Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

“Most people have no desire to swim until they are able to.”5 Isn’t that a laugh? Of course they don’t want to swim! After all, they were born to live on dry land, not in water. Nor, of course, do they want to think. They weren’t made to think, but to live! It’s true, and anyone who makes thinking his priority may well go far as a thinker, but when all’s said and done he has just mistaken water for dry land, and one of these days he’ll drown.’

Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.

Occasionally I saw it clearly for minutes, passing through my life like a golden trace of the divine, but it was almost always deeply buried under layers of filth and dust. Then it would shine forth afresh in a shower of golden sparks, apparently never to be lost again. Yet it was soon lost once more, totally.

I can’t understand the pleasures or joys people now seek in crowded trains and hotels, in crowded cafés with their obtrusive hot-house music; in the bars and variety theatres of expensive, fashionable cities; at the world’s fairs, at street carnivals, in the public lectures for those desperate to improve their education, or at large sporting venues. I am unable to understand or share any of these joys which thousands of other people jostle one another to experience, though they would of course be within my reach. On the other hand, what I experience in my own rare hours of joy, what invigorates, delights, uplifts me, and sends me into ecstasies, the world at large knows, looks for and loves if at all only in works of literary fiction.

I would often look lingeringly at its rough surface since there were few such quiet, kind, silent surfaces in the inner city. Otherwise, every one and a half square foot of ground there was occupied by a shop, a lawyer, an inventor, a doctor, a barber, or a specialist in treating corns, all of them blaring out their names at you. This time too, the old wall looked quiet and peaceful, yet something about it was different. In the middle of it I noticed an attractive little portal with a Gothic arch and, scarcely able to believe my eyes, couldn’t decide whether it had always been there or was a recent alteration. It certainly looked old, age-old. Presumably centuries ago this little closed gateway with its dark wooden door had been the entrance to some sleepy monastery courtyard, and it still was, even though no monastery now stood there. I had probably seen the gateway a hundred times, simply failing to take notice of it. Perhaps it caught my eye now because it was freshly painted. Whatever the case, I remained standing there, peering across at it. I didn’t venture over the road – it was so deep in mud and rainwater – but stayed on the pavement, just gazing across. Everything was already shrouded in night, but it seemed to me that there was a garland or some other colourful thing draped around the gateway. And, striving to look more intently, I now saw above the portal a bright sign on which, so it seemed, something or other was written. Despite the mud and the puddles, havi...

Who read the cloud messages in the mists swirling over the Rhine at night? It was Steppenwolf. And who, above the ruins of his life, was striving to locate some elusive meaning? Who was enduring a seemingly senseless, seemingly mad existence, yet still, at this last insanely chaotic stage, secretly hoping to find revealed truth and divine presence?

All his fine theory of the wolf would go to pieces, for there are absolutely no human beings, even primitive Negroes, even idiots, who are so pleasingly simple that their characters can be explained as the sum of only two or three principal elements.

Human beings’ thinking capacity is not very highly developed, and even the most intellectual and educated of them constantly view the world and themselves – for the most part themselves! – through the distorting lenses of very naive and simplistic formulae. For it seems that all human beings are born with an absolutely compulsive need to imagine their selves as unified wholes. No matter how often and how drastically this illusion is shattered, they always manage to patch it up again.

To have any knowledge of such matters you have to live a normal, practical life.

At the same time I was thinking to myself: just as I am now getting dressed, going out to visit the professor and exchange polite remarks with him – all the opposite of what I really want to do – so most human beings spend their lives acting compulsorily, day after day, hour after hour. Without really wanting to, they pay visits, hold conversations, work fixed office hours – all of it compulsorily, mechanically, against their will. It could all be done just as well by machines, or not done at all. And it is this perpetual mechanical motion that prevents them from criticizing their own lives in the way I do, from realizing and feeling just how stupid and shallow, how horribly, grotesquely questionable, how hopelessly sad and barren their existence is. And oh, how right they are, these people, a thousand times right to live the way they do, playing their little games and pursuing what seems important to them instead of resisting this depressing machinery and staring despairingly into the void as individuals who have gone off the rails do, like me.

If from time to time I seem to despise and even pour scorn on such people in these pages, let no one think that I wish to accuse others of being responsible for my personal misery or put all the blame on them. However, once you have got to the point where you are standing on the very edge of life like me, gazing down into a dark abyss, it is wrong and dishonest to attempt to deceive yourself and others into believing that life’s machinery is still running smoothly, that you can still be a party to that blissful, childlike world of endless game-playing.

