Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Steppenwolf

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.