The steppe wolf
The Steppenwolf is a novel by Hermann Hesse published in 1927 . He describes the experiences of the main character Harry Haller, one of the author's alter egos . Similarities between Haller's character and Hermann Hesse and, for example, Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are indicated several times in the text or are obvious, for example the initials of Harry Haller and Hermann Hesse match.
Haller suffers from the turmoil of his personality: his human, bourgeois-adapted side and his steppe wolfish, lonely, socially and culturally critical side fight each other and block Haller's artistic development. The way of healing is the reconciliation of both sides in humor , in laughing at oneself and the inadequacy in culture and society. Only by considering reality from the point of view of humor are Haller's further steps on the path to his artistic perfection that are no longer described in the novel.
The Steppenwolf , a critique of society and a personality analysis at the same time, played a major role in Hesse's world success and in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to him (1946). The work triggered the international Hesse renaissance in the 1960s.
Origin situation
When Hesse wrote the Steppenwolf , he suffered from the effects of the technically rationalized world and civilization, which he saw endangered the minds and souls of people. The feeling of the threat of disasters close by and new wars persisted.
Hesse was in a deep personal crisis when the almost 50-year-old wrote in his diary: “I'm throwing everything away, my life, […] me as an aging man. To react to your world differently than by creating it or by the steppenwolf would for me be a betrayal of everything that is sacred. ”Like the author himself, Harry Haller , the main character of the novel, is considering killing himself. In the treatise on the Steppenwolf , the Steppenwolf sets his 50th birthday as the possible day to commit suicide. "I made up my mind that on my 50th birthday, two years from now, I would have the right to hang myself."
The Steppenwolf is the literary expression of a deep emotional crisis in Hesse. In order to cope with his life conflicts, Hermann Hesse had therapeutic sessions with his friend JB Lang, a psychoanalyst from the school of CG Jung, parallel to the writing of the Steppenwolf .
The house facade painted by Burckhard Mangold at Spalenberg 22 in Basel with the wolf as a sign is said to have inspired Hesse when he named the book Der Steppenwolf .
Most of the work was written in the Hotel Krafft in Basel.
content
Harry Haller, “a man of almost fifty years of age”, settles for ten months in a larger city that he visited 25 years ago. In this narrated period of time, he overcomes his deep depression and his social disgust through a “learning process” under the guidance of new friends.
The previous life of the main character is very short and casual shown: Haller (small) grew bourgeois cultivated, has had a career in the broad field of the study of poetry, music and philosophy, is as an author of books and an expert on Mozart and Goethe emerged , his pacifist views are well known to the public. He had to accept several only hinted strokes of fate: one time he lost reputation and fortune, the other time his wife lost her mind and left him. Then he concentrates on his job until he can no longer find satisfaction in it either and a phase of wild, exhausting journeys begins. We meet him after this phase of traveling, in which he has become “jobless, familyless, homeless” and is still on the road.
Haller's ideas of happiness are determined by the few hours of joy in which he experienced "bliss, experience, ecstasy and elevation" through poetry or music, moments in which he "saw God at work". He longs to find “a golden divine trace”, which he sees covered and destroyed by the civil order that surrounds him. He also strives to participate in this divine world through his own works, which he does not succeed because of the battle between his two souls.
Because Haller experiences himself as a “steppenwolf”, as a double being: as a person he is an educated citizen, interested in beautiful thoughts, music and philosophy, has money in the bank, is a supporter of bourgeois culture and compromises, wearing bourgeois clothing and with normal longings - As a wolf , he is a lonely doubter of bourgeois society and culture, who considers himself “a genius superior to the citizens”, an outsider and a political revolutionary.
In the course of his life, Haller discovered a connection between strokes of fate and a gain in insight and depth, but at the same time also in loneliness and despair. He is considering suicide , and even decides to possibly commit suicide on his 50th birthday for no additional external cause (although the certainty of a final emergency exit mitigates the depth of his suffering somewhat).
Haller seems to be sandwiched between two times, two cultures and religions, of which the bourgeoisie suffocates him with its boredom, corruption and incitement to war, the other culture no less suffocates him with loneliness, despair and the life of a “steppe wolf”. Despite his anti-bourgeois attitude, the civil order of his landlady has a great attraction: The smell of silence and cleanliness, the careful design of a landing by an araucaria are resting points in his confusion and refreshment in these days of his soul death.
