STEPPENWOLF AS SELF-PORTRAIT
On his own admission Hermann Hesse was a peculiarly autobiographical writer. The central figures of most of his stories and novels were, he once declared, symbolic vehicles for his own experiences, thoughts and problems at particular stages of his life. Of all such characters, Harry Haller is the most striking example. He shares the author's initials H. H. and his age - Hesse was approaching his fiftieth birthday when completing the novel. Like Hesse, Haller looks back on a broken marriage after his wife's sudden mental illness. Like Hesse, he is pilloried in the right-wing press as a traitor to his German Fatherland because of articles of an internationalist and pacifist persuasion he has written during and since the First World War.
Beyond these broad biographical parallels, however, Steppenwolf deals in a concentrated way with a particular period of crisis in Hesse's life, which was at its most acute during the years 1922 to 1926. Suicide is an option referred to more than once in Hesse's letters of these years. Aged forty-eight in 1925, he writes to his friends Emmy and Hugo Ball of his despairing attitude to life, but claims that he has overcome the worst depression by allowing himself two years' respite until his fiftieth birthday. Only then will he have the right to hang himself, should he still feel that way inclined. This is, of course, exactly the stratagem adopted by the 'suicidal' Haller in the novel.
An important forerunner of Steppenwolf is a cycle of over forty poems that Hesse wrote in the winter of 1925/6, significantly entitled 'Crisis'. The whole cycle was not published until 1928, and then only in a limited edition, but a selection from it appeared in the November 1926 issue of the periodical Neue Rundschau under the title: 'Steppenwolf. Extracts from a Diary in Verse'. The cycle includes the very poem 'Steppenwolf' that Haller, in the novel, says he has written late one night, and which he describes as 'a self-portrait in crude rhyming doggerel'. Much the same could be said of most of the poems in the cycle, which have little aesthetic merit, as Hesse himself admitted in a letter of October 1926 to the critic Heinrich Wiegand, before justifying them in the following terms:
Years ago I gave up all aesthetic ambition. I don't write literature now but simply confessions, just as a drowning man or a man dying of poisoning no longer worries about the state of his hair or the modulation of his voice, but instead simply lets out a scream.
The 'Crisis' collection also contains verbatim the poem 'The Immortals', which Haller in the novel scribbles on the back of the wine list while waiting for Maria in a pub in the suburbs. Otherwise, however, its poems are mainly raw, subjective expressions of the problems Hesse is experiencing and his attempts to find new distractions as he feels old age coming on. Much the same ground is covered in his correspondence of the period before the real-life experiences find their way, often only slightly adapted, into the novel he sometimes called the 'prose Steppenwolf'.
Hesse's depressed state of mind in these years relates, as has already been stressed, largely to the process of ageing. His correspondence is full of complaints about physical ailments, principally sciatica and gout, but also failing eyesight and severe headaches, especially behind the eyes. All of these are reflected in the novel, as are Hesse's own preferred means of coping with pain, whether by resorting to strong opiates or to heavy drinking. His excessive consumption of wine and brandy, in particular, is frequently mentioned in the 'Crisis' poems and letters of the period, and both drinks feature prominently in Harry Haller's visits to city pubs in the novel.
Perhaps more surprising is the extent to which one of Haller's other activities in the novel - his dancing lessons, the purchase of a gramophone, his attendance at the masked ball - is based on Hesse's own experience at that time. A letter of February 1926 records that he has just finished a course of six dance lessons and, as far as can be expected of 'an elderly man with gout', now feels reasonably competent at the foxtrot and one-step. And one Saturday in March, during the Carnival season, he went, for the first time in his life, to a masked ball in Zurich, commenting shortly afterwards: 'I have been a real fool1 to spend 30 years of my life wrestling with the problems of humanity without ever knowing what a masked ball is.' In June of the same year he confides to a friend that he has bought himself a small gramophone in Zurich and taken it back with him to his country retreat in Montagnola above Lake Lugano. There he winds it up from time to time of an evening and listens to 'Valencia' or 'Yearning', popular dance tunes of the time.
