Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Steppenwolf
Steppenwolf
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Dave Schaafsma's review
bookshelves: fiction-20th-century
Apr 23, 2018
bookshelves: fiction-20th-century
Read 2 times. Last read April 11, 2018 to April 23, 2018.
for madmen only
In league with Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is about a suicidal guy who never actually commits suicide, a tortured soul who struggles with the dualism of his nature, from the human to the wolf, from the classical to the romantic, to the spiritual to the sinful, from the life of the mind to the life of the body. I read this three times when I was 18-20, trying to understand it, trying to find elements that would help shape my personality, my image as budding/wannabe Artiste, in all my adolescent angst. “You were such a happy baby; what happened?” my mother said to me once during this brooding period, when I was reading everything from Dostoevsky to Rimbaud to Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano and Camus and Sartre, and yes, every Hesse book I could get my hands on.
Steppenwolf was written by Hesse at middle age, looking back on his struggle between the coolly distant Germanic aesthetic and the more sensual Buddhism. In my late teens all the Christians I knew including me were reading Zen Buddhism, and Hesse helped us bridge the strict Calvinism we wanted to be free from and the East we found more attractive, less restrictive.
Harry Haller, writer and reader of many books, an intellectual, is contemplating suicide on his 50th birthday. Melancholy, dumped by his wife, he sees himself as a “wolf of the steppes,” half human, half wolf. He hates modern society. He’d rather read Goethe and listen to Mozart than go to a party and listen to modern jazz or make small talk. His nephew sees him as "a genius of suffering," which seems about right. He’s born to be wild, separate from society:
Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egMWl...
A peddler gives Steppenwolf a pamphlet entitled, "Treatise on the Steppenwolf." He meets a woman, Hermione, in a bar; she mocks him for his self-obsession, and introduces the aging intellectual—through other women—to the life of the body, to dancing, to cocaine, to wine, to sex. The sensual. Meaning: women, basically. Men: Rational, the life of the mind. Women: Sensual, physical. There’s almost no dialogue in this book, but for certain, women mostly play a central role; they don’t talk much, the me do most of the talking, but they are a central shaping force.
Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPE9a...
Steppenwolf visits a Magic Theater, which in the sixties might have been seen as a place for psychedelic experimentation because it is there that Harry experiences dreams and nightmares. Emerging out of this with Rosa, Harry ultimately finds he needs to lighten up! He needs to laugh, and enjoy life, and society. So that’s the heart of the book, Step embracing Mozart’s The Magic Flute and love of life, rejecting the suicidal isolation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Plato, Spinoza, and Nietzsche get referenced along the way, too. I guess it can be seen as a novelistic reflection on the divided self.
There’s not much of an actual story here. It’s an internal, philosophical/spiritual novel, which feels more like allegory (and perhaps autobiography), to tell you how to stop brooding and embrace life. I can see in reading this why a man—in particular a man, because it was written by a man with men as his primary audience, I think—in his late teens or middle-age might embrace this. I liked it less than I did when I was in my teens, but it surely has a kind of intense appeal. Oh, and my mom came to see I also got out of that brooding phase and lightened up, too.
In league with Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is about a suicidal guy who never actually commits suicide, a tortured soul who struggles with the dualism of his nature, from the human to the wolf, from the classical to the romantic, to the spiritual to the sinful, from the life of the mind to the life of the body. I read this three times when I was 18-20, trying to understand it, trying to find elements that would help shape my personality, my image as budding/wannabe Artiste, in all my adolescent angst. “You were such a happy baby; what happened?” my mother said to me once during this brooding period, when I was reading everything from Dostoevsky to Rimbaud to Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano and Camus and Sartre, and yes, every Hesse book I could get my hands on.
Steppenwolf was written by Hesse at middle age, looking back on his struggle between the coolly distant Germanic aesthetic and the more sensual Buddhism. In my late teens all the Christians I knew including me were reading Zen Buddhism, and Hesse helped us bridge the strict Calvinism we wanted to be free from and the East we found more attractive, less restrictive.