In the middle of the novel, in the city of his temporary stay, he meets the androgynous and understanding Hermione in a dance café, who at first vaguely reminds him of a "Hermann" from the past, but maybe just Hesse's female alter ego. Hermione is a younger woman and a casual prostitute who struggles with helping out and being endured. For Haller, she is a guide to new experiences - as Virgil once was for Dante . Haller and Hermine refer to themselves as "siblings", Hermine sees himself as a mirror of being who receives Haller's wishes and answers, a soul mate who, as a "courtesan", teaches him to dance to new rhythms and to laugh and live. Her most important lesson for Haller is that he has to take his luck into his own hands: "How can you say that you've made an effort with your life when you don't even want to dance?"
Hermione insists that he obey her, and already on their first rendezvous announces that he will have to kill her one day. She seems to know not only her fate, but also his, and explains to him that they both belong to the real, genuine, more demanding people, to those "with one dimension too many", who she counts among the "saints" to which they are sees himself and Haller on the way.
For educational reasons, Hermine soon puts Maria in bed, a beautiful wife and colleague of Hermione, for educational reasons . Haller rents a small apartment for her love games and discovers physical delights with her for the first time. But soon Haller is driven beyond his new satisfaction, he longs for new suffering that makes him willing to die and ready for the first step in a new development. Without any external distress, he said goodbye to Maria: "It was soon time for me to move on."
Haller attends a masked ball late in the evening, which takes place in a large building with many halls, corridors and storeys. In the turmoil he does not find Hermione, but he is slipped a reference to a “magical theater” that takes place at four in the morning in the basement decorated as “hell”. On the way there he meets Maria again - and in "Hell" finally Hermione disguised as a man, in whom he recognizes his childhood friend Hermann "only a little bit of hair and make-up" and again succumbs to her / his " hermaphroditic magic". Hermine / Hermann and Haller dance as "rivals" with the same women - "everything was fairy tale, everything was one dimension richer, one meaning deeper, was game and symbol".
Haller experiences multiple personality changes in "Hell": he experiences the downfall of the individual in the crowd, his unio mystica of joy, he suddenly sees his alter ego Hermine as "a black Pierrette with a face painted white", they dance a "wedding dance" and from her / his eyes "my poor little soul looked at me". With this mystical union the last phase of the transformation begins: Hermine, Pablo , a saxophonist and friend Hermines, and Haller take drugs together and with their effect the picture room opens up in Haller's soul, the long sought-after "magic theater" in which there are “only pictures, no reality”: Haller finds himself in a horseshoe-shaped corridor of a theater with enticing inscriptions on countless box doors, behind which the events take place that are supposed to teach Haller to laugh. As the sixth of his experiences, Haller kicks a mirror into pieces with his foot and ends up in a box where Pablo and Hermione, exhausted from making love, are lying naked on the floor. Haller sticks a knife into the mark of a love bite under Hermione's left breast and Hermione seems to bleed to death.
Haller's hymnic verses about the immortals come to mind, Mozart enters the box and uses the radio to listen to Handel's music - for Haller almost sacrilege, for Mozart just an occasion to laugh at the struggle between the divine idea and the profane Appearance: Haller must learn to laugh, the humor, which can only be gallows humor . For his crime of the (announced and yet not actually carried out) murder of Hermione, Haller is sentenced to eternal life and being laughed at once, because he stabbed with knives (and did not laugh at himself and his jealousy). Haller is optimistic that he will be able to play this game better next time.
Figure overview
construction
In its first part , the novel allows three different storytellers to have their say: First, there is the editor's foreword, in which the nephew of the landlady Haller's describes his personal impression of the Steppenwolf; secondly, Harry Haller's notes, in which he describes his own experiences, and thirdly, the treatise on the Steppenwolf , in which the Steppenwolf is analyzed coolly and objectively from the point of view of seemingly outsiders, whereby the outsiders are the immortals . This treatise is like an “inner biography”, a psychoanalysis of an Olympic narrator, like a book within a book that the protagonist reads himself. After that, his records will continue. (Hesse also uses the technique of fictitiously pretending to be the editor of third-party writings in other works.)
Even with its three different narrators, who deal with almost the same narrated time of the main character from three perspectives, the novel was a compositional innovation. This triple narrator was so important to Hesse that he even had the treatise attached as a separate yellow booklet in the first editions of the novel. The “bourgeois” view of the “publisher” on society, culture and Harry Haller “from outside” is initially only opposed to Haller's view of his joylessness and lack of success, the inner perspective. The worship of the spirit of the one and the suffering of the spiritlessness of his time in the other perspective are only lifted in the perspective of the treatise to one another: As in a "biographical laboratory", it examines the conditions under which Hallers become artistically productive again and the path to their own Immortality could continue.