Hesse had moved to Montagnola from Berne in 1919 and very much regarded his house and garden there as a rustic refuge from city life and the modern world in general. His early years in this retreat were characterized by a degree of asceticism - he lived frugally, becoming a vegetarian for a spell, and also practised meditation. He saw himself as a kind of hermit, enjoying the isolation that was fruitful for his writing as well as the new art form he had taken up: painting. However, the harsh winters in Montagnola became unbearable and from 1924 onwards he regularly moved back to the city during colder months, taking lodgings in Basel and later Zurich. The experience of meeting friends, of living in proximity to 'normal' people like his first landlady in Basel, from whom he rented two rooms in the attic just as Haller does from the 'aunt' in the novel, led him to question the value of his years of isolation and independence. It also led to regrets that he had spent so much of his younger years in the pursuit of some kind of higher wisdom, thus missing out on the simpler, unreflective enjoyments of life. In his own words, he was now attempting to live for once like an 'overgrown child'. Success was only partial, but it was pleasurable. It seems, in addition to the dancing and pub-crawling, also to have involved a degree of sexual liberation, certainly of renewed attraction to often younger women, though there is nothing as explicit in Hesse's letters of the time as the account of Harry Haller's erotic education at the hands of the prostitute Maria.
The winter months Hesse spent in Basel and Zurich during these years were of course not wholly devoted to this life of dancing, drinking and erotic escapades. He himself writes of the need to pack his suitcases carefully before leaving Montagnola, ensuring that he has with him the books he requires, his watercolours and sketch pads, a few pictures and other objects with which to deck out his city lodgings. In the novel, Harry Haller arrives in the city with just this kind of intellectual and aesthetic 'baggage', and he fills his rented attic room with it, turning it into a sort of hermit's cell. His preferences correspond closely to Hesse's own. The picture of a Siamese Buddha that the landlady's nephew notices hanging on the wall, of course, reflects Hesse's interest in oriental religion and thought, its replacement by a portrait of Gandhi his pacifism. The near identity of author and character is even more strikingly apparent in Haller's reading. German Romanticism was an early and lasting influence on Hesse, and two of his favourite writers of that period, Jean Paul and Novalis, figure prominently in Haller's travel library. Heavily annotated volumes of Dostoevsky point to another preoccupation of Hesse. In 1920 he published three essays on the Russian novelist under the title 'Gazing into Chaos'. The presence of the complete works of Goethe in Haller's 'den' is of even greater significance in this respect. Hesse was a deep admirer of Germany's major poet, novelist and dramatist, though not uncritical of him, especially in his late 'Olympian' phase as the 'sage of Weimar', and both his admiration and his criticism are voiced by Haller in his dream encounter with Goethe in the novel. Goethe's influence on Steppenwolf and his role as a character in the novel, one of the so-called 'Immortals', indicate how firmly Hesse's imaginative autobiographical fiction is rooted in the German literary tradition.
STEPPENWOLF AS A 'BILDUNGSROMAN'
A prominent genre in German literature is the 'Bildungsroman', or novel of education. In contrast to the broadly realist novel traditions of England, France and Russia it focuses on the development of a central character from inexperienced youth to eventual maturity. Wider social concerns, while by no means ignored, tend to play a subordinate role to this process of personal education, in
which philosophical ideas also often have a big part to play. Hesse's Steppenwolf is a 'Bildungsroman', but with a difference in that Harry Haller is at the outset already a highly educated man, a published author and sophisticated connoisseur of literature and classical music. His is a very belated 'education', beginning in his late forties, and it follows a highly unusual curriculum. One of the key things he has to learn is to view himself differently. His image of himself as a hybrid creature, half human by virtue of his intellectual, spiritual and artistic qualities, half wolf by virtue of his instincts, appetites and urges, is dismissed as an instance of crude binary thinking in the Steppenwolf 'Tract', a pamphlet that comes into his hands after a night out drinking. 'Harry may be a highly educated human being, but he is acting like some savage, say, who is incapable of counting beyond two,' we are told there. Yet the Tract also points to an example of such thinking on the part of a literary character who is anything but a primitive man: the learned Doctor Faust of Goethe's drama and his famous declaration: 'Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast!' Such crude dualism is still central to Western thought, it is argued, despite the fact that Indian philosophy long ago exposed it as a delusion, since in reality human beings consist of multiple souls. Although he studies the Tract closely, there is little evidence that Haller - unlike perceptive readers of the novel - learns from it at this stage. Only in the 'Magic Theatre' sequence towards the end, when confronted by the image of his multiple selves, whether in the giant mirror on the wall or in the form of miniature figures on a chessboard, does he begin to appreciate the fact.
