner and Wagner, a deep psychological novella from the early works of the Swiss-German author, Nobel laureate in literature, Hermann Hesse, written in 1919, and first published in Berlin in 1920. It serves as a prelude to Hesse's subsequent novels.