These three equal perspectives on the main character form the first part of the novel, outlining the theme of identity and its development. The following two parts of the novel examine how the abolition of the one-sided views, the inner struggle of which hinders Haller's progress, could look like in the lived biography:
In the second part , the implementation, Haller's experiences condense into a life alternative: After exposing the three perspectives, so to speak the sketch of the problem and the sketch of a solution, the main character now unfolds with the three new friends Hermine, Maria and Pablo, the can be read as personifications of inner-worldly longings or Haller's fates. Above all, the figure of Hermione becomes a female alter ego of Haller / Hesse, as she is both his soul mirror and later changes her gender to a "Hermann". All three secondary characters together lead Haller into the antithesis of his previous life and prepare for overcoming in a third step through the transformations of the magical theater.
In the third part of the novel, the dialectical suspension, the one-sided images of the main character begin to transform and dissolve. It plays in the basement of a dance palace, which is decorated as "Hell" (Dante's Divine Comedy , which is also three-part , and begins in Hell is alluded to several times ). In the logic of the abolition of the as yet not yet integrated, as yet separate perspectives, there is their multiple deaths: the deaths of Haller in the destruction of his mirror images and his final symbolic execution, the symbolic murder of Hermione by Haller, the armed struggle against the order of the automobile with the Sacrifice of the chauffeurs. These negative metaphors of overcoming are juxtaposed with the rather optimistic images that Haller could rely on in his next phase of life, which is no longer described in the novel: the ever-new constellations of tiny chess pieces, the confident interaction between wolf and human and the variety of opportunities of love and sexual fulfillment already in Haller's "old" life.
understanding
In the treatise on the Steppenwolf, the complexity of the human soul, the problem of ego dissociation, is described in more detail. There is not only the “one soul” and not only Haller's dichotomy of “human” and “steppenwolf”, but within every human being there are many different forms, sometimes childlike, sometimes defiant, sometimes passionate.
The thought that there is no homogeneous individual , but that the soul is split up into many different parts, unsettled the generation of that time. Expressionist authors in particular , who certainly influenced Hesse simply through the overlapping of time, often addressed this. This figure of thought was initiated by the distinction between the “ Apollonian and Dionysian ” in Friedrich Nietzsche and, among other things, by the theoretical writings of Sigmund Freud , who examined the instinctual and the unconscious. The unity of this diversity of souls therefore became a problem of self-discovery for many artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century .
Hesse himself had to seek psychiatric treatment due to tragic family events (death of the father, illness of the son and his wife, the breakup of his first marriage) . His relationship with the psychology of Carl Gustav Jungs began in the spring of 1916 when the poet had a nervous breakdown and received psychotherapeutic treatment from J. B. Lang, a colleague of C. G. Jungs. The influences of Jung's archetypes can be seen in the Steppenwolf.
In many of his books, Hesse deals with the Far Eastern doctrinal thesis, according to which the path to enlightenment does not lead through extreme asceticism or debauchery, but can be seen in the art of combining these two. The inner turmoil of the Steppenwolf and his attempt to integrate these two sides reflect the Buddhist principle of the Middle Path or the realization that good and bad not only condition one another, but are a construct of human rationality (cf. also Hesse's Demian ). Whoever has understood this can smile from deep understanding with the universe, as immortals do in the Steppenwolf . Humor appears as a kind of transcendence : it shows the ridiculousness of our desires and fears “ sub specie aeternitatis ”.
reception
After it was published, the anti-bourgeois work was judged very contradictingly: on the one hand, it was sharply rejected, on the other hand, it was enthusiastically approved - especially in literary circles and later in the hippie movement. In the eventful sixties, the work became the cult book of a generation that delighted young readers who recognized Harry Haller as a soul mate. The effect has continued to this day, where Hesse is now enormously popular due to his ethical-spiritual views.
The controversial psychoanalytic work did not meet with a particularly positive response from a broad audience. The novel was not banned during the Nazi era, but it did not experience any new editions. And after the end of the war, the Steppenwolf fell into oblivion, despite the Nobel Prize of its creator (1946).
In the United States , the Steppenwolf was removed from libraries several times in the 1960s as being immoral. In Colorado , the novel has been accused of promoting substance abuse and sexual perversions. Because of these controversies, this book in particular triggered the new, extensive reception of Hesse in the 1960s and 1970s in America and Germany.