The form Harry Haller's dualistic self-image takes is a familiar one in Western philosophy, a dichotomy between mind/spirit on the one hand and body on the other, where things intellectual and spiritual are deemed positive while the instincts, appetites and carnal urges are regarded as inferior characteristics, shared with other animals and thus needing to be tamed. The 'editor' of Harry Haller's notebooks, his landlady's grammar-school-educated nephew, speculates that Haller's self-image has its origins in his upbringing by strict and piously Christian parents who, while encouraging him to love his neighbours, had taught him to hate himself. This puritanical background leads also to sexual inhibitions, since the self-hatred is directed at what Haller considers the wolf in himself. It is significant, for instance, that his first adolescent encounter with the opposite sex, when he does no more than raise his hat to the attractive Rosa Kreisler, takes place on the very Sunday in spring when he has just been confirmed. That the middle-aged Harry is still troubled by such inhibitions is evident from the dream he has about visiting the old Goethe in Weimar. For much of it he is irritated by the presence of a scorpion, associated in his subconscious with the beautiful lover Molly of August Burger's poems and explicitly identified as 'a beautiful, dangerous heraldic creature representing femininity and sin'. In contrast, sexuality holds no such threat for Goethe. When asked whether Molly is there, he laughs out loud and takes from his desk a velvet-lined box containing a miniature female leg, which he dangles before Haller's face, taunting him. Reaching for the leg, Haller sees it twitch momentarily and, still suspecting it may be the scorpion, is torn between desire and fear.
Haller's belated 'education' in matters sexual comes from Maria, the beautiful young prostitute friend of Hermione during the three weeks leading up to the masked ball. It continues during the ball itself, first as he is made aware of the homoerotic component in his make-up when he encounters Hermione dressed as a young man, which evokes memories of his boyhood friend Hermann, then in the passionate 'nuptial dance' with her, now in the guise of a Pierrette. The new skills he has learned are then practised on the surreal level of the Magic Theatre when he enters the box promising 'ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS', in which he is allowed to relive all the sexual opportunities of his past life, this time not letting them slip by because of his inhibitions. When he leaves this box he feels he is ripe for Hermione, the one true woman of his dreams, but his new self-confidence proves misplaced. On subsequently discovering Hermione and Pablo lying exhausted together on a rug after making love, he stabs her to death. He later protests that he was only fulfilling her own wish, but the more plausible motive is jealousy, an indication that he has not yet learned to cope with sexuality in the sovereign, playful manner evinced by Goethe in the earlier dream sequence. This reading is borne out by Pablo's reaction towards the very end of the novel when, pointing to Hermione's corpse, he says to Haller: 'Unfortunately you didn't know how to handle that figure. I thought you had learned to play the game better.' As Pablo then picks up Hermione, her body shrinks instantaneously to the size of a toy, which he slips into his waistcoat pocket just as nonchalantly as Goethe had earlier returned the miniature woman's leg to its velvet box.
Inability to 'play the game of life' is something that characterizes Haller from the outset of the novel. On the occasion of their first visit to a restaurant together, Hermione tells him he still needs to learn the basic arts of living that most human beings practise as a matter of course, such as taking pleasure in eating food. And as early as their first encounter in the Black Eagle she claims he needs her if he is 'to learn how to dance, to learn how to laugh, to learn how to live'. She eventually succeeds in teaching him the first skill on this list, as we can see from his accomplishments at the masked ball, but the second one proves far more difficult, despite her constant playful mockery of him. It is claimed in the Tract that Steppenwolf shows signs of being blessed with the gift of humour, but Haller remains for the most part a character who takes both life and himself extremely seriously. Only momentarily does he burst out laughing and feel a great sense of release, and significantly that occurs in the Magic Theatre, which Pablo explicitly describes as a 'school of humour'. This is the moment when he is invited to carry out a 'make-believe act of suicide' by destroying his previous personality as seen in the pocket mirror Pablo holds up to him. In the end, however, he is the one on the receiving end of laughter when he is literally laughed out of court because, by insisting on his own execution for the murder of Hermione, he has used 'our theatre quite humourlessly as a mechanism for committing suicide'.
