Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

  Interestingly, however, Hesse's criticism is not just confined to these familiar targets that most historians now agree played a significant part in the failure of the Weimar Republic. He also points more speculatively to the negative influence of German intellectuals over the years: philosophers, artists and writers like himself. 'We German intellectuals, all of us, were not at home in reality, were alien and hostile to it, and that is why we have played such a lamentable role in the real world of our country, in its history, its politics and its public opinion,' is the indictment pronounced by Haller after an evening spent listening to a concert of early music. If his own passion for music triggers such thoughts it is because he views his whole relationship to it as 'unwholesome'. Music is associated in his mind with things other-worldly, purely aesthetic and also irrational. Indulgence in it comes at the expense of reason, the Logos, the word, which ought to be the preferred 'instrument' of intellectuals. This argument may strike readers as vague and speculative, but Hesse is not alone in propounding it. Thomas Mann had already set up a similar opposition between music and words in The Magic Mountain and he was later to expand on this theme when exploring the roots of Nazism in his novel Dr Faustus and his 1945 essay 'Germany and the Germans'. In a more general way Thomas Mann's elder brother, Heinrich, had prepared the ground for such arguments in a number of essays written before and during the First World War in which he castigated German intellectuals and writers for their relative indifference to socio-political developments, especially compared to their French counterparts such as Voltaire or Zola.

  Harry Haller's criticism of German intellectuals for being 'alien and hostile' to reality can, ironically, be seen to apply in no small measure to himself, particularly where the reality of the modern world is concerned. In the first few pages of his notebooks we find him railing against modern life with its mass entertainments as something essentially shallow, characterized by mindless consumption. When he later visits a cinema to kill time he is horrified to see the sacred stories of the Bible reproduced on a commercialized epic scale before an audience that is gratefully consuming not only the film but also the sandwiches it has brought along with it.2 He abhors jazz, thinking that something similar must have been played under the last Roman emperors since it is 'the music of an age in decline'. In all these respects Haller seems to share the cultural pessimism expressed by many intellectuals at the time, most notably by Oswald Spengler in his popular Decline of the West. At one point, when attending the funeral of a complete stranger, Haller reflects that the whole world of culture as he knows it is like a vast cemetery in which the names of Jesus Christ, Socrates, Mozart, Haydn, Dante and Goethe are now barely legible on the graves. The God of the modern age, in Haller's eyes, is technology, something he is also hostile to, witness his enthusiastic participation in the wholesale destruction of cars in one sequence from the Magic Theatre and his aversion to early wireless sets, whether constructed by his landlady's nephew as a hobby or by Mozart in order to tune in to a broadcast of Handel's music. Haller's hostility to some of these features of modern life, such as the dominance of the motor car or the mindless consumption, may well explain the novel's lasting appeal in times of greater ecological awareness. It was certainly, as indicated before, shared by the 'drop-outs' of the hippie generation in America in the 1960s, for many of whom Steppenwolf became a cult book.3 Ultimately, however, the novel offers no blanket endorsement of Haller's cultural pessimism, since Mozart, in the Magic Theatre, insists that he must learn to listen to 'life's damned radio music' without allowing the dross it contains to destroy the true spirit of it.

  STRUCTURE AND STYLE

  In a letter of 1927 Hesse complained that no critic had appreciated the innovative form of Steppenwolf. It was not, as many thought, a fragmentary work, but had a clearly proportioned structure like a sonata or a fugue. He later made a similar claim about the novel's musical structure, arguing that it was rigorously composed in sonata form around the Tract as an intermezzo. Were this the case, it would be a highly appropriate form for a novel in which music plays a considerable thematic role. However, despite some ingenious attempts by academic critics to substantiate it, the analogy is not altogether convincing. Subtle shaping along musical lines would, in any case, appear to conflict with Hesse's own statement, quoted above, that he had long since abandoned all 'aesthetic ambition'.