The Steppenwolf was included in the ZEIT library of 100 books . The manuscript can be seen in the permanent exhibition of the Modern Literature Museum in Marbach. The majority of Hermann Hesse's estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach .
Testimonies
Hermann Hesse in a letter to Georg Reinhart, August 18, 1925:
"[...] it is the story of a person who strangely suffers from the fact that he is half human and half a wolf. Half want to eat, drink, murder and the like, simple things, the other half want to think, listen to Mozart and so on, this creates disturbances and the man is not doing well until he discovers that there are two ways out of his situation, either to hang up or to convert to humor. "
Kurt Pinthus wrote in 1927:
“I read the Steppenwolf, this most ruthless and soul-stirring of all confessional books, darker and wilder than Rousseau's Confessions, the cruelest birth celebration ever celebrated by a poet himself. [...] It is about an anarchist who, full of mad rage at this false existence, wants to smash department stores and cathedrals and turn his face in the neck of the bourgeois world order. It is a revolutionary of the ego ... The Steppenwolf is a poem of counter-bourgeois courage. "
Thomas Mann in a letter to Hesse, January 3, 1928:
"The Steppenwolf taught me for the first time in a long time what reading means."
Thomas Mann in the foreword to the American edition of Hesse's Demian (1948):
"Is it necessary to say that the Steppenwolf is a novel that is as daring as the ' Ulysses ' or the ' Faux Monnayeurs ' in terms of experimental daring ?"
Adaptations
Movie
- 1974: Der Steppenwolf , directed by Fred Haines , with Max von Sydow in the lead role.
radio play
- Hermann Hesse - Der Steppenwolf, Der Hörverlag 2002, ISBN 978-3-89584-981-7 , director: Christiane Ohaus , with Manfred Zapatka , Anna Thalbach , Dieter Mann a . a. (200 min.)
theatre
- 2005: The play Der Steppenwolf by Joachim Lux was premiered in the Burgtheater Vienna (director: Sebastian Hartmann ).
- 2017: Play The Steppenwolf based on the novel by Hermann Hesse. Performed at the Schauspielhaus Bochum . (Director: Pauk Koek).
- 2019: Play The Steppenwolf in the Heilbronn Theater, directed by Malte Kreutzfeldt
- 2020: Theater play Hermann Hesse Der Steppenwolf in the Societätstheater Dresden Director: Arne Retzlaff
Musical theater
- 2016: The music theater Der Steppenwolf by Viktor Åslund (text: Rainer Lewandowski) premiered at the Mainfranken Theater Würzburg (director: Anna Vita ).
music
- The song Steppenwolf by the rock group Hawkwind is lyrically based on the book.
- Likewise, the title track from Peter Maffay's 1979 album Steppenwolf .
- The songs Das Rätsel des Lebens , So geht's dir (Your Hell) from the album Schwarz by the rock group Böhse Onkelz refer to the novel.
- The song Lain with the Wolf by the metal band Primordial is also based on this story.
Adaptations of the name
- The hard rock band Steppenwolf named themselves after the book title and recorded their debut album Steppenwolf in 1968 .
- In 1974, in the theater city of Chicago , based on the title of the novel, the Steppenwolf Theater Company, which has received many awards (including the " Theater Oscar "), was founded by the actors Terry Kinney , Jeff Perry and Gary Sinise .
- The band DAAU (The Anarchist Evening Entertainment), founded in 1992, named itself after the magic theater.
Book editions
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The Steppenwolf appeared in the Neue Rundschau in November 1926 . A piece of diary in verse , in May 1927 a preprint of the Steppenwolf tract . In June 1927 the S. Fischer Verlag brought the book onto the market. In 1946 Der Steppenwolf was published as the 12th volume in the " Manesse Library of World Literature " series.
In 1963 the first paperback edition was published by Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag . In the library Suhrkamp 1969 first edition (Volume 226), 1985 a second, supplemented with 15 of watercolors appeared Gunter Böhmer .
- The steppe wolf . Fischer, Berlin 1927.
- The steppe wolf . Manesse, Zurich 1946.
- Steppenwolf tract . Afterword by Beda Allemann . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1961; 2. A. ibid. 1969, ISBN 978-3-518-10084-4 (= edition suhrkamp 84).
- The steppe wolf . Novel. DTV, Munich 1963.
- The steppe wolf . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1969 (= BS 226); New edition ibid. 1985, ISBN 3-518-01869-8 (= BS 869).
- The Steppenwolf and unknown texts from around the Steppenwolf . Edited and with an essay by Volker Michels . Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-7632-1583-2 .
- The steppe wolf . Narrative. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-36675-0 (= st 175).
