This is another entry in a series of reflections connecting literary passages to leadership concepts.

Herr Joseph Giebenrath, jobber and middleman, possessed no laudable or peculiar traits distinguishing him from his fellow townsmen. Like the majority, he was endowed with a sturdy and healthy body, a knack for business and an unabashed, heartfelt veneration of money; not to mention a small house and garden, a family plot in the cemetery, a more or less enlightened if threadbare attachment to the church, an appropriate respect for God and the authorities, and blind submission to the inflexible laws of bourgeois respectability. Though no teetotaler, he never drank to excess; though engaged in more than one questionable deal, he never transgressed the limits of what was legally permitted. He despised those poorer than himself as have-nots and those wealthier as show-offs. He belonged to the Chamber of Commerce and every Friday went bowling at the Eagle. He smoked only cheap cigars, reserving a better brand for after-dinner and Sundays. […] The “sensitive” side of his personality had long since corroded and now consisted of little more than a traditional rough-and-ready “family sense,” pride in his only son, and an occasional charitable impulse toward the poor. His intellectual gifts were limited to an inborn canniness and dexterity with figures. His reading was confined to the newspapers, and his need for amusement was assuaged by the amateur theatricals the Chamber of Commerce put on each year and an occasional visit to the circus. He could have exchanged his name and address with any of his neighbors, and nothing would have been different. In common with every other paterfamilias in town, and deeply ingrained in his soul, he also had this: deep-seated distrust of any power or person superior to himself, and animosity toward anyone who was either extraordinary or more gifted, sensitive or intelligent than he.

Enough of him. It would require a profound satirist to represent the shallowness and unconscious tragedy of this man’s life. But he had a son, and there’s more to be said about him.

– Beneath the Wheel, Herman Hesse

Herr Giebenrath is not a tyrant or an evil villain. He is somehow worse—beige, forgettable, and passionate about insignificance. Hesse’s description is so precise that it doesn’t require embellishment. Giebenrath had no exceptional qualities. He could have swapped names with any man in town, and no one would have noticed. He lived as expected. That was the problem. In fact, it’s the fatal flaw, but not for him, but for his son.

Hesse cuts the cord with a single sentence: “Enough of him.”

It’s a quiet indictment. Not only of mediocrity, but of passivity. Giebenrath is not wicked. He simply allows the dominant values around him—propriety, modest advancement, polite constraint—to shape his entire horizon, even as he is proud when his son starts to peer beyond it. His son is bright and curious. That’s what ruins him.

What makes this passage so uncomfortable is how reasonable Giebenrath seems. He does what most people would do in his position. And that’s exactly Hesse’s point. The tragic turn in the book involves the tension between this rational simplicity and the blazing vibrancy of his son. While we’d like to say “enough of him” and truly be done with such a character, we find that the presence of this passionate mediocrity is as persistent and inescapable as gravity.

Tyranny, as we brought up earlier, is a perversion of a good. In this case, it would be the perversion of the ambitious use of power. The man that Hesse describes here is not even a perversion; he is a buried talent.1 May the same never be said of us.