Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (Der Steppenwolf) is a novel by the German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse, published in 1927 and the tenth of his novels. It is one of his most celebrated works, combining an autobiographical tone with fantastical elements, especially toward the end. Much of the book reflects the deep spiritual crisis Hesse went through in the 1920s.

The biographical context helps explain the work. After marrying the singer Ruth Wenger in 1924, Hesse drifted apart from her and lived in an isolation that brought episodes of great despair and thoughts close to suicide. He began the novel in Basel and finished it in Zurich; as a precursor, he had published in 1926 a collection of poems called The Crisis. The novel appeared in 1927, and its first English translation came out in 1929.

The book is presented as a set of manuscripts written by its protagonist, Harry Haller, a middle-aged man who feels unfit for ordinary bourgeois life. By chance he receives a short pamphlet, the Treatise on the Steppenwolf, which describes a man divided between a lofty spiritual nature and a low, animalistic one, caught in an unresolvable struggle. The text strikes him as uncannily accurate, and it forces him to recognize his own suicidal inclinations, though it also hints at a potential for greatness.

The second half introduces Hermine, a lively young woman who draws him into dancing, jazz, love and occasional drug use, and the saxophonist Pablo, an enigmatic figure who leads him into the so-called Magic Theatre. There the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve, and Harry passes through a series of doors representing fragments of his life and of himself. The experience confronts him with his inner demons and his illusions about existence.

The novel was an international success at first, although for years Hesse's closest readers criticized its sexual frankness and its depiction of drug use. In the 1960s it regained considerable popularity within the counterculture and the psychedelic movement. Hesse later claimed the book had been widely misunderstood, since readers fixated on the protagonist's suffering rather than on the possibility of transcendence and healing that he believed the work also offers.