- The steppe wolf . Text and comment. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-18812-7 (= Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek 12).
literature
- Mária Bieliková: Bipolarity of the characters in Hermann Hesse's prose. The novels "Demian" and "Der Steppenwolf" against the background of Daoist philosophy (= series of publications studies on German studies, vol. 23). Hamburg 2007, pp. 85–115.
- Helga Esselborn-Krumbiegel: Broken Identity. The mirror symbol at Hermann Hesse . In: Michael Limberg (ed.): Hermann Hesse and psychoanalysis . "Art as Therapy". 9th International Hermann Hesse Colloquium in Calw 1997. Bad Liebenzell 1997, pp. 130-148.
- Helga Esselborn-Krumbiegel: Hermann Hesse: The Steppenwolf. Interpretation . 3. revised A. Oldenbourg, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-486-88622-3 .
- George Wallis Field: Hermann Hesse. Commentary on all works (= Stuttgart works on German studies, No. 24). Stuttgart 1977, pp. 99-109.
- Christof Forder: I eclipses. Doppelganger in literature since 1800 (= M and P series of publications for science and research). Stuttgart, Weimar 1999, pp. 199-210.
- Anne Brith Heimdal: Hermann Hesse: The Steppenwolf. Crisis - Development - Confession. An interpretation (= writings of the German Institute of the University of Bergen, 7). Bergen 1980.
- Maria-Felicitas Herforth: Text analysis and interpretation of Hermann Hesse: Der Steppenwolf. Bange, Hollfeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-8044-1947-6 (= King's Explanations and Materials 473).
- Marga Lange: “Daseinsproblematik” in Hermann Hesse's “Steppenwolf”. An existential interpretation (= Queensland studies in German language and literature, vol. 1). Brisbane, Queensland 1970.
- Volker Michels (Ed.): Materials on Hermann Hesse's "The Steppenwolf" . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-518-06553-X (= st 53).
- Egon Schwarz: Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf . Athenaeum, Königstein 1980, ISBN 3-7610-2150-X .
- Klaus von Seckendorff: Hermann Hesse's propaganda prose. Self-destructive development as a message in his novels from “Demian” to “Steppenwolf” (= treatises on art, music and literary studies, vol. 326). Bouvier, Bonn 1982, pp. 68-98.
- Timotheus Schwake: Hermann Hesse. The steppe wolf . Lesson model in the series EinFach Deutsch. Edited by Johannes Diekhans. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-3-14-022492-5 .
- Hans-Georg Schede: Hermann Hesse. The steppe wolf . Modules and materials for teaching literature. Schroedel, Braunschweig 2016, ISBN 978-3-507-69765-2 .
- Sikander Singh: Hermann Hesse. The steppe wolf . Schroedel, Braunschweig 2017, ISBN 978-3-507-47740-7 .
Web links
- Hesse portal
- Kindler's new literary dictionary on the Steppenwolf
- Analysis and interpretation (in English) (PDF; 28 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hesse himself, however, rejected the term "novel" for his "prose poems", as he called them. See for example his essay Eine Arbeitsnacht from 1928. In: Gesammelte Werke 11, pp. 80ff.
- ↑ Günter Baumann: It's down to the blood and hurts. But it promotes ... - Hermann Hesse and CG Jung's psychology department. (PDF; 56.8 kB) In: Lecture at the 9th International Hesse Colloquium in Calw 1997. February 7, 2002, archived from the original on August 13, 2003 ; Retrieved January 3, 2015 .
- ↑ Herbert Altenburg: Banned Books ( Memento of the original from January 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Ossietzky No. 15/2003.
- ↑ The Steppenwolf - by Hermann Hesse. kurier.at, December 7, 2011, accessed on November 20, 2012 .
- ^ Hermann Hesse's "Der Steppenwolf" in the Burgtheater. Announcement in the Wiener Zeitung, March 24, 2005
- ↑ Stage photos website of the stage and costume designer Hannah Hamburger
- ↑ Entry on the staging on the website of the Schauspielhaus Bochum ( memento of the original dated February 11, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Hermann Hesse's "Der Steppenwolf" premiered in the Mainfrankentheater on May 7, 2016
- ↑ Production photos website of the ballet director Anna Vita
- ↑ The riddle of life. In: dunklerort.net. Archived from the original on June 18, 2008 ; Retrieved January 3, 2015 .
- ↑ So are you (your hell). In: dunklerort.net. Archived from the original on April 18, 2008 ; Retrieved January 3, 2015 .
