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Steppenwolf: A Novel
Steppenwolf: A Novel
Steppenwolf: A Novel
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Steppenwolf: A Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal Magic Theater—for mad men only.

Steppenwolf is Hesse's best-known and most autobiographical work. With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, it is one of literature's most poetic evocations of the soul's journey to liberation. Originally published in English in 1929, the novel's wisdom continues to speak to our souls and marks it as a classic of modern literature.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 22, 2013
ISBN9781466835030
Steppenwolf: A Novel
Author

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was born in 1877. His books include Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Magister Ludi. He died in 1962.

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Rating: 4.021061466003316 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Nach 25 Jahren habe ich das Buch wieder gelesen – und habe es völlig anders wahrgenommen als damals.Als Teenager war ich völlig fasziniert, teilte Hallers Weltverachtung, fühlte mich selbst als Steppenwolf und las begierig und staunend die mystischen Anteile, fand dort ungeheure Weisheit. Heute kommen mir die antibürgerlichen Aspekte etwas zu theatralisch vor, und Weisheit und Faszination finde ich weniger im magischen Theater (obwohl es mich weiterhin begeisterte) als in der Lebensweisheit Hermines, im Weg des Steppenwolfs heraus aus Eigenbrötlerei und Vereinsamung: Das Ganzwerden, das er zum Ende des Buches längst nicht vervollständigt hat, das Gesundwerden trotz Verzweiflung an der Menschheit, der Humor.Auch wenn ich die Geschichte vom Steppenwolf heute bei weitem nicht mehr so vergöttere wie damals: Ein Erlebnis bleibt sie allemal. Unbedingte Empfehlung!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was meaningful in my early 20s; I don't have any inclination for a reread.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    1179. Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse (4 Aug 1972) This was also a Hesse work which I did not appreciate.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Bevreemdend verhaal, vooral het slot, ligt in de lijn van absurd theater. Gaat vooral over midlifecrisis en strijd tegen burgerlijkheid. 3 perspectieven, dus aansluiting bij modernisme.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    At last, 35 years after the event, I get round to reading this cult novel of the 60s. If I’d read it when I was 15 it would have blown me away, but I think - for me - its time is well passed now.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was able to really associate with the protagonist. Since Hesse claimed that the novel was somewhat autobiographical, I suspect that Hesse may have had Asperger's syndrome (like me). It is a great book for those of us that always feel a bit out of place, uncomfortable, awkward, withdrawn, etc.So if I relate to it so much, why not 5 stars?1. The extreme lack of chapters, pauses, and things of that nature, make it very difficult to find a place to stop when you can't read the entire novel in one sitting (which most of us can't).2. Although I can relate to it a lot, Hesse always makes it difficult for me to FULLY relate to his characters. The reason he makes it so difficult to fully relate: I am heterosexual. Hesse almost always feels the need to make his protaganists at least a little bit gay. This is not a flaw, and there is nothing wrong with that. But as a straight man, I can never relate to the protagonist 100%.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I don't know if anyone else has this, but when I graduated with my English lit degree I thought, right. I've done it. I have in my hands the key to any text, anywhere, and damn it I will appreciate every text for something about it, whether it be the brilliance of the writing or the social context or just having fun ripping it apart. And then I got onto my MA and discovered I was wrong, of course, that I could still find any given book stultifyingly boring regardless of any merit I tried to find within its pages. I'm looking at you, Mists of Avalon.

    Well, yeah. That's me and Steppenwolf, too. It's a good chunk of I-don't-get-it -- I mean, I understand Hermann Hesse's intentions and all that, but maybe he's right that I'm too young for it. The prose is just boring, which might be partly the translator's fault (my edition is ancient and does not name the translator). Well, actually, I found the content kind of boring, too. Yep, even the drugs and sex and so on.