Harry Haller, writer and reader of many books, an intellectual, is contemplating suicide on his 50th birthday. Melancholy, dumped by his wife, he sees himself as a “wolf of the steppes,” half human, half wolf. He hates modern society. He’d rather read Goethe and listen to Mozart than go to a party and listen to modern jazz or make small talk. His nephew sees him as "a genius of suffering," which seems about right. He’s born to be wild, separate from society:
Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egMWl...
A peddler gives Steppenwolf a pamphlet entitled, "Treatise on the Steppenwolf." He meets a woman, Hermione, in a bar; she mocks him for his self-obsession, and introduces the aging intellectual—through other women—to the life of the body, to dancing, to cocaine, to wine, to sex. The sensual. Meaning: women, basically. Men: Rational, the life of the mind. Women: Sensual, physical. There’s almost no dialogue in this book, but for certain, women mostly play a central role; they don’t talk much, the me do most of the talking, but they are a central shaping force.
Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPE9a...
Steppenwolf visits a Magic Theater, which in the sixties might have been seen as a place for psychedelic experimentation because it is there that Harry experiences dreams and nightmares. Emerging out of this with Rosa, Harry ultimately finds he needs to lighten up! He needs to laugh, and enjoy life, and society. So that’s the heart of the book, Step embracing Mozart’s The Magic Flute and love of life, rejecting the suicidal isolation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Plato, Spinoza, and Nietzsche get referenced along the way, too. I guess it can be seen as a novelistic reflection on the divided self.
There’s not much of an actual story here. It’s an internal, philosophical/spiritual novel, which feels more like allegory (and perhaps autobiography), to tell you how to stop brooding and embrace life. I can see in reading this why a man—in particular a man, because it was written by a man with men as his primary audience, I think—in his late teens or middle-age might embrace this. I liked it less than I did when I was in my teens, but it surely has a kind of intense appeal. Oh, and my mom came to see I also got out of that brooding phase and lightened up, too.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
August 26, 2012
– Shelved
September 18, 2012
– Shelved as:
fiction-20th-century
April 11, 2018
–
Started Reading
April 11, 2018
–
0.0%
"Read this book three times when I was 18 and 19. Listening to it now. "For madmen only.""
April 23, 2018
–
Finished Reading
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message 1:
by
Ilse
(new)
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rated it 4 stars
Apr 23, 2018 10:28AM
![Ilse](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1686327155p1/22848274.jpg)
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![david](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1674750693p1/67794375.jpg)
![Rituraj Kashyap](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1472823342p1/26666326.jpg)
![Moira Macfarlane](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1677858367p1/59942362.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
Well, it is a very familiar separation/distinction/binary, and in 1969 when I probably first read it I wouldn't have been disturbed by it. This is probably how I saw girls, as mysterious, sensual, unavailable. Now it seems really oversimplified, of course. And I probably didn't even like it most of the way through, really, but it ends with a kind of affirmation of life.. .. though a skeptic might also say he just found a girl and now he is happy again. Now I notice: He never talks to most of these women; he dances with them, he admires them for their "beauty" and he has sex with them. This feels like the history of literature with respect to men and women, in a way! A woman in my climate change literature class this spring has been writing about all the women in the books we have been reading are just objectified as sexual objects, in The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, in the film Water World, Though I do think things are changing in the past quarter century of course with more women and men authors focusing on strong girls and women.
![Rituraj Kashyap](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1472823342p1/26666326.jpg)
Sure!
![Greta G](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1525435609p1/45248887.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
2) Some of it feels like a dream, nightmare, drug trip. Everyone thought this was a cool book and all my friends were talking about it, and it has all this dark laughter in it. . . it was interesting but I didn't know what it was all about. It felt "deep" and mysterious and sexy and I was a virgin, no experience with drugs, but intrigued by all of it. I was a working class kid wanting to be that "cultured" to get that kind of hip book. . .. and know all those references.
