'Rosshalde'

Rosshalde, to me, is just another chapter in the literary transition of the turn of the century, provincial lifestyle, the rise of the middle class and the death of the mores that dominated through the beginning of the 20th century.

Rosshalde is no different from Howard's End or any other E.M. Forster novel or The Remains of the Day.

In this case, it's the dismemberment of the family establishment and the disenfranchisement of marriage. Veraguth's disillusionment of his marriage (and thus his older son, who he actually has entirely more in common with unlike the youngest, Pierre, who seems to despise art) and also with the provincial life in the country speaks volumes about the sea change in the way we see families and archaic ways of living through the middle of the 20th century.

Essentially, everything about the way we thought and felt changed. From the latter stages of the Industrial Revolution (mobility, communication), to civil rights, the Great Depression, the World Wars, the 1960s and the "flattening" of the world makes us currently completely unrecognizable to even someone like Veraguth and possibly Hermann Hesse.