    So. Chalk that down to a one-star due to not-for-me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Harry Haller, Hermine/Herman, Pablo and Maria. All the characters there are,and what an odd book this is. I was not blown away by it as I was as an adolescent, in fact with this reading a list demerits of the work that are glaringly obvious would take some time. Overall, a work that makes you think. The Magic Theater, "For Madmen Only," the Treatise on the Steppenwolf. A bit put off by the drug use and homosexuality, rather enjoyed the business of the fracturing of Haller's personality.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    To call this book a novel is to mislabel it. Ostensibly this book is about a loner, a self-described Steppenwolf or Wolf of the Steppes, Harry Haller. Steppenwolf rents an apartment from the initial narrator's aunt and is so weird that the narrator is put off by him. He slowly wins the narrator over with his tantalizing hints of a deeper inner nature. As suddenly as Steppenwolf appears in the lives of the narrator and his aunt, he disappears one day, leaving behind a Steppenwolf Treatise.The Steppenwolf treatise describes in both first and third person language the split personality of Haller, who believes he is part man and part wolf. The civilizing forces of humanity are always in conflict with the wilder sides of his nature represented by the wolf. The Steppenwolf is at a loss how to reconcile one with the other without feeling like he is betraying or being a hypocrite to an essential part of himself. He soon realizes that dividing his identity into two principal halves is a mistake. His identity is in fact made up of a many selves, each of which can be arranged like coins in three-D chess to manufacture a infinite number of identities.After months of living like a recluse, the Steppenwolf contemplates suicide, and it is a fortuitous encounter with the seductive and mysterious Hermine that saves him from that fate. Hermine is determined that he should learn to dance, to learn to enjoy everything that he considers low-brow and despises. In doing so, Haller finds that reaching the state of the Infinite is not to live in seclusion and living the high-brow life of contemplation and thought, but to expand the self to include even what is considered low and thus enter into an understanding the Infinite from the opposite direction - by loving, valuing, experiencing all.Hermine, clearly Herman Hesse's feminine alter ego, tells the Steppenwolf that while he still has to fall in love with her, fall in love with her he must and then he must do her bidding without question. The command she issues him is to kill her, an action that is reminiscent of the Buddha's exhortation to kill the Buddha. Meaning, once the wise Buddha has imparted everything that he knows, he must be killed because he too is shackled by the limits of his knowledge, which imposes artificial boundaries on whoever follows him.In spite of all these high ideas presented in this book, my main objection to it is how difficult it is to read it. There is page after page of contemplative thought, very little action, and much of it seems like regurgitated Buddhism lite. Why call it a novel then? I can, in fact, think of better people (eg. Joseph Campbell) who can explain these treatises in layman's terms. If the idea was to present Buddhism to an audience that is partially or fully unaware of it, it wouldn't work. Where this book holds value is how the mind of a schizophrenic or split personality works. The constant tussle between our infinite selves is something most of us undergo without giving much thought. This book deconstructs that process for us.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fascinating, weird, psychological tale. Great illustrations in this edition.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    mandatory high school fare, nonetheless a must read
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It’s no Glass Bead Game or Siddhartha, or at least it didn’t apply to me as much; though - it is a self acknowledged novel about being an ageing man. Basically, I understand why it was alt- popular, but really I think the magic theater scene at the end could have been tied into the rest of the story better and it would have been a much better read.

    Tldr: a depressed academic guy who had disconnected from the world meets a depressed hedonistic girl and they learn from each other. It’s more than that but you get the idea.

