You can find some of my previous posts for German Literature Month on the blog. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for something a bit different from anything you’ve read before. Overall, I found this to be a fascinating novel with an interesting structure and plenty of ideas to chew on about the nature of human existence within modern society. Yet, despite starting out in those different voices, they all coalesced in the end into the same voice, a voice that sounded remarkably like that of a highly intelligent Nobel Prize-winning author with a lot of great ideas to put across.īut that’s a minor quibble.
The first section was supposed to be written by a conventional, bourgeois young man, the notebooks were supposed to be the ravings of a madman, and the tract was supposed to be an academic study of Steppenwolf. One flaw, for me, was the tone, which didn’t match the different narrators. The human/wolf dualism, like the spirit/body dualism at the heart of much of Western philosophy, must be abandoned in favour of an embrace of the complexity of the human condition, the multiple selves that comprise Harry Haller. Harry Haller’s journey is essentially a destruction of the self he has always been attached to, in the process hoping to find something more authentic. Steppenwolf is a novel of self-discovery and exploration, probably another source of its counterculture appeal. With her help, he explores totally different sides of his personality: sex, jazz, dancing the foxtrot, taking drugs, and finally entering the “Magic Theatre”, a place where he can explore all the different sides of his personality in full. Haller is on the verge of suicide when he meets Hermione, a young woman who reminds him of his childhood friend Hermann Hesse. His binary concept of a human spirit struggling with a wolfish, animalistic body is a gross simplification that has caused much of his anguish.Īfter that, we’re back to the notebooks, which form the bulk of the book.
In particular, the central fact of Haller’s identity-that he feels torn between his human side and his wolfish nature-is revealed to be a “simple, brutal, primitive formula.” In fact, the tract claims, Harry Haller is made up of innumerable different selves, not a mere two. This is a cold, abstract treatment of his character, in which a lot of the claims he has made are ruthlessly taken apart. In the course of the events described in the notebooks, Haller comes across a strange tract called “On Steppenwolf”, which forms another section of the novel. Then we move on to the notebooks themselves, subtitled “For mad people only.” It’s a detached view of Harry Haller from the perspective of his landlady’s nephew, an apparently sensible, conventional young man who gives a sensible, conventional view of the notebooks he’s found in Haller’s room. We start with an “Editor’s Preface”, which is actually part of the novel. The structure of Steppenwolf is very interesting.
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