Steppenwolf

“Don’t you smell it too, a fragrance given off by the odor of floor polish and a faint whiff of turpentine together with the mahogany and the washed leaves of the plants—the very essence of bourgeois cleanliness, of neatness and meticulousness, of duty and devotion shown in little things. I don’t know who lives here, but behind that glazed door there must be a paradise of cleanliness and spotless mediocrity, of ordered ways, a touching and anxious devotion to life’s little habits and tasks.”

Haller’s remarks on the plants in the stairwell betray his torn perspective between “man” and “wolf.” He praises the doorway for its cleanliness and safety, but he undermines this praise with terms like “mediocrity” and “bourgeois,” both of which are derogatory in this usage. Likewise, the “anxious devotion” Haller projects onto the doorway implies his own discomfort with cleanliness and safety.

“It was not in my power to verify the truth of the experiences related in Haller’s manuscript. I have no doubt that they are for the most part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention. They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences.”

The narrator, while establishing a framework to add credibility to Haller’s writing, also undermines that credibility in this passage. He asserts that Haller did not likely experience the events of the manuscript, but he encourages readers to find abstract meaning in the writing. This suggestion foreshadows the ending of the novel, in which the events of the narrative are implied to be purely imaginary.

“I like to step across the threshold of my room where all this suddenly stops; where, instead, cigar ash and wine bottles lie among the heaped up books and there is nothing but disorder and neglect; and where everything—books, manuscript, thoughts—is marked and saturated with the plate of lonely men with the problem of existence and with the yearning after a new orientation for an age that has lost its bearings.”

Haller’s thoughts on his room reveal the kind of joy he takes in suffering alone. Though he laments his isolation and distance from society, he also relishes the filth and discomfort in his life as a badge of honor. His room, like himself, reflects the idea of disorientation and confusion, emphasized by the phrase “lost its bearings,” which Haller tries to deflect to a “lost age” that is really only his own choice.

“One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade and sugar and sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental and vigorous. Yet the two went artlessly well together and made a whole. It was the music of decline. There must have been such music in Rome under the later emperors. Compared with Bach and Mozart and real music it was, naturally, a miserable affair; but so was all our art, all our thought, all our makeshift culture in comparison with real culture.”

This passage highlights Haller’s anti-Modernist attitude, literally using the term “real” to elevate music and culture of the past beyond that of the implicitly “fake” culture of the modern day. Haller compares interwar Europe to “Rome under the later emperors,” drawing on popular ideas of the decadence and decline of Rome to suggest that his own culture is similarly in decline.

“On the other hand, all suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s own hand.”

This passage from the treatise remarks on Harry’s feelings regarding suicide. He views suicide as an escape, but he also feels that it would be cowardly to end his own life. The alternative to suicide, in his view, is to be “conquered by life”—a phrase that carries a tone of martyrdom. Harry inherently feels that his suffering makes him superior to other people, as though suffering proved his strength and nobility.

“It is possible that Harry will one day be led to this latter alternative. It is possible that he will learn one day to know himself. He may get hold of one of our little mirrors. He may encounter the Immortals. He may find in one of our Magic Theaters the very thing that is needed to free his neglected soul. A thousand such possibilities await him. His fate brings them on, leaving him no choice; for those outside of the bourgeoisie live in the atmosphere of these magical possibilities.”

The treatise foreshadows the remainder of the novel, and this passage marks the point beyond which the remainder of the narrative takes place only in Haller’s mind. If the treatise itself is a mirror, supported by the fact that the treatise addresses Haller’s life directly, then this moment would be when Haller steps into that mirror and begins to address himself.

“Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in his wolf’s breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same forgetfulness as the man who sings: ‘If I could be a child once more!’ He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering.”

This passage, though directed at Haller’s simplification of the wolf and periodic desire to go back in time, also highlights the issues of anti-Modernism. Much like the person who longs for childhood or animalistic simplicity, the anti-Modernist idealizes the past and believes that the modern world is uniquely corrupt. In reality, all times have suffering and complexity, and changing time or place does not magically heal all pains.

“Thus stood the two Harrys, neither playing a very pretty part, over against the worthy professor, mocking one another, watching one another, and spitting at one another, while as always in such predicaments, the eternal question presented itself whether all this was simple stupidity and human frailty, a common depravity, or whether this sentimental egoism and perversity, this slovenliness and two facedness of feeling was merely a personal idiosyncrasy of the Steppenwolves.”

This passage highlights the actual reality of Haller’s perception of himself as the Steppenwolf. He envisions one part of himself violently fighting with the other, each trying to persuade him to behave in accordance with social norms or to actively reject them. Haller considers the possibility, though, that all people might feel this way, which shows early progress toward understanding the treatise and himself.

“What a hideous day of shame and wretchedness it had been from morning to night, from the cemetery to the scene with the professor. For what? And why? Was there any sense in taking up the burden of more such days as this or of sitting out any more such suppers? There was not. This very night I would make an end of the comedy, go home and cut my throat. No more terrifying.”