    Herman Hesse anticipates the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope? Yeah, I’ll shut up
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Harry Haller is fifty, an artist and an intellectual, bitterly disillusioned with his life and society. He is repulsed by people’s bourgeois attitudes and petty concerns, yet he is unable to live without them. He feels the untameable nature of a wolf inside him, lonely and free, which comes in conflict with the life he leads. Totally frustrated by the duality of his nature he vows to commit suicide, but finds out that he is unable to do it when the time comes. Desperate, he seeks solace in a bar where he meets a courtesan. She takes him on a symbolic journey of self discovery, where he tries to get rid of all his inhibitions, and through self reflection, sex, and drugs, is able to access higher levels of his consciousness, and finally find himself.An interesting book, likened to On the Road by Kerouac.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I had a mixed reaction to “Steppenwolf”. On the one hand, its exploration of the dual nature of man – his high, spiritual nature alongside being animalistic and like a “wolf of the steppes” – as well as questioning whether life is worth living make it a thought-provoking read. On the other hand, the line between reality and symbolic fantasy is often blurred, particular in the scenes toward the end in the magic theater, and while I applaud Hesse for pushing the envelope, this made the novel less satisfying for me.It seems to have polarized readers since it was published in 1927; it’s interesting to me that even in the 60’s as a generation embraced it for its depictions of free love and drug use, Jack Kerouac criticized it in his novel Big Sur. Quotes:On art:“When he worships his favorites among the immortals, Mozart, perchance, he always looks at him in the long run through bourgeois eyes. His tendency is to explain Mozart’s perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness…”On fate:“The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.”On man’s insignificance:“…the Steppenwolf’s look pierced our whole epoch, its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated intellectuality. And, alas! The look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man’s life. It said: ‘See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!’ and all at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and enduring in man fell away and became a monkey’s trick!”On living life:“How I used to love the dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter, how eagerly I imbibed their moods of loneliness and melancholy when wrapped in my cloak I strode for half the night through rain and storm, through the leafless winter landscape, lonely enough then too, but full of deep joy, and full of poetry which later I wrote down by candlelight sitting on the edge of my bed! All that was past now. The cup was emptied and would never be filled again. Was that a matter of regret? No, I did not regret the past. My regret was for the present day, for all the countless hours and days that I lost in mere passivity and that brought me nothing, not even the shocks of awakening.”“It is certain in any case that life is quite disarmed by the gift to live so entirely in the present, to treasure with such eager care every flower by the wayside and the light that plays on every passing moment.”On oneness:“Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications – and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again.”On selling out:“Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign themselves or make compromises. Despising the bourgeois, and yet belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live.”On suicide:“No, I am sure he has not taken his life. He is still alive, …. , listens to the world beneath his window and the hum of human life from which he knows that he is excluded. But he has not killed himself, for a glimmer of belief still tells him that he is to drink this frightening suffering in his heart to the dregs, and that it is of this suffering he must die.”“’I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.’ There are a great many suicides to whom this thought imparts an uncommon strength.”
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An important book to many, but the dream images were too insubstantial to really grab me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a very interesting book about the Steppenwolf, a man who believes himself to be half Harry and half wolf.It is a gripping story filled with unexpected strange incidents and fantastic characters.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A very strange book and one that I don't really know how I feel. I remember trying to read this book at least three times, always putting it aside before finishing even a third. It was interesting, yet the complicated language and paragraphs that went on for a page or more were simply daunting. Perhaps the English translation isn't like that, but reading it in Russian was a challenge. The fourth time, however, I did get past the pamphlet that Harry picked up and read the rest quite eagerly. The ending was definitely odd and unexpected, which is probably to be expected from Hesse. For a long time it seemed as though in the character of Harry Haller I could see myself. I also remember trying to emulate him in his disdain of the modern "culture" and instead striving to the true beauty in classical music, art, and so on. Interestingly, just as with Harry, a woman (my beloved wife) came into my life and turned all that upside-down, exposing me to things that I have learned to look down on in contempt. As a result, I feel I am now much more open to new ideas and experiences than I would have been had I not met her.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As Hesse might say, since we are on the other side of the riddle of suffering from the immortals, it behooves us to learn to laugh as they laugh at the piteous fumbling of our lives. To not only be willing to die, but be willing to live which might be much more terrifying a proposition. Read this book if you find yourself at odds with your own nature, or your own mind. It starts off a little slow, but the last fifty pages alone make it worth the read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A strange and disturbing book detailing one man's degeneration and redemption. Fantastical scenes and allusions to philosophy that results in one of those rare things, a book that makes you question the things you believe in.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Disappointing on second reading. I remembered much more humour than I actually found. Haller is supposed to be learning to laugh at himself, and he hasn't really managed to by the end of the novel.There are moments when the exaggerated wailing and moaning reaches wry comedy, but they're fewer and farther between than I remembered. More often we're simply told that Haller has seen the funny side, without being able to share that insight.Nevertheless, as I said, there are moments... Try this for size:"It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out undigested, to enter into me through my eyes. I absorbed a whole column of it."Those first two sentences make up for much.(I don't expect, by the way, a novel like this to be a comedy. But the whole point, if I'm understanding it correctly, of Haller's experience is to learn playfulness and humour in dealing with what he at the beginning of the novel regards as insufferable. And then I would hope to find more playfulness and humour in the style.)
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Didn't like this one so much; neither did Hesse. He was frequently questioned about it in his later years; often asked, "What were you getting at when you...?" His invariable reply was, quite simply, "I wrote that thing twenty years ago. How the hell do I know what I was getting at?"Funny how an author's more famous works are often the least impressive ones. Siddartha and Demian do not escape this tendancy.