Ultimately, then, while he certainly learns to dance, Haller fails the test of laughter. Yet along the way he has been confronted with two figures who prove more than capable of both these 'skills', and might have served him as models. In his dream, watching Goethe prancing up and down, Haller has to grant that he can 'dance wonderfully well'. When asked about Molly, the aged writer's response is to laugh out loud, while at the end of the dream sequence he is described as 'chortling away to himself with the dark, inscrutable kind of humour typical of the very old'. In the Magic Theatre, Mozart, on seeing Haller's long face, starts turning somersaults and playing 'trills with his feet'. When he first appears, to the sound of the 'Stone Guest' music from Don Giovanni, the composer is laughing, and his laughter is 'bright and ice-cold'. A little later, when Haller protests at having to listen to Handel's music so badly distorted by the wireless set, Mozart again responds with laughter. This time it is 'cold, ghostly, noiseless'. Both descriptions bring to mind the final line of the poem 'The Immortals', mentioned earlier, which reads: 'Cool and star-bright, our laughter knows no end.'
Goethe and Mozart are portrayed as belonging to the ranks of these 'Immortals'. Both are seen as outstanding human beings who, to use the cosmological imagery of the Steppenwolf Tract, have escaped the gravitational pull of the 'bourgeois' world by making a daring leap into the icy realms of starry outer space. This pattern of imagery, especially the three elements of vast, empty space, icy coldness and the stars, recurs frequently in the novel in connection with Hesse's vision of the 'Immortals' as rare individuals who have achieved the ideal goal of becoming fully human. Precisely the same pattern, as it happens, recurs in connection with the 'Ubermensch' or 'Superhuman Individual' in Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, a work that had a profound impact on Hesse when he first read it as a twenty-year-old. What is more, two skil
ls the prophet Zarathustra regards as essential to the so-called 'higher human beings', those aspiring to the condition of 'Ubermensch', are dancing and laughter. Here, then, we have a clear philosophical source for two key elements in Harry Haller's education. Indeed, to judge from what the Tract says about his being 'blessed with sufficient genius to venture along the road to becoming fully human', Haller may be regarded as a 'higher human being' in this Nietzschean sense. However, as he himself acknowledges at the very end of the novel, his education is far from complete. He still has to learn to play life's game better, still needs to learn to laugh.
SOCIO-POLITICAL ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL
Steppenwolf may primarily be concerned to chart the educational development of a single character who is a self-portrait of the author. By introducing long-dead figures such as Goethe and Mozart into a twentieth-century setting and locating much of the final action in a 'Magic Theatre' it can also be seen to venture into surreal realms. Yet for all this, as has been indicated before, a strong case can be made for the novel as a realistic portrayal of the social and political conditions of its time and in a particular place. Though the novel's city scenes are based on Basel and Zurich, Hesse very much has an eye to the Weimar Republic of his native Germany when evoking the atmosphere of the 1920s. This is especially evident in the portrayal of the professor Haller visits one evening. On the one hand a highly sophisticated academic, an expert on Eastern mythologies, he is on the other hand 'blind to the fact that, all around him, preparations are being made for the next war; he considers Jews and Communists to be detestable; he is a good, unthinking, contented child'. This description would fit many, if not a majority, of those holding professorial chairs at German universities during the period. Militarism, anti-republican feeling, hostility to democracy and anti-Semitism were rife in academic circles, including the student body. Such reactionary attitudes were fostered in part by the right-wing press, especially the very high proportion of newspapers owned by the nationalistic media magnate Alfred Hugenberg. The professor reads just such a paper, delighting in the way its editor pillories pacifists and cosmopolitans like Haller. Later we learn that Hermione has come across an article denouncing Haller in much the same terms in another paper. When he points out to her that two thirds of his compatriots read publications of this kind, stirring up their hatred and inciting them to seek revenge for Germany's defeat in the war, he is clearly a spokesman for Hesse's own insight into the power of a propaganda machine that is helping to make a second war inevitable. None of those in positions of power - the generals, the industrial magnates, the politicians - are, Haller argues, prepared to acknowledge their share of guilt in the slaughter of the last war, a criticism again voiced by Hesse himself in essays of the time.