Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

  Hermione disappeared to the right, past a gigantic mirror that covered the rear wall from the floor right up to the vaulted ceiling.

  'Now then, Harry, come along and cheer up, do. The whole point of the exercise is to cheer you up and teach you how to laugh, and I hope you will make my task an easy one. You do feel well, don't you? Yes? You are not anxious, by any chance? That's good then, very good. You are now about to enter our make-believe world, not anxiously at all, but with genuine pleasure, and you will be introduced to it, as is customary, by means of a little make-believe act of suicide.'

  Taking out his little pocket mirror again, he held it in front of my face. Once more I could see the blurred, confused image of Harry, fused with the wrestling figure of the wolf. To tell the truth, this familiar image was not at all congenial to me, so putting an end to it was unlikely to worry me at all.

  'My dear friend, all that's required of you is to obliterate this now redundant mirror image. If you can bring yourself to laugh heartily when you contemplate it, that will be enough. This is a school of humour that you are in, designed to teach you how to laugh. You see, the first requirement of our advanced humour course is to stop taking yourself seriously.'

  Taking a steady look in the 'mirror, mirror in the hand', I saw the hybrid Harry-Wolf going through his painful convulsions. Momentarily I felt a slight but painful twinge in my innards too, something akin to memory, homesickness, remorse. Then this slight anxiety gave way to a feeling similar to the one you have when a bad tooth is extracted from your cocaine-numbed jaw and you sigh, not just with relief, but also amazement at the fact that it hasn't hurt at all. And this feeling was accompanied by a fresh sense of joviality, an urge to laugh that I could not resist. Indeed, I burst out laughing, which was a great release.

  The little cloudy image in the looking glass flared up briefly, then vanished, leaving the small round surface of the mirror looking suddenly grey, rough and opaque, as if it had been scorched. With a laugh, Pablo threw the fragment of glass away and it rolled out of sight along the floor of the endless corridor.

  'What a good laugh that was, Harry!' Pablo exclaimed. 'Well done! One of these days you'll be able to laugh like the Immortals. At last you've managed to kill off Steppenwolf, which it's impossible to do with a razor. Just make sure he stays dead. In a short while you will be able to leave stupid reality behind you. You are more likeable today than you've ever been, my dear chap. We must drink to our close friendship the next time we get the opportunity. Then we can say 'du' to one another and, if it still matters to you, we can talk philosophy and argue with one another, discussing music, Mozart and Gluck, Plato and Goethe to your heart's content. You will understand now why such things were impossible before. - I hope you have succeeded in ridding yourself of Steppenwolf for the day, because of course your suicide is not final. We are not dealing with reality here, but mere images. By choosing beautiful and cheerful images you can demonstrate that you aren't in fact still in love with your questionable personality. Should you nonetheless feel the urge to have it restored, you need only look into the mirror I am now about to show you. However, I take it you are familiar with the old wise saying "A mirror in the hand is better than two on the wall". Ha! Ha!' (Again that fine, terrible laughter of his rang out.) 'So there, and now we just need to perform one little amusing ritual. Now that you have cast off the spectacles of your personality, come and take a look in a proper mirror. You'll find it fun.'

  Laughing as he did so, and giving me the odd little friendly pat and stroke, he turned me round to face the gigantic mirror on the wall. In this one I could see myself.

  For just the briefest of moments I saw the Harry I knew, except that the look on his face was unusually good-humoured, bright and radiant. However, scarcely had I time to recognize him when he disintegrated, a second figure detaching itself from him, then a third, a tenth and a twentieth until the whole gigantic mirror was full of nothing but Harrys or fragments of Harrys, innumerable Harrys, each of which I only managed to glimpse and recognize for a fleeting instant. Some of these many Harrys were as old as me, some older, some really aged, whereas others were very young, young men, lads, schoolboys, little rascals, children. Fifty-year-old and twenty-year-old Harrys were running and jumping all over the place. There were thirty-year-olds and five-year-olds; serious and funny, dignified and comical Harrys. Some were well dressed, some in rags, some totally naked even, while some were bald and others had long hair. Yet all of them were me, and they were all only glimpsed and recognized in a flash before vanishing again. They were dispersing in all directions, to the left, to the right, into the depths of the mirror or right out of it. One of them, an elegant young chap, leaped into Pablo's arms with a laugh, pressed him to his breast and ran off with him. And another one that I particularly liked, a charming, handsome lad of sixteen or seventeen, darted off along the corridor, eagerly reading the inscriptions on all the doors. Following him, I saw him stop outside one door, on which I read:

  ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS

  INSERT I MARK PIECE

  With one jump the dear boy shot up head first, threw himself into the slot and vanished behind the door.

  Pablo too had vanished, as had the mirror, so it seemed, and with it all the numerous Harry figures. Sensing that I was now left to my own devices and that the theatre was mine to explore, I walked from door to door, full of curiosity. On each one I read an inscription, an enticing message, a promise.

  Attracted by the inscription

  TALLY-HO! A-HUNTING WE WILL GO

  HIGH SEASON FOR MOTOR CARS

  I opened the narrow door and went in.

