"Steppenwolf" (Hermann Hesse)
'not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves'
The Treatise on the Steppenwolf
Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men!1
Among the first things the narrator tells us of Harry Haller – the "Steppenwolf" of the novel's title – is that he is "unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced in anybody."2 It is a point reinforced throughout the novel: Haller is a man apart. Middle-aged, solitary, and restless, he is an appreciator of great art – Mozart and Goethe are his touchstones – and a critic of bourgeois society.
But he is neither a political radical3 nor a self-satisfied snob. The essence of his nature is instead a constant struggle between his animal and human qualities; that is, between wildness and misanthropy on the one hand, and refinement and idealism on the other. He is a "wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd."4
This, at least, is how Haller understands himself. He is diagnosed as suicidal by an anonymous tract entitled 'Treatise on the Steppenwolf' that falls into his hands,5 not in the literal sense of intending to end his own life (in fact he is terrified of 'the razor'), but in his feeling that it is his fate to march towards self-destruction.
'You know the fox trot now, thank the Lord.'
Oh, don't make a song of your sufferings. You are no madman, Professor. You're not half mad enough to please me.6
The Treatise is the catalyst in the awakening of Haller's soul. The next stage commences at a tavern to which Haller has retreated after he inadvertently insults the wife of a professor-friend at dinner. There he meets Hermine, "a pale and pretty girl" with a boyish face.
Hermine and Haller strike up a relationship of sorts. They go out together in the evenings, and she introduces him to a new, merry way of life, and to her friends: Pablo, a handsome jazz saxophonist, and Maria, a young beauty. Haller swallows his distaste for jazz ("Compared with Bach and Mozart and real music it was, naturally, a miserable affair"7) and his self-consciousness about his clumsy dancing, and allows himself to be swept along with Hermine's clique.
Haller finds Hermine and her friends to be frivolous and superficial at first. But there is more to Hermine than just the "courtesan of fairly good taste" that she appears to be.8 She and Haller are kindred spirits, "brother and sister," both among "a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness."9 Each is unhappy in spite of themselves, and in opposite ways: Hermine despite her merrymaking, and Haller despite his acquaintance with the art of the 'immortals.'
The Magic Theater
It was my destiny to make another bid for the crown of life…10
At the end of a decadent masked ball, Haller is invited by Pablo to enter his 'magic theater' – an "inexhaustible world of doors, notices and magic mirrors."11 By entering various doors in the hall, Haller undergoes a series of dream-like experiences that culminates in him stabbing Hermine as she lies with Pablo.
Returning to reality, Haller is chastised by Pablo for "spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality."12 He hears "ghastly laughter" and recognizes it as the laughter of the immortals. In the Treatise we earlier read that "he may find in one of our magic theaters the very thing that is needed to free his neglected soul."13 As it turns out, he catches at least a "glimpse of meaning" in his visions, and this glimpse inspires a new resolve to play at "life's game".
Hesse writes in the author's note that Steppenwolf is "not a book of a man despairing, but of a man believing." Indeed, he was a man believing all along, and it was this belief in the possibility of a higher beauty that fueled his despair that life failed to mirror it – despair which even now he must face, though perhaps he may now come to terms with it.
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. Originally published in German in 1927. Quotations and page numbers from the 1929 Basil Creighton translation as published in 1969 Bantam edition, with updates from Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz.
p. 35
p. 4
Though he was an opponent of the First World War and a favorite target in the press of right-wing columnists.
p. 19
The novel itself is framed as a manuscript written by Haller, inside of which the text of the Treatise is included; there is also a brief introductory note by the narrator, a young man with whom Haller lodged for some time.
p. 101
p. 43
p. 171
p. 143
p. 180
p. 231
p. 247
p. 64