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Der Steppenwolf was first published in Germany in 1927 and in the foreword to this edition, Hesse writes that of all his books, this one was "more often and more violently misunderstood than any other". The protagonist Harry Haller is a 48 year-old career intellectual, who flits from one boarding room to another without ever being gainfully employed, and Hesse does indicate that the book deals with the problems of a man that age.Harry Haller's problems are mainly depression and suicidal thoughts - or, self pity and self absorption, depending on your outlook. He has decided to kill himself on his 50th birthday. He spends his days reading, listening to classical music, writing letters to the paper about the war, and visiting local bars to drink wine. He rather smugly considers himself to be a part of the bourgeoisie and is completely wrapped up in aesthetic and intellectual pursuits at the price of any possible interpersonal relationship. He enjoys the anonymity of being the eternal boarder, rarely striking up friendships with those he rents rooms from. Suffice to say, as someone who is not a 48 year-old man, I found it quite difficult to empathise with Harry Haller.Harry seizes on his internal Steppenwolf as the cause of his ennui, and identifies this as the negative and self-destructive part of his personality, and of course, the reason for his unhappiness. One night, while out at one of his favoured taverns, a stranger gives him a pamphlet called The Treatise of the Steppenwolf, which seems to him to explain everything. It discusses how the concept of the ego is a fiction, and proposes that individuals are composites of many personalities. The Treatise claims that Haller's perception of a dual personality is ludicrous and causes violence to his soul.I found the first hundred pages or so of this book pretty hard work. There's a lot of philosophising and precious little plot movement. It brightens up though, when Harry meets an outgoing lady named Hermine, who makes it her goal in life to show Harry how to enjoy himself. This involves him letting go of his snobbery about dancing and music and falling in lust with much younger women (icky, and such a total middle-aged man fantasy).Harry Haller is basically having a mid-life crisis. My own feeling is that he'd have had much less time to feel sorry for himself if he'd done some honest hard work every now and then. Definitely not a book for everyone.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautiful Herman Hesse. One of my all-timers. I think I'll go blow my brains out now.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a novel that can mean different things to different people. Is this a story where these events take place? Or is a spiritual journey? Or self-analysis? This is the pull of the novel. Whatever you make of it, it is a vehicle for Hesse to give us his view on a central axiom of Western man – the spectrum of human pleasure at one end and ethics at the other. As a novel of ideas it is a little short on dialogue and action, so the writing may seem a little wooden. The central protagonist, Harry Haller, is on the verge of suicide – an act he promised to do at the age of 50. He is now that age, is contemplating it but can’t quite carry it off. He has devoted his life to study, to appreciating the great men of civilization like Mozart, Goethe and Nietzsche, to the extent of detesting everything in life that does not live to their ideals. Harry has a distorted view of life - he has rejected all of what passes for normal life, particularly bourgeois life, and hates all who adhere to it. He is alone, unable to participate in life and very unhappy. He describes his personal torment as a battle of two identities – man, the enjoyer of life, and the wolf, the denier of that enjoyment. A series of chance and bizarre encounters leads to Harry, on a very depressed night and contemplating suicide, walking into a bar he has been lead to believe contains the answers to his life. There he meets a woman Hermine, who embodies the carnal aspects of life, the aspects Harry most despises. She and the bar specialize in dancing, jazz music and the sensual life. But Harry immediately identifies Hermine as a kindred spirit, and she him. But Hermine is not intellectual like Harry, but totally sensual, living the life of a courtesan. She hints at Harry eventually falling in love with her. She declares that she understands him and immediately offers to help Harry rehabilitate his life, but he must obey without question her every command.Hermine teaches Harry to dance the foxtrot and the boston and to enjoy jazz music. She also introduces him to Marie and makes her his lover. Harry must learn to laugh and enjoy life, and even be prepared to die for love, if he is to gain Hermine’s love.Hermine and the bar scene is the very animal instincts of man – pleasure seeking and living for the moment. Harry is the ethical man – living all the aspects deemed as perfection in man. Neither are happy with their lot. Hermine teaches Harry that his problem is seeing himself as two souls whereas man really has thousands of souls. It is in discovering these other souls that will be his salvation. The trick with living with multiple souls is not to take anything seriously. Then there’s Pablo, the saxophonist who eventually becomes the arbiter for a balanced life. His magical Theatre becomes the means by which Harry is finally forced to confront the absurdity of his view of himself and life, view his heroes in a new light and find a new path.Therein lies Hesse’s view of western civilization – a mix of two opposites. To live at either end is unsustainable. It is up to the individual to find his mix. The abhorrent bourgeois life ironically is just one mix – where nothing is exciting, but in order. Taking life too seriously leads only to madness. Steppenwolf is the journey Harry Haller needs to take to achieve personal salvation and a reason to live.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Herman Hesse's novel Steppenwolf was a fanstastic read, just the sort of symbolic, metaphorical and metaphysical fiction that I love to read. However, reading it with a certain sociological imagination allowed me to gain even more insights than I would have otherwise. It allowed me to both participate in the reading and the enjoyment of the novel, but also to be able to analyze the broader meanings of what is going on in the book as it relates to sociology. C. Wright Mills thought that people often see their lives as having explanation solely in terms of personal success and failures, failing to see the many ways in which their own personal biographies link with the course of human history. This could be said to be the root of all of Harry Haller's problems. Steppenwolf is the story of Harry Haller, a middle aged intellectual who is unable to find any joy in life. Having taken a course in Sociology, one can see that an individual's choices are never free but are always determined to some extent by a person's environment. This is a core idea in Sociology and may have saved Harry a lot of heartache. He moves into a boarding house, where despairing, lonely, and suicidal, he laments his life and his lack of any feeling of identity with the society around him. Durkheim called the way Harry was feeling, anomie, and felt that it was caused by a lack of integration of the individual into social groups and communities. This feeling of anomie causes people to feel lost or adrift and it is this feeling that causes Harry to feel suicidal. Harry comes to view himself as a Steppenwolf, or a wolf of the steppes, in that he views himself as a man of a dual nature. He yearns to transcend the Normative order of the bourgeoise and into the world of the spiritual, but he also feels drawn to this world of sensual pleasures. Not being able to comprehend how society is able to find happiness in their lives of drab conformity, where people seem to coast along with productive diligence towards meaninglessness, yet unable to resist the charms of their easy sense of happiness, Harry begins to loathe the Steppenwolf he sees himself as. He is unable to come to terms with the concept of Socialization, the ways in which people learn to conform to their society's norms, values, and roles. Fom an interactionist perspective, it can be seen that Harry is having a difficult time with the devolopement of his social self through the interaction with others. Unable to take the role of the generalized other, unable to shape his participation in a social life according to the roles of others, identification becomes a problem for Harry in that he does not wholly identify with any social groups. Half man, half wolf, half desiring the easy and sensual pleasures of the common man, he also desires to transcend this life that, for him, has no value. In a Social Darwinistic manner of speaking, it could be said that Harry has been unable to adapt to the social environment in which he finds himself. One night, while walking through the city, Harry sees a sign over a door that reads reads "MAGIC THEATER—ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY." Looking closer he notices the words, "FOR MADMEN ONLY". Enthralled but unable to open the door, he is given a book by the sign holder entitled, "Treatise on the Steppenwolf." Upon reading it, Harry discovers that the book is describing himself, the half man, half wolf that he sees himself as, feeling drawn to more spiritual matters, but unable to altogether resist the sensual pleasures of this mundane world. At this point, Harry becomes even more convinced of his desire for suicide. Before he is able to do so though, and after a disastrous meeting with one of his former colleagues, in which Harry insults him about a picture of Goethe, the German poet, in his house, he ultimately meets the woman that will lead him towards salvation, a young sensual woman named Hermine. She teaches Harry to dance and how to enjoy life's simple pleasures without having to analyze his every feeling. Becoming totally enthralled with her and agreeing to obey her every command, Hermine informs him of his ultimate duty, which will be, after falling in love with her, to kill her. At this point, Harry jumps head first into a life of sensual hedonistic pleasures and he comes to appreciate such a life, based upon the pleasure principle, even though he still feels a sense of yearning for transcendence above such a life. After