  I was whisked away into a world of loud noise and turbulence. Cars, some of them armour-plated, were tearing along the streets, hunting down pedestrians, running them over and reducing them to pulp, squashing them to bits against the walls of the buildings. Immediately I understood that the war between human beings and machines, long prepared, long expected and long feared, had now finally broken out. Everywhere there were dead and mutilated bodies lying around; everywhere too there were the buckled and half-burned-out wrecks of cars that had skidded out of control. Aeroplanes were circling above this utterly chaotic scene, and people with rifles and machine guns were shooting at them too from many windows and rooftops. On all the walls there were garish, splendidly provocative posters. In gigantic letters, flaring up like torches, the nation was being called upon to finally take up arms on behalf of humanity against machines; to finally exterminate the fat, handsomely dressed, perfumed plutocrats who, with the help of machines, were living off the fat of others. Also to put an end to their huge, coughing, evilly snarling and devilishly humming motor cars; to finally set fire to the factories and go some way towards clearing out and depopulating the desecrated earth so that grass might grow again and the dust-filled concrete jungle might give way to things such as woods, meadows, heaths, streams and marshland. From other posters, in contrast, splendidly stylized and beautifully painted in gentler, less childish colours, came stirring warnings, composed with extraordinary subtlety and wit, about the chaos and anarchy that were threatening all prudent property owners. In truly gripping terms these posters pictured the blessings of law and order, hard work, property and culture, and they praised machines as human beings' latest and greatest invention, with the aid of which they would be transformed into gods. As I read them, deep in thought, I could not help admiring the posters, the red ones as well as the green. Both their fiery eloquence and their compelling logic made an enormous impression on me. They were right, I thought, as I stood there profoundly convinced, now in front of one poster, now in front of another, albeit perceptibly disturbed by the fairly hefty shooting match going on all around me. Well, there was a war being fought, that was the main thing: a vehement, spirited war that was highly congenial because it wasn't a matter of the Kaiser, the Republic or national frontiers, or of flags and battle colours and such things of a more decorative and theatrical kind - all essen
tially shabby issues. No, this was a war in which all those who felt stifled, all those for whom life had acquired a nasty taste, were giving full vent to their grievances and trying their hardest to set in train a process leading to the general destruction of the shoddy world of civilization. All their eyes were shining so brightly with a genuine, burning desire to destroy and kill that I felt the same passions burning just as fiercely in me, flourishing unchecked like tall, rank, blood-red flowers. I was more than happy to join in the fighting.

  However, the nicest thing of all was the sudden appearance at my side of my former classmate Gustav, whom I had completely lost touch with decades ago. Of all my early-childhood friends he had once been the wildest and strongest, the one with the greatest appetite for life. My heart leaped to see his bright blue eyes winking at me once again, and when he beckoned to me I was at once delighted to follow him.

  'Good Lord, Gustav!' I exclaimed happily. 'I never expected to see you again! What have you been doing with yourself all these years, then?'

  Annoyed, he burst out laughing, just as he used to as a boy.

  'Stupid fool! Do we really have to begin right away with tittle-tattle and questions like that? If you must know, I became a theology professor. There you have it, but luckily there's a war on now, my lad, and no call for theology. Come on, what are you waiting for?'

  Just then a small motor-truck came puffing its way towards us. Shooting down the driver, Gustav leaped up in the cab with all the agility of a monkey and brought the vehicle to a stop. He got me to climb up alongside him and we drove off at one hell of a pace, past upturned vehicles and through a hail of rifle bullets, making our way out of the town and its suburbs.

  'Are you on the side of the factory owners?' I asked my friend.

  'Don't ask me, it's just a matter of taste. We can worry about that once we're out of town. But no, hang on. If anything, I think we should opt for the other side, even though it basically makes no difference, of course. I'm a theologian, and since my predecessor Luther in his day came to the aid of the rich and the princes against the peasants, I think we ought now to redress the balance a little. This vehicle's no good. Let's hope it holds out for another few kilometres!'

  As fast as the wind, the heaven-born wind, we rattled along, entering a peaceful green stretch of land many miles wide; then on through a vast plain before slowly climbing into a huge mountain range. Here we came to a halt on a smooth, shimmering road that boldly wound its way upwards between sheer walls of rock and a low protecting wall, high above a bright blue lake.

  'Lovely area,' I said.

  'Very pretty. We can call it Axle Road, Harry my boy, since various axles are about to come to grief on it. Just you watch.'

  There was a large pine tree by the roadside, and high up in it we could see something like a hut made of planks, a raised stand with a lookout. Smiling brightly, Gustav gave me a sly wink with those blue eyes of his and we both hurriedly got out of our truck. Clambering up the trunk of the pine, we hid ourselves, gasping for breath, in the lookout. It was an ideal spot. We found shotguns, pistols and boxes of cartridges there. And we scarcely had time to cool off and settle down in this shooting box before we heard the hoarse, domineering sound of a car's horn as it approached the nearest bend. It was a huge limousine, its engine humming as it drove at high speed along the smooth mountain road. We already had hold of the shotguns. The excitement was wonderful.