  Steppenwolf does have an unusual structure, but it is perhaps more helpful to see this as determined by considerations of perspective. The novel begins with a seemingly objective view of Haller in the form of a reflective memoir by the unnamed landlady's nephew who styles himself as the editor of the notebooks left behind by the lodger. We then enter the subjective world of Haller via a first instalment of his notebooks, ominously headed 'For mad people only', suggesting that our perspective on events will be totally different from that of the eminently commonsensical 'bourgeois' editor. A switch to a third narrative perspective occurs when Haller records the contents of the Steppenwolf Tract that has mysteriously come into his possession. This, in his own estimation, is 'highly objective, the work of someone uninvolved, picturing me from the outside and from above'. For the remainder of the novel - much the longest section - Hesse reverts to the subjective vision of Haller's notebooks, though that vision is progressively modified, to an extent under the influence of the Tract, partly also as Haller learns from his encounters with Hermione and Pablo to view himself in radically different ways. The most striking change of perspective comes in the long Magic Theatre sequence at the end. Here all semblance of reasoned objectivity is left behind, as is suggested by the words 'PAY AT THE DOOR WITH YOUR MIND' that Haller reads on the announcement of the evening's entertainment.

  Hesse's use of multiple narrators certainly makes Steppenwolf a more complex text in the modernist manner than any of his previous works. There is also evidence of his striving to achieve contrasts in tone and register within the novel's different sections. Whether he is entirely successful in this is, however, debatable. The language of the nephew in the first section is, it is true, generally simpler than that of Haller when we first encounter him in the notebooks, where the sentences are far longer and more intricate. Yet even the supposedly non-intellectual nephew is familiar with aspects of Nietzsche's thought and proves capable of analysing Haller in ways that don't differ markedly from what is later argued in the Tract. The Tract itself is a curious mixture stylistically. It begins like a fairy tale with 'Once upon a time', reads for a while like the cheap 'self-help' manual it appears to be, but then, despite its occasionally playful, mocking tone, it develops into something more akin to a sociological and psychological treatise with generalized comments on the bourgeoisie, suicide, and the complex psychological make-up of human beings. In other words, it is ultimately much more like the 'study' Hesse initially intended to call it than a cheap pamphlet obtained from a street vendor. The Tract is variously couched in the 'I' and the 'we' form, but exactly who the author or authors of the document are remains a mystery. There are suggestions that the perspective is that of the 'Immortals' and that they are the owners of a number of Magic Theatres like the one that Haller will eventually visit. Yet the sometimes ponderous and pompous style of the piece is very different from that of the inscriptions on that theatre's doors, which is more appropriate to the kind of crude 'peep show', as Pablo calls it. And at no point do the Tract's authors mock Haller for his own pomposities as scathingly as Mozart does in that theatre's last scene.

  In short, it seems that Hesse has not entirely solved the stylistic problems arising from the structure he has chosen to adopt in the novel. Nor is that structure as radically modernist as is claimed by critics such as Thomas Mann, who regarded Steppenwolf as comparable with innovatory works of the same period, such as Joyce's Ulysses or Gide's Faux-monnayeurs. The novel's strength lies rather in its honest depiction of a personal neurosis, which, as the 'editor' points out in the preface, is also the neurosis of a whole generation. As such
, it has succeeded in appealing to several subsequent generations too.

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  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Der Steppenwolf first published in Germany by S. Fischer Verlag A.G. 1927

  This translation first published by Penguin Classics 2012

  Copyright (c) Hermann Hesse, 1955

  Translation and Afterword copyright (c) David Horrocks, 2012

  Cover Illustration by Julian House

  All rights reserved

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-93868-4

  1 An epistolary novel in sentimental vein by Johann Timotheus Hermes (1738-1821), one of the most read works of the eighteenth century.

  2 Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), humorous novelist of the Romantic period, greatly admired by Hesse, who wrote introductions to a number of twentieth-century editions of his works.

