Steppenwolf (33 page)

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 Bürger’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 ‘A
LL 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 ‘Übermensch’ 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 skills the prophet Zarathustra regards as essential to the so-called ‘higher human beings’, those aspiring to the condition of ‘Übermensch’, 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.

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.

Interestingly, however, Hesse’s criticism is not just confined to these familiar targets that most historians now agree played a significant part in the failure of the Weimar Republic. He also points more speculatively to the negative influence of German intellectuals over the years: philosophers, artists and writers like himself. ‘We German intellectuals, all of us, were not at home in reality, were alien and hostile to it, and that is why we have played such a lamentable role in the real world of our country, in its history, its politics and its public opinion,’ is the indictment pronounced by Haller after an evening spent listening to a concert of early music. If his own passion for music triggers such thoughts it is because he views his whole relationship to it as ‘unwholesome’. Music is associated in his mind with things other-worldly, purely aesthetic and also irrational. Indulgence in it comes at the expense of reason, the Logos, the word, which ought to be the preferred ‘instrument’ of intellectuals. This argument may strike readers as vague and speculative, but Hesse is not alone in propounding it. Thomas Mann had already set up a similar opposition between music and words in
The Magic Mountain
and he was later to expand on this theme when exploring the roots of Nazism in his novel
Dr Faustus
and his 1945 essay ‘Germany and
the Germans’. In a more general way Thomas Mann’s elder brother, Heinrich, had prepared the ground for such arguments in a number of essays written before and during the First World War in which he castigated German intellectuals and writers for their relative indifference to socio-political developments, especially compared to their French counterparts such as Voltaire or Zola.

Harry Haller’s criticism of German intellectuals for being ‘alien and hostile’ to reality can, ironically, be seen to apply in no small measure to himself, particularly where the reality of the modern world is concerned. In the first few pages of his notebooks we find him railing against modern life with its mass entertainments as something essentially shallow, characterized by mindless consumption. When he later visits a cinema to kill time he is horrified to see the sacred stories of the Bible reproduced on a commercialized epic scale before an audience that is gratefully consuming not only the film but also the sandwiches it has brought along with it.
²
He abhors jazz, thinking that something similar must have been played under the last Roman emperors since it is ‘the music of an age in decline’. In all these respects Haller seems to share the cultural pessimism expressed by many intellectuals at the time, most notably by Oswald Spengler in his popular
Decline of the West
. At one point, when attending the funeral of a complete stranger, Haller reflects that the whole world of culture as he knows it is like a vast cemetery in which the names of Jesus Christ, Socrates, Mozart, Haydn, Dante and Goethe are now barely legible on the graves. The God of the modern age, in Haller’s eyes, is technology, something he is also hostile to, witness his enthusiastic participation in the wholesale destruction of cars in one sequence from the Magic Theatre and his aversion to early wireless sets, whether
constructed by his landlady’s nephew as a hobby or by Mozart in order to tune in to a broadcast of Handel’s music. Haller’s hostility to some of these features of modern life, such as the dominance of the motor car or the mindless consumption, may well explain the novel’s lasting appeal in times of greater ecological awareness. It was certainly, as indicated before, shared by the ‘drop-outs’ of the hippie generation in America in the 1960s, for many of whom
Steppenwolf
became a cult book.
³
Ultimately, however, the novel offers no blanket endorsement of Haller’s cultural pessimism, since Mozart, in the Magic Theatre, insists that he must learn to listen to ‘life’s damned radio music’ without allowing the dross it contains to destroy the true spirit of it.

In a letter of 1927 Hesse complained that no critic had appreciated the innovative form of
Steppenwolf
. It was not, as many thought, a fragmentary work, but had a clearly proportioned structure like a sonata or a fugue. He later made a similar claim about the novel’s musical structure, arguing that it was rigorously composed in sonata form around the Tract as an intermezzo. Were this the case, it would be a highly appropriate form for a novel in which music plays a considerable thematic role. However, despite some ingenious attempts by academic critics to substantiate it, the analogy is not altogether convincing. Subtle shaping along musical lines would, in any case, appear to conflict with Hesse’s own statement, quoted above, that he had long since abandoned all ‘aesthetic ambition’.