‘All right, I’ll tell you something. For an hour now you’ve been listening to me using the familiar form “du”, yet you are still addressing me formally as “Sie”. Just like your blessed Latin and Greek, always making things as complicated as you possibly can. If a girl says “du” to you, and you don’t exactly find her loathsome, you say “du” back to her. There, you’ve learned something new. And secondly: for half an hour now I’ve known that you’re called Harry. Because I asked you your name, that’s why. But you’ve no desire to know what I’m called.’

So, what are we supposed to do? Just jettison everything, give up all our thought, all our striving, all our humanity, allow ambition and money to go on ruling us and wait over a glass of beer for the next mobilization to take place?’

‘I don’t know. To be fair to the world I’d like to think that it is merely true of the present day, just a sickness, a temporary misfortune. The political leaders are resolutely and successfully working to bring about the next war while the rest of us are dancing the foxtrot, earning money and eating fancy chocolates. In an age like this the world is bound to look well and truly lousy. Let’s hope other ages were better and will be better again, richer, broader, deeper. But all that’s of little use to us. And perhaps it has always been like this …’ ‘Always like today? Always a world fit for politicians, conmen, waiters and playboys, a world where there is no air fit for human beings to breathe?’ ‘Who knows? I don’t, nobody does. It makes no difference anyway. But now I’m wondering what it must have been like for your great favourite Mozart, whom you’ve told me about from time to time, even reading to me from his letters. How was it for him? Who was ruling the world in his day, creaming off the best, setting the tone, and considered important? Was it Mozart or the profit-seekers, Mozart or shallow, run-of-the-mill types? And how did he die? How did they bury him? And I think it has perhaps always been like that and always will be. And the subject they call “World History” in schools and the things you have to learn off by heart in them in order to be educated – all those heroes, geniuses, great deeds and sentiments – is just a confidence trick devised by the schoolteachers f...

Steppenwolf

On all the walls there were garish, splendidly provocative posters. In gigantic letters, flaring up like torches, the nation was being called upon to finally take up arms on behalf of humanity against machines; to finally exterminate the fat, handsomely dressed, perfumed plutocrats who, with the help of machines, were living off the fat of others. Also to put an end to their huge, coughing, evilly snarling and devilishly humming motor cars; to finally set fire to the factories and go some way towards clearing out and depopulating the desecrated earth so that grass might grow again and the dust-filled concrete jungle might give way to things such as woods, meadows, heaths, streams and marshland.

From other posters, in contrast, splendidly stylized and beautifully painted in gentler, less childish colours, came stirring warnings, composed with extraordinary subtlety and wit, about the chaos and anarchy that were threatening all prudent property owners. In truly gripping terms these posters pictured the blessings of law and order, hard work, property and culture, and they praised machines as human beings’ latest and greatest invention, with the aid of which they would be transformed into gods. As I read them, deep in thought, I could not help admiring the posters, the red ones as well as the green. Both their fiery eloquence and their compelling logic made an enormous impression on me. They were right, I thought, as I stood there profoundly convinced, now in front of one poster, now in front of another, albeit perceptibly disturbed by the fairly hefty shooting match going on all around me. Well, there was a war being fought, that was the main thing: a vehement, spirited war that was highly congenial because it wasn’t a matter of the Kaiser, the Republic or national frontiers, or of flags and battle colours and such things of a more decorative and theatrical kind – all essentially shabby issues. No, this was a war in which all those who felt stifled, all those for whom life had acquired a nasty taste, were giving full vent to their grievances and trying their hardest to set in train a process leading to the general destruction of the shoddy world of civilization. All...

‘Are you on the side of the factory owners?’ I asked my friend. ‘Don’t ask me, it’s just a matter of taste. We can worry about that once we’re out of town. But no, hang on. If anything, I think we should opt for the other side, even though it basically makes no difference, of course. I’m a theologian, and since my predecessor Luther in his day came to the aid of the rich and the princes against the peasants, I think we ought now to redress the balance a little.

‘What? And they now have to pay so dearly for it?’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘Naturally. The law must take its course. Only when they have discharged the debt of their age will it become clear whether enough still remains that is personal to them to make a reassessment of their value worthwhile.’ ‘But surely neither of them is responsible for it?’ ‘Of course not, any more than you are responsible for the fact that Adam ate the apple, but you still have to pay for it.’ ‘But that’s terrible.’ ‘Certainly. Life is always terrible. We are not responsible for things, yet we have to answer for them. Just by virtue of being born we are guilty. You must have enjoyed a strange kind of religious education if you didn’t know that.’