  'Aim at the chauffeur,' Gustav ordered swiftly, just as the heavy vehicle was racing by beneath us. And, before I knew it, I was taking aim at the blue cap of the man at the steering wheel and pulling the trigger. The man slumped at the wheel. The car careered on, smashed into the cliff wall and rebounded, only to crash heavily against the low protecting wall like a great fat bumble bee in a rage. Then it overturned and there was a short, soft thud as it jumped the wall and plummeted into the depths.

  'That's one done for,' Gustav said with a laugh. 'The next one's mine.'

  And no sooner had he said it than another car came racing by, the three or four people in it looking very small in their upholstered seats. I could see part of a woman's veil, blown back in a stiff, horizontal line from her head. It was a light blue veil, and I actually felt sorry about it because, for all we knew, it might be concealing the shining face of the most beautiful of women. Good Lord, I thought, if we really must act the bold robber we might have done better to take our cue from those great model outlaws of the past who, for all their bloodlust, drew the line at killing members of the fair sex. However, Gustav had already fired. With a jerk the driver slumped down in his seat, the car mounted the vertical rock face, tipped over and, its wheels uppermost, landed back down on the road with a loud crash. We waited, but nothing moved. As if caught in a trap, the car's occupants remained silently lying under their vehicle. It was still humming and throbbing, its wheels turning comically in the air. All at once, however, there was a terrifying explosion and the car was engulfed in bright flames.

  'It was a Ford,' Gustav said. 'We need to go down now and clear the road.'

  Climbing down, we took a look at the flaming heap. By the time the wreck had fully burned out, which was not long, we had cut some young branches which we used to lever it aside and tip it over the road's edge into the abyss. For quite a while we could still hear it crashing down through the undergrowth. Two of the dead occupants, having fallen out of the car when it overturned, were lying there on the road, their clothes partly burned. The coat of one of them was still fairly intact, so I went through the pockets in the hope of finding out who he was. I discovered a leather wallet with visiting cards in it. Taking one out, I read on it the words: 'Tat tvam asi.'12

  'Very amusing,' Gustav said, 'though in fact it makes no difference what the people we are killing are called. They're poor devils like us; their names are immaterial. This world has to be destroyed, and all of us with it. The least painful solution would be to flood it with water for ten minutes. Come on, back to work.'

  We threw the dead bodies after the car. Another was already on its way, tooting its horn. We shot this one to pieces right there on the road. It spun on for a stretch, reeling like a drunk, before sagging and chugging to a halt. One occupant remained motionless inside but another, a pretty young girl, got out unscathed, even though she looked pale and was trembling violently. Greeting her in a friendly manner, we asked what we could do to help. For quite a while she just stared at us like one deranged, far too shocked to be able to speak.

  'Come on, we might as well check on the old gentleman first,' Gustav said, turning towards the passenger who was still stuck there in his seat behind the dead chauffeur. He had short grey hair and intelligent, light-grey eyes that were open, even though, to judge from the blood flowing from his mouth and the worryingly stiff and crooked look of his neck, he seemed to be very badly injured.

  'Allow me to introduce myself, Sir, my name is Gustav,' said my companion, addressing the old gentleman. 'We've taken the liberty of shooting your chauffeur. May I ask with whom we have the pleasure of speaking?'

  The old man's small grey eyes gazed coolly and sadly at us.

  'I am Senior Public Prosecutor Loering,' he said slowly. 'You have not only killed my poor chauffeur, but me too, for I can feel my end is near. Tell me, why did you shoot at us?'

  'Because you were driving too fast.'

  'We were driving at the normal speed.'

  'It may have been normal yesterday, Your Honour, but it isn't normal today. Today we are of the opinion that any speed a car is driven at is too high. We have now taken to wrecking cars, all of them, and the rest of the machines too.'

  'Even your shotguns?'

  'Their turn will come too, if we have time. By tomorrow or the day after we'll presumably all be wiped out. As you know, our continent was terribly overpopulated. So the idea now is to clear the air.'

  'Are you shooting indiscriminately at everyone?'

  'Certainly. It's a shame to kill some of them, no doubt. I woul
d have been sorry, for instance, to see the pretty young lady die. I suppose she's your daughter.'

  'No, she is my typist.'

  'So much the better. And now get out of the car, please, or let us pull you out, because it's going to be destroyed.'

  'I prefer to be destroyed with it.'

  'As you wish, but let me ask you one more thing, if I may. You are a public prosecutor. I've never been able to understand how anyone can bring themselves to make a living from prosecuting others, the majority of them poor devils, and then sentencing them. But that's what you did, isn't it?'

  'It is. I did my duty. It was my office, just as it was the office of the executioner to take the lives of those I sentenced to death. Now you yourselves have taken on the same role, haven't you? You too are taking lives.'

  'Correct. Only we are not killing because it is our duty to. We are killing for pleasure, or rather out of displeasure, out of despair at the way the world is going. That's why we take a certain delight in killing. Did it never delight you?'

  'You are starting to bore me. Be so kind as to finish your task. If duty means nothing to you ...'

  He fell silent, tightening his lips as if intending to spit, but all that emerged from his mouth was a trickle of blood that stuck on his chin.