  3 Real name: Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), Romantic poet and thinker.

  4 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), major dramatist and critic; Friedrich H. Jacobi (1743-1819), novelist and thinker, critical of rationalism; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), physicist, philosopher and satirist. These three writers indicate Haller's interest in the Enlightenment as well as Romanticism.

  5 Both these aphorisms come from Das Allgemeine Brouillon or General Rough Draft, a vast collection of thoughts on science, philosophy and the arts that Novalis jotted down in the years 1798 and 1799.

  1 Born in 1805, Stifter was an Austrian novelist and story-writer. The reference is to his suicide in Linz in 1868.

  2 Central figure in The Logbook of the Aeronaut Gianozzo, a story of 1801 by Jean Paul. See p. 13 footnote2.

  3 Another Jean Paul character, this time from his 1809 story Army Chaplain Schmelzle's Journey to Flatz.

  4 Monumental Buddhist shrine in Java, erected in the eighth and ninth centuries AD.

  1 Part of a refrain in the 1837 comic opera Zar und Zimmermann (Tsar and Joiner) by the popular Berlin composer Albert Lortzing (1801-51).

  1 The reference is to a poem of autumn 1884, unpublished in Nietzsche's lifetime, which he variously entitled 'Vereinsamt' ('Isolated') and 'Abschied' ('Departure').

  2 See p. 13, footnote1.

  3 Friedrich von Matthison (1761-1831), once popular, now almost totally for-gotten writer of neoclassical verse.

  4 Gottfried August Burger (1747-94), poet of the 'Storm and Stress' period, noted for his ballads. The 'Molly' poems were written for Auguste, younger sister of his then wife, Dorette. After Dorette's death he entered into a short-lived second marriage with Auguste.

  5 Christiane Vulpius (1765-1816) was for many years Goethe's lover and eventually his wife.

  6 The first line of the untitled eighth poem from Goethe's late cycle 'Chinese-German Hours and Seasons' of 1827.

  7 Goethe was not without admiration for the dramatist and story-writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), but he shied away from the more pessimistic aspects of his work, which he regarded as self-destructive. Kleist committed suicide in 1811. Similarly, though less strongly, the 'Classical' Goethe seems to have deplored the wilder aspects of Beethoven's personality and his compositions.

  8 Walther von der Vogelweide (c.1170-1230) is the most important German lyric poet of the Middle Ages.

  9 The 'Erbfeind', that is to say, France, traditionally regarded by the Germans as their arch rival and enemy.

  10 The foxtrot 'Yearning', written by the Philadelphia-born composer Joseph A. (Joe) Burke (1884-1950), was very popular from 1925 onwards. 'Valencia', another foxtrot, written by the Spanish composer Jose Padilla (1889-1960), became a major hit for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in 1926.

  11 Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), Norwegian writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Like the philosopher Nietzsche, Hamsun influenced a whole generation of German writers, including Hesse.

  12 A Sanskrit saying, literally meaning 'You are that' where 'Tat' ('that') is the fundamental principle underlying all cosmic reality, and 'tvam' ('you') denotes an individual's innermost self. To recognize that the two are identical, as this pronouncement of Vedantic Hinduism teaches, is to achieve salvation or liberation.

  13 Hesse's invention, this work alludes to the famous collection of German folksongs Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn), which the Romantic writers Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano assembled in the years 1806-8. By slightly changing the title, however, Hesse is also alluding to the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), specifically to his 1922 study Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), which contained many illustrations of artworks produced by patients in the psychiatric hospital of Heidelberg University.

  14 'O Freunde, nicht diese Tone', the beginning of an introductory passage that precedes the singing of Schiller's 'Ode to Joy' in the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Sympho
ny. Hesse had already used the line as the title of a newspaper article he wrote in November 1914, a condemnation of the stridently nationalistic tones then universally to be heard in the first year of the First World War.