attending a masquerade dance and dancing with Hermine, Harry is invited by a man named Pablo into his Magic Theater and this is where the book gets even more symbolic and metaphorical. Harry is told that the goal of the theater is to lose his personality and that the only avenue for doing such is laughter. Harry laughs at himself in a mirror and travels down a corridor of doors, some of which he enters, into a sort of theater of the absurd, a kind of waking dream. Entering one room where he finds Hermine and Pablo naked and lying on the floor, he believes that this is the moment that Hermine had meant when she told him that he must ultimately kill her, so, finding a knive magically appear in this pocket he proceeds to stab and kill her. He is now greeted by the ghost of Mozart, the classical composer, who tells Harry that he is much too serious and that he has committed a grave error by misunderstanding the magic theater and that his goal was to learn laughter. Erik Erikson said that throughout the life course, an individual must resolve a series of conflicts that shape that person's sense of self and ability to perform social roles successfully. It is this conflict that we see Harry having a difficult time with. Hermine and Pablo make an attempt at resocialization for Harry, but he ultimately takes everything too seriously and misses the point that laughter is the key to happiness. It can be seen that as society becomes more complex, it tends to become characterized more and more by secondary groups and organizations, making society more efficient but also causing confusion and unhappiness. This is the story of Harry Haller. Using social imagination, I was able to analyze Harry Haller's feeling and actions from a sociological perspective. I was able to see how Harry was having a hard time coping with society, and how that it was this inner turmoil that he labeled the Steppenwolf. I can very much relate to Harry Haller, as I myself have found myself feeling exactly as he has over the years. I, too, have felt a sense of the Steppenwolf within me, a sense of not being able to recognize myself in others and the easy way some people seem able to proceed through life. It has always seemed to me that the vast majority of mankind seems easily able to just live life without having to think about much of anything. For people like myself and Harry Haller, there is a spiritual yearning for more, even as we reject much of what religion has to offer. The story of the Steppenwolf is to realize that there is a dual nature within all of us, even more than just two natures actually, according to Herman Hesse, and that the best remedy is to learn to be able to laugh at life and at ourselves. It is interesting that laughter is also one of the main themes of another book I have just finished, Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. In the Steppenwolf, laughter is what Harry was to learn in order to find some sort of happiness, while in Bradbury's book, it was laughter that was used to thwart the evil carnival freaks. It seems that Harry Haller was visited in his life by Bradbury's carnival freaks and unable to learn laughter, succumbed to their evil. Literature teaching truth? Hmm! I would definitely recommend this book, especially to those introspective types, such as myself, who may feel a tinge of the Steppenwolf within their own soul. It is my humble opinion that if one is paying attention to the world around them, and not just floating through life Paris Hilton like, then one can't help but to feel their own personal Steppenwolf roaring within from time to time.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The principal character Harry Haller, also known as Steppenwolf, is a strange man, a loner and a recluse. He is convinced that his main problem in life is that he has two dueling personalities, namely that of a wolf; untamed, wild, savage, and that of a cultured man who is in awe of Mozart and Goethe (two name just those two) and all which is thought to come from evolved and refined minds. He comes to learn one day that we all in fact have countless personalities, but his mental and spiritual suffering become so intolerable that he decides the only solution is to kill himself. Then he meets Hermine, a lovely girl who understands Steppenwolf in all his complexity but also loves simply having a good time. She teaches Harry how to dance and enjoy the nightlife, and Harry is happy for the first time ever, though he feels that this happiness cannot last. I did not like this story. The main reason is that Harry reflected back to me all those things which I dislike about myself, in particular this insistence on living from the mind and not being able to break free and just have a good time for it’s own sake. The book seemed pedantic. Some notions of Buddhism, were repeated over and over again which made the book feel more like a school manual than a novel. Towards the end where Steppenwolf ends up in the Magic Theater—For Madmen Only! I just wanted Hesse to move on and couldn’t understand what point he was trying to make if not simply to just repeatedly show how absurd life and humanity is. No big surprise there, but I suppose it may have been a new concept for readers when Steppenwolf was first published.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Sometimes the book was a bit confusing to read; not knowing fully what is happening or what was fantasy or illusion and what was real, but that was what made the book great. The book really plays with your mind and perspective on things through-out the book on many levels. The book's look into Harry’s inner wolf and human nature was really fascinating and intriguing. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A work like Steppenwolf is iconic in its artistic significance. Being so makes it more difficult to discuss the book as I would other "good" reads. A novel of ideas, one that challenges my own conception of the world, it raises more questions than it answers. It draws upon the ideas of other thinkers, notable Goethe and Nietzsche and Jung, and presents those ideas in new ways - challenging even those with which the author may agree. This is what Hermann Hesse set out to do in writing Der Steppenwolf in 1927.The novel presents a complex narrative that combines three different styles within its structure; a straightforward preface introducing the protagonist, Harry Haller, a "Treatise on the Steppenwolf" in the form of a pamphlet that Harry accepts and interprets as a study of his own life, and Harry's own narrative which moves into a dream sequence when Harry enters the "Magic Theater". We meet characters, both women and men, at least one of whom may be Harry's alter ego or "anima" in Jungian terms. We see a man who would separate himself from the Nietzschean herd and values individuality. Most of all we encounter a man facing not the "two souls" that dwell within his breast, as Goethe described Faust, but one who faces innumerable souls in a personality that seems to be breaking up into different persons. Through it all Harry looks up to artistic "Immortals" as representative of an ideal in the form of idealized visions of Goethe and Mozart. Especially Mozart who plays a critical role in Harry's dreams.What can I take away from this work? As I said it raises questions and the thoughts and process of reviewing the way I approach the world is one thing that this novel provides. With all great - read transcendent - works of art I continue to find new layers of meaning as I read and reread their pages. One fundamental question, and I think this is central to all of Hesse's writings, is what does it mean to be human? The philosophers from Plato and Aristotle have tried to define this, but Hesse's Steppenwolf continues to present the question and explore original ways to find the answer.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I couldn't finish this one, but I give it three stars. Perhaps it is the originating thought module of teenage angst. I felt very familiar indeed with the thoughts in the first part, the 'introduction' and so on. Then, considering whether or not to continue on through it, I read a great many reviews, being very interested in the book. The book certainly did catch my attention. All of the reviews sounded very fascinating.The reviews were detailed. The conclusion, the killing of a woman in tune with the beast nature, was revealed. While I remained interested, I found that all motivation to complete the novel ended. I can find the reasoning behind killing a woman in a porn video, rather than struggling through Steppenwolf in search of enlightenment.I can watch Moulin Rouge for a depiction of a woman character as a prostitute with character, which I have many times. I didn't finish the novel, but someday, I'll try reading it again. Perhaps the painful depiction of egotism which I expected which compelled me to put the novel down rather than finish it will not be there. Maybe my interpretation is totally wrong. I wouldn't mind being wrong at all. I like to find my expectations incorrect. But I put this one down.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    the second Hesse book I read, and my second favorite. very dark shows the two sides of man Hesse always dealt with and what made him famous. epic tale.