Following the incident at the professor’s house, Haller is feeling an accumulation of embarrassment. At the funeral, the man from the theater did not recognize him, then he made a fool of himself at the professor’s, and now he wants to die by suicide to end his suffering. This passage is one of the few instances in which Hesse hints that Haller’s suffering is not as severe as Haller makes it seem.

“Goethe has been dead for 100 years, and you’re very fond of him, and you have a wonderful picture in your head of what he must have looked like, and you have the right to, I suppose. But the artist who adores Goethe too, and makes a picture of him, has no right to do it, nor the professor either, nor anybody else—because you don’t like it. You find it intolerable. You have to be insulting and leave the house.”

As in many of Hermine and Haller’s early meetings, she makes fun of Haller’s perspective, noting the arrogance and conceit Haller displays by criticizing the arrogance and conceit of the portrait of Goethe. She outlines how Haller takes himself seriously and thinks he is always right, while simultaneously rejecting all other ideas as foolish. In Haller’s mind, he cannot see where he is wrong because he never allows the possibility that someone else could have an equally valid perspective.

“We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wish to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”

Goethe’s perspective on time in Haller’s dream reveals the importance of humor in an abstract form. Taken in the view of mortality, Goethe is telling Haller that his life is too short for him to worry about all the issues he takes so seriously, since, even after death, there will still not be enough time to care. As such, Goethe advocates humor as a way to enjoy the small amount of time he and Haller have.

“I told her that the omnipresence of all forces and facts was well known to ancient India, and that science had merely brought a small fraction of this fact into general use by devising it, that is, for sound waves, or receiver and transmitter which were still in their first stages and miserably defective. The principal fact known to that ancient knowledge was, I said, the unreality of time. This science had not yet observed.”

This passage aligns Haller with Hesse, as Hesse was in the middle of a depressive period in the 1920s and was eagerly integrating what he had learned in India into his philosophy. Haller’s use of Indian spirituality as an analog for European science relates to a pattern of comparisons many Europeans made, and still make, between European and Asian thought. However, Haller is still dissatisfied with the European iteration of the concept of omnipresence, implying that he is not against progress but irritated with the rate at which Europe is progressing.

“No, one had to bring certain qualities to dancing that I was entirely without, gayety, innocence, frivolity, elasticity. Well, I had always thought so. But there, the next time it did in fact go better. I even got some fun out of it, and at the end of the lesson her mean announced that I was now proficient in the foxtrot.”

Haller learning to dance is emblematic of the paradigm of Haller’s life, in which he needs to try new things in order to learn why other people like them. He began with a total insistence against dancing, and his list of traits cements his self-loathing as the source of his distaste for dancing. However, once he begins trying to dance with Hermine, he quickly masters the dance and begins enjoying himself.

“Because it’s the same for me As for you, because I am alone exactly as you are, because I’m as little fond of life and men and myself as you are and can put up with them as little. There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.”

This passage continues Hermine’s hints that she is a reflection of Haller, sympathizing with his distaste for society. She appeals to his sense of superiority with terms like “stupidity and crudeness,” while also vowing that she can only bear to be with certain people, like Haller. Because Haller feels the same way, he becomes more attached to Hermine in this conversation, never questioning how Hermine knows his feelings so specifically.

“Though I carried the complete works of Bach and Hayden in my head and could say the cleverest things about them, not a soul would be the better for it. But when I take hold of my mouthpiece and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood. That’s the point and that alone. Look at the faces in a dancehall at the moment when the music strikes up after a longish pause, how eyes sparkle, legs twitch and faces begin to laugh. That is why one makes music.”

Pablo’s perspective on music is a direct counterpoint to Haller’s. Where Haller finds significance in the canon of classical music, he can only find his “golden thread” when he is convinced of the universal quality and importance of the music he hears. For Pablo, this is too restrictive and reduces music to study and theory. Instead, Pablo insists on the value of music as a source of pleasure: Music is valuable because it makes people happy.

“Because I should not have had that fear of death when I wished for it all the same. The unhappiness that I need and long for is different. It is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and lust after death. That is the unhappiness, or happiness, that I am waiting for.”

Hermine’s perspective is the same as Haller’s, in that both characters do not truly wish to end their lives. Instead, they want to suffer and be rewarded for suffering, enabling them to relish their pain without feeling it too deeply. The issue with this paradigm, as Haller shows, is that they take their suffering too seriously to ever find enjoyment in it. Instead, they need to learn to laugh at their own pain.