![david](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1674750693p1/67794375.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
If you are suicidally depressed, get laid and this will make you quite a bit happier. I really think that is the point of this book, and I said it above less directly. . .. :)
![Greta G](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1525435609p1/45248887.jpg)
I think that sometimes, in our strive to understand the meaning of life through reading, or, in your case, to be hip :), or because we idolize an author, we may be giving a book more deep and spiritual significance than it really deserves.
I’m pretty skeptical about these kind of ‘deep’ books. If an author doesn’t succeed to get his message across, it’s just not written well (unless I know nothing about the subject of course) or he just doesn’t understand what he is talking about himself.
Also referencing authors, composers, philosophers, works of art and literature ... can be done in a way that is meaningful even when a reader doesn’t know them, otherwise it’s just name-dropping and showing off.
Anyway, I only speed-read this book to help my daughter out with a book review for school, and to be honest, I wasn’t very thrilled with it. I plan to read it again though, more attentively, because I really loved his book Gertrude which I read about 25 years ago (not surprisingly, you didn’t like that one :)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
For much of this book I was bored with Harry Haller and his pretentious self-absorption, I winced at the idea of his thinking of himself as a Steppenwolf, ugh, but in the end I was won over by his recognizing that he had been self-absorbed and narcissistic. The women are just sexual objects (like the love children in the "sexual revolution were supposed to be, I suppose; "free" love!!) but even that part of it was way better than all his early whining.
![Czarny Pies](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1400687408p1/29160274.jpg)
![Ken](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1621963990p1/730754.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
Thanks. I read your review about the point of the book being that sex and drugs seem to be the solution. I think that would be one way to look at what the book says! I didn't read this with my students, but I would recommend it to some of them, I think. It feels like a threshold or identity crisis book, perfect for teens or mid-life crisis.
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
![Greta G](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1525435609p1/45248887.jpg)
Hesse himself grew up in a Pietist home, David. He had a troubled youth, showed signs of depression, attempted suicide, was in a mental institution for a while, had severe conflicts with his parents, searched for spiritual/theological inspiration a great deal of his life. I doubt he ever lived a life of free love and drugs himself. Probably that was only a fantasy. Based on your review and comments, I’m not sure I would recommend the book to people who struggle with an identity crisis ; on the contrary! :)
![Czarny Pies](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1400687408p1/29160274.jpg)
Thanks. I read your review about the point of the book being that sex a..."
This time I must concede that you understood the book better than me.
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
Thanks. I read your review about the point of the book be..."
I appreciate the compliment, Czarny, but there are still things I don't understand about it, and those who know philosophy and music and German literature better than I do will lend more insight into it.
![Czarny Pies](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1400687408p1/29160274.jpg)
Thanks. I read your review about the point..."
There are some topics that I know very well. The problem or the charm of GR is that you review books in areas that you do not know very well and it in areas that you know much better.
![Ned](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1526900273p1/21232850.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
Ah, thanks, Fergus, I think if we got together we would have a lot to talk about.
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
![Jay](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1713179389p1/6137835.jpg)
![Dave Schaafsma](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1661286030p1/269235.jpg)
Best Hesse book? Well, that's (of course) a matter of taste. Books like Demian and Siddhartha and are simple and simple straightforward and emotional and usually the most popular. The more intellectual ones, the more complex and philosophical ones that are seen as great include Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game, and the lit crowd usually picks that latter one, but that's one I haven't re-read in decades, though I have on old dusty copy of it here. I guess Siddhartha is the most direct and clear and emotional one, I like that, but I kind of prefer the darker Demian. . . it kind of occurs to me it's like a junior Steppenwolf. I need to re-read some of them, like Narcissus and Goldmund, too.
![David](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1359307439p1/16855847.jpg)