Book preview

Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse

PREFACE

THIS BOOK CONTAINS THE RECORDS left us by a man whom, according to the expression he often used himself, we called the Steppenwolf. Whether this manuscript needs any introductory remarks may be open to question. I, however, feel the need of adding a few pages to those of the Steppenwolf in which I try to record my recollections of him. What I know of him is little enough. Indeed, of his past life and origins I know nothing at all. Yet the impression left by his personality has remained, in spite of all, a deep and sympathetic one.

Some years ago the Steppenwolf, who was then approaching fifty, called on my aunt to inquire for a furnished room. He took the attic room on the top floor and the bedroom next it, returned a day or two later with two trunks and a big case of books and stayed nine or ten months with us. He lived by himself very quietly, and but for the fact that our bedrooms were next door to each other—which occasioned a good many chance encounters on the stairs and in the passage—we should have remained practically unacquainted. For he was not a sociable man. Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced in anybody. He was, in fact, as he called himself, a real wolf of the Steppes, a strange, wild, shy—very shy—being from another world than mine. How deep the loneliness into which his life had drifted on account of his disposition and destiny and how consciously he accepted this loneliness as his destiny, I certainly did not know until I read the records he left behind him. Yet, before that, from our occasional talks and encounters, I became gradually acquainted with him, and I found that the portrait in his records was in substantial agreement with the paler and less complete one that our personal acquaintance had given me.

By chance I was there at the very moment when the Steppenwolf entered our house for the first time and became my aunt’s lodger. He came at noon. The table had not been cleared and I still had half an hour before going back to the office. I have never forgotten the odd and very conflicting impressions he made on me at this first encounter. He came through the glazed door, having just rung the bell, and my aunt asked him in the dim light of the hall what he wanted. The Steppenwolf, however, first threw up his sharp, closely cropped head and sniffed around nervously before he either made any answer or announced his name.

Oh, it smells good here, he said, and at that he smiled and my aunt smiled too. For my part, I found this manner of introducing himself ridiculous and was not favorably impressed.

However, said he, I’ve come about the room you have to let.