“For the honor of the world, I will suppose it to be in our time only—a disease, a momentary misfortune. Our leaders strain every nerve, and with success, to get the next war going, while the rest of us, meanwhile, dance the foxtrot, earn money and eat chocolates—in such a time the world must indeed cut a poor figure. Let us hope that other times were better, and will be better again, richer, broader and deeper. But that is no help to us now. And perhaps it has always been the same—”

Hermine plays along with Haller’s insistence that the modern day is worse than any other time, but she opens the possibility that Haller’s thinking is either wishful or misinformed. She hopes that the past and future were and will be better, but she cannot say for sure that things have not always been the same. This discussion opens Haller’s mind to the possibility that his railing against modernity is fruitless.

“And without Hermine appearing to give herself the least trouble I was very soon in love with her. As she was dressed as a boy, I could not dance with her nor allow myself any tender advances, and while she seemed distant and neutral in her male mask, her looks and words and gestures encircled me with all her feminine charm. Without so much as having touched her I surrendered to her spell, and this spell itself kept within the part she played. It was the spell of a hermaphrodite.”

As in the passage in which he wonders about an orgy with Pablo and Maria, Heller’s unconscious desires chafe against societal restrictions. This repression is evident in the language he uses: Because Hermine is dressed as a boy, he cannot “allow [him]self any tender advances.” His attraction to Hermine has always been rooted in her similarity to himself and to Herman, and the combination of masculine and feminine energy is explicitly arousing for Haller in this passage. The “spell” Hermine casts is only that of mirroring Haller and Haller’s desires so perfectly.

“Where were we? Was I asleep? Was I at home? Was I driving in a car? No, I was sitting in a blue light in a round room and a rare atmosphere, in a stratum of reality that had become rarefied in the extreme. Why then was Hermine so white? Why was Pablo talking so much? Was it not perhaps I who made him talk, spoke, indeed, with his voice? Was it not, too, my own soul that contemplated me out of his black eyes like a lost and frightened bird, just as it had out of Hermines gray ones?”

Haller’s confusion in the room reflects the disorienting experience of drug use and partying, but it also shows his own internal state of mind. Looking to Hermine and Pablo, he starts to realize that he may be the only person present, with Pablo and Hermine simply existing as fragments of himself. This passage foreshadows the conclusion, in which Haller sees that he has been alone the entire time.

“I saw myself for a brief instant as my usual self, except that I looked unusually good-humored, bright and laughing. But I had scarcely had time to recognize myself before the reflection fell to pieces. A second, a third, a tenth, a twentieth figure sprang from it till the whole gigantic mirror is full of nothing but Harrys or bits of him, each of which I saw only for the instant of recognition.”

The mirror in the Magic Theater displays the concept that the treatise and Haller’s meditations have been saying throughout the novel: that each person has thousands of souls or selves. By making the abstract concept of a fragmented identity real, the mirror shows Harry the many possibilities he has within him, foreshadowing the radical and psychedelic experiences he will have in the theater.

“Meanwhile a man on foot went past below. He saw the smashed-up cars and began nosing around them. Leaning over into one of them he pulled out a gay parasol, a ladies handbag and a bottle of wine. Then he sat down contentedly on the wall, took a drink from the bottle and ate something wrapped in tinfoil out of the handbag. After emptying the bottle he went on, well pleased, with the parasol clasped under his arm; And I said to Gustav: ‘Could you find it in you to shoot at this good fellow and make a hole in his head? God knows, I couldn’t.’”

The man in the road represents the ability of each person to distance themselves from conflicts like the abstract war of the machines. Gustav and Haller tell Dora they must fight or die, and yet they find a man totally separate from this dynamic. Haller’s statement that he could not kill that man emphasizes the fact that Haller could choose to live like the man in the road, rather than actively seeking conflict.

“‘It is the last great music ever written,’ said I with the pomposity of a schoolmaster. ‘Certainly, there was Schubert to come. Hugo Wolf also, and I must not forget the poor, lovely Chopin either. You frown, Maestro? Oh, yes, Beethoven is wonderful too. But all that—beautiful as it may be—has something rhapsodical about it, something of disintegration. A work of such plentitude and power as Don Giovanni has never since arisen among men.’”

Haller repeats the same elitist view of music to Mozart that he said earlier to Pablo, taking on the same air of conceit that he hated in Goethe’s portrait at the professor’s house. Without realizing it, this passage shows how Haller is the exact person he does not respect. His criticisms of music and musicians are directed, no less, at Mozart, the musician he most respects, making it obvious that Haller is looking for approval.

“It little becomes people like you to be critics of radio or of life either. Better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest period or is it that you have done better yourself, more nobly and fitly and with better taste? Oh, no, Mr. Harry, you have not. You have made a frightful history of disease out of your life, and the misfortune of your gifts. And you have, as I see, found no better use for so pretty, so enchanting a young lady than to stick a knife into her body and destroy her.”

Mozart points out the irony of a person like Haller, who sees himself as a horrible and desperate person, to criticize anything that other people do or like. Instead, Mozart reinforces the novel’s focus of looking inward and trying to solve problems within Haller’s own life, first. Then, when Haller is content with himself, the implication is that he will laugh at others, not criticize them.