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Steppenwolf is among my favorite books of all time, and it is due to the great influence it has had on my life that I chose to name my website after it. This page has been (for sentimental reasons) preserved almost unchanged from its original home at Vassar College, where Brian's original "Magic Theatre" is sadly but a memory. Steppenwolf is the story of Harry Haller, an author and intellectual, who believes himself to be possessed by two personalities, one of a man and one of a wolf. These two personalities live within him in a state of perpetual antagonism, forever preventing poor Harry from finding happiness or meaning in life. Steppenwolf chronicles the individual quest for existential reassurance that I believe all human beings must at some point come to terms with. The "Magic Theatre of the Soul" is our private temple of self-exploration. It is where one faces the unmasked reflections of the self and comes to terms with one's own multiplicity. The human soul is fundamentally multiple and multifarious, with numerous facets, pieces, and twigs that the actualized individual can use to arrange, construct, and reconstruct the self at wish. Hence, Steppenwolf is about learning to love one's own complexity and become fluent and morphous in the language of life itself. This language, according to Hesse, is "humor." Much of the book focuses upon Harry's preoccupation with his own death. Because of his unhappiness, Harry makes a pledge to himself that he will commit suicide on his fiftieth birthday. Hesse uses this theme to suggest that man has created a fear of death to rationalize a far more intense fear of life. (I have, in fact, met a number of people who have suffered from severe depression -- myself among them -- who renounced their intent to commit suicide at least in part because of this book.) Toward the end of the book, after Harry stood trial for murdering his would-be lover (it wasn't a "real" murder), one of the characters approaches him and jeers at him: When it's a question of anything stupid and pathetic and devoid of humor or wit, you're the man, you tragedian. Well, ...I don't care a fig for all your romantics of atonement. You wanted to be executed and to have your head chopped off, you lunatic! For this imbecile ideal you would suffer death ten times over. You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live. The devil, but you shall live! It would serve you right if you were condemned to the severest of penalties. ...We might, for example, restore this girl to life again and marry you to her. (Hesse, 216)According to Hesse, it is "on the gallows," at those moments of intense humiliation and degradation, where the humor of life must be learned. Harry finds humiliation to be a fate worse than death, and to find salvation, Harry must learn humor to face the endless and potentially embarrassing trials that life presents. It should be noted that the intrigue of Steppenwolf exists on many levels, with political as well as existential motivations. It is a prophetic novel about the tragic comedy of the West and the bourgeois culture of post-World War I Germany. Hesse forsees that modern civilization is due for an apocalyptic day of reckoning and predicts the unfortunate political fate of Germany seven years before the rise of Hitler. This "Downfall of the West" was, to Hesse, evident not only in the political atmosphere of Europe at the time, but in European bourgeois culture itself, in its art, its poetry, its society, and its music. Steppenwolf was also very much a reaction to the era in which it was written. Hesse, like many of his contemporaries, was shocked by the animalism and decadence manifested in the rising jazz culture of the 1920s, and it was his helpless attraction for that decadence which Haller attributed to the wolf side of his personality. Indeed, Hesse is identical to the character he creates, and Steppenwolf is considered Hesse's most autobiographical work: Haller's favorite authors and composers were Hesse's, he shares the belief that...jazz mirrors the cultural disintegration of the Western world, and he, as was Hesse, is both appalled by jazz and touched by its raw, honest sensuality (Mileck, 177).Hesse was also an admirer of Freud's and Jung's philosophies; in his amateur psychoanalyses, Hesse (like Haller) considered himself a "schizophrenic" with a shattered self.
The theme of the conflicted self is almost certainly among the most common in world literature. The dualistic nature of the human existence, marking the inner conflict between rational judgment and primal instinct, is inherent to our kind and must be reckoned with throughout life. It has been theorized upon by many great thinkers: Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of the psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages,...so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which...shoes countless archaic traits (Jung, 126).Steppenwolf reflects the main character's stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge and accept his own -- at first -- "dual" nature, even when it is made apparent to him that it is critical to achieving self-actualization. It is an allegory, personified by the protagonist as a wild animal; it relates the dangers of reclusion and the futility of suicide. Steppenwolf, however, takes the theme further. In the famous "Treatise on the Steppenwolf," Harry is told that he in truth must grapple with not two selves, but countless selves which he embodies. The "Treatise" also declares that this multiplicity of the self is not something to be feared, avoided, or repressed. It is not a "tragic fault" or a "shortcoming." Rather, it is a power to be discovered, embraced, and channeled. It is the secret to our immortality. Sources: * Illustration by Jaroslav Bradac for the film version of Steppenwolf (1974), starring Max von Sydow and produced by Peter J. Sprague.
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