I did not get a good look at him until we were all three on our way up to the top floor. Though not very big, he had the bearing of a big man. He wore a fashionable and comfortable winter overcoat and he was well, though carelessly, dressed, clean-shaven, and his cropped head showed here and there a streak of grey. He carried himself in a way I did not at all like at first. There was something weary and undecided about it that did not go with his keen and striking profile nor with the tone of his voice. Later, I found out that his health was poor and that walking tired him. With a peculiar smile—at that time equally unpleasant to me—he contemplated the stairs, the walls, and windows, and the tall old cupboards on the staircase. All this seemed to please and at the same time to amuse him. Altogether he gave the impression of having come out of an alien world, from another continent perhaps. He found it all very charming and a little odd. I cannot deny that he was polite, even friendly. He agreed at once and without objection to the terms for lodging and breakfast and so forth, and yet about the whole man there was a foreign and, as I chose to think, disagreeable or hostile atmosphere. He took the room and the bedroom too, listened attentively and amiably to all he was told about the heating, the water, the service and the rules of the household, agreed to everything, offered at once to pay a sum in advance—and yet he seemed at the same time to be outside it all, to find it comic to be doing as he did and not to take it seriously. It was as though it were a very odd and new experience for him, occupied as he was with quite other concerns, to be renting a room and talking to people in German. Such more or less was my impression, and it would certainly not have been a good one if it had not been revised and corrected by many small instances. Above all, his face pleased me from the first, in spite of the foreign air it had. It was a rather original face and perhaps a sad one, but alert, thoughtful, strongly marked and highly intellectual. And then, to reconcile me further, there was his polite and friendly manner, which though it seemed to cost him some pains, was all the same quite without pretension; on the contrary, there was something almost touching, imploring in it. The explanation of it I found later, but it disposed me at once in his favor.

*   *   *

Before we had done inspecting the rooms and going into the arrangements, my luncheon hour was up and I had to go back to business. I took my leave and left him to my aunt. When I got back at night, she told me that he had taken the rooms and was coming in in a day or two. The only request he had made was that his arrival should not be notified to the police, as in his poor state of health he found these formalities and the standing about in official waiting rooms more than he could tolerate. I remember very well how this surprised me and how I warned my aunt against giving in to his stipulation. This fear of the police seemed to me to agree only too well with the mysterious and alien air the man had and struck me as suspicious. I explained to my aunt that she ought not on any account to put herself in this equivocal and in any case rather peculiar position for a complete stranger; it might well turn out to have very unpleasant consequences for her. But it then came out that my aunt had already granted his request, and, indeed, had let herself be altogether captivated and charmed by the strange gentleman. For she never took a lodger with whom she did not contrive to stand in some human, friendly, and as it were auntlike or, rather, motherly relation; and many a one has made full use of this weakness of hers. And thus for the first weeks things went on; I had many a fault to find with the new lodger, while my aunt every time warmly took his part.

As I was not at all pleased about this business of neglecting to notify the police, I wanted at least to know what my aunt had learnt about him; what sort of family he came of and what his intentions were. And, of course, she had learnt one thing and another, although he had only stayed a short while after I left at noon. He had told her that he thought of spending some months in our town to avail himself of the libraries and to see its antiquities. I may say it did not please my aunt that he was only taking the rooms for so short a time, but he had clearly quite won her heart in spite of his rather peculiar way of presenting himself. In short, the rooms were let and my objections came too late.

Why on earth did he say that it smelt so good here? I asked.

I know well enough, she replied, with her usual insight. There’s a smell of cleanliness and good order here, of comfort and respectability. It was that that pleased him. He looks as if he weren’t used to that of late and missed it.

Just so, thought I to myself.

But, I said aloud, if he isn’t used to an orderly and respectable life, what is going to happen? What will you say if he has filthy habits and makes dirt everywhere, or comes home drunk at all hours of the night?

We shall see, we shall see, she said, and laughed; and I left it at that.

And in the upshot my fears proved groundless. The lodger, though he certainly did not live a very orderly or rational life, was no worry or trouble to us. Yet my aunt and I bothered our heads a lot about him, and I confess I have not by a long way done with him even now. I often dream of him at night, and the mere existence of such a man, much as I got to like him, has had a thoroughly disturbing and disquieting effect on me.

*   *   *

Two days after this the stranger’s luggage—his name was Harry Haller—was brought in by a porter. He had a very fine leather trunk, which made a good impression on me, and a big flat cabin trunk that showed signs of having traveled far—at least it was plastered with labels of hotels and travel agencies of various countries, some overseas.

Then he himself appeared, and the time began during which I gradually got acquainted with this strange man. At first I did nothing on my side to encourage it. Although Haller interested me from the moment I saw him, I took no steps for the first two or three weeks to run across him or to get into conversation with him. On the other hand I confess that I did, all the same and from the very first, keep him under observation a little, and also went into his room now and again when he was out and my curiosity drove me to do a little spy work.

I have already given some account of the Steppenwolf’s outward appearance. He gave at the very first glance the impression of a significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate sensibility. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case, dropped conventionalities and said personal and individual things that came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right.

I remember an instance of this in the last days he was here, if I can call a mere fleeting glance he gave me an example of what I mean. It was when a celebrated historian, philosopher, and critic, a man of European fame, had announced a lecture in the school auditorium. I had succeeded in persuading the Steppenwolf to attend it, though at first he had little desire to do so. We went together and sat next to each other in the lecture hall. When the lecturer ascended the platform and began his address, many of his hearers, who had expected a sort of prophet, were disappointed by his rather dapper appearance and conceited air. And when he proceeded, by way of introduction, to say a few flattering things to the audience, thanking them for their attendance in such numbers, the Steppenwolf threw me a quick look, a look which criticized both the words and the speaker of them—an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke volumes! It was a look that did not simply criticize the lecturer, annihilating the famous man with its delicate but crushing irony. That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture was announced—no, the Steppenwolf’s look pierced our whole epoch, its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man’s life. It said: See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man! and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey’s trick!

With this I have gone far ahead and, contrary to my actual plan and intention, already conveyed what Haller essentially meant to me; whereas my original aim was to uncover his picture by degrees while telling the course of my gradual acquaintance with him.

Now that I have gone so far ahead it will save time to say a little more about Haller’s puzzling strangeness and to tell in detail how I gradually guessed and became aware of the causes and meaning of this strangeness, this extraordinary and frightful loneliness. It will be better so, for I wish to leave my own personality as far as possible in the background. I do not want to put down my own confessions, to tell a story or to write an essay on psychology, but simply as an eyewitness to contribute something to the picture of the peculiar individual who left this Steppenwolf manuscript behind him.

At the very first sight of him, when he came into my aunt’s home, craning his head like a bird and praising the smell of the house, I was at once astonished by something curious about him; and my first natural reaction was repugnance. I suspected (and my aunt, who unlike me is the very reverse of an intellectual person, suspected very much the same thing)—I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him with the instinct of the healthy. This shrinking was in course of time replaced by a sympathy inspired by pity for one who had suffered so long and deeply, and whose loneliness and inward death I witnessed. In course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony. I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.

And here I cannot refrain from a psychological observation. Although I know very little of the Steppenwolf’s life, I have all the same good reason to suppose that he was brought up by devoted but severe and very pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine that makes the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and upbringing. But in this case the attempt to destroy the personality and to break the will did not succeed. He was much too strong and hardy, too proud and spirited. Instead of destroying his personality they succeeded only in teaching him to hate himself. It was against himself that, innocent and noble as he was, he directed during his whole life the whole wealth of his fancy, the whole of his thought; and in so far as he let loose upon himself every barbed criticism, every anger and hate he could command, he was, in spite of all, a real Christian and a real martyr. As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.

It is now time, however, to put my own thoughts aside and to get to facts. What I first discovered about Haller, partly through my espionage, partly from my aunt’s remarks, concerned his way of living. It was soon obvious that his days were spent with his thoughts and his books, and that he pursued no practical calling. He lay always very late in bed. Often he was not up much before noon and went across from his bedroom to his sitting room in his dressing gown. This sitting room, a large and comfortable attic room with two windows, after a few days was not at all the same as when occupied by other tenants. It filled up more and more as time went on. Pictures were hung on the walls, drawings tacked up—sometimes illustrations cut out from magazines and often changed. A southern landscape, photographs of a little German country town, apparently Haller’s home, hung there, and between them were some brightly painted water colors, which, as we discovered later, he had painted himself. Then there were photographs of a pretty young woman, or—rather—girl. For a long while a Siamese Buddha hung on the wall, to be replaced first by Michelangelo’s Night, then by a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi. Books filled the large bookcase and lay everywhere else as well, on the table, on the pretty old bureau, on the sofa, on the chairs and all about on the floor, books with notes slipped into them which were continually changing. The books constantly increased, for besides bringing whole armfuls back with him from the libraries he was always getting parcels of them by post. The occupant of this room might well be a learned man; and to this the all-pervading smell of cigar smoke might testify as well as the stumps and ash of cigars all about the room. Many of the books, however, were not of a scholarly nature. The majority were works of the poets of all times and peoples. For a long while there lay about on the sofa where he often spent whole days all six volumes of a work with the title Sophia’s Journey from Memel to Saxony—a work of the latter part of the eighteenth century. A complete edition of Goethe and one of Jean Paul showed signs of wear, also Novalis, while Lessing, Jacobi and Lichtenberg were in the same condition. A few volumes of Dostoievski bristled with penciled slips. On the big table among the books and papers there was often a vase of flowers. There, too, a paint box, generally full of dust, reposed among flakes of cigar ash and (to leave nothing out) sundry bottles of wine. There was a straw-covered bottle usually containing Italian red wine, which he procured from a little shop in the neighborhood; often, too, a bottle of Burgundy as well as Malaga; and a squat bottle of Cherry brandy was, as I saw, nearly emptied in a very brief space—after which it disappeared in a corner of the room, there to collect the dust without further diminution of its contents. I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly all the same, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller’s room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic

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