Steppenwolf

Hesse published Steppenwolf in 1927, as Europe was still reeling from the devastation of WWI and as rising nationalism in Germany signaled that another conflagration was coming. WWI forms the backdrop of Haller’s experience in a very direct way, as his unpopular opposition to the war has cost him his position as a public intellectual. Feeling alienated by the militant nationalism he sees all around him, Haller initially views the Modernism of the 1920s as a scene of cultural devastation like that described in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Millions of people have died in a conflict between dying empires, and the values and beliefs that propped up those empires can no longer be credited. Haller sees the young, fashionable people around him—those who dance and frequent jazz clubs—as trying to build a new culture in the ruins of the old one, and he sees the approach of another war as proof that the project is not working. In his eyes, no jazz musician can compare with Mozart, nor can any modern poet approach the greatness of Goethe. Moreover, very few modern people can understand the greatness of Mozart or Goethe, as evidenced by his disgust with the portrait of Goethe in the professor’s house. Haller hates the portrait because it transforms the great poet into a commodity—an accessory hung on the wall to signify the owner’s refinement, and thus a mark of the same cultural emptiness that Haller sees all around him.

Haller claims of jazz music: “Compared with Bach and Mozart and real music it was, naturally, a miserable affair; but so was all our art, all our thought, all our makeshift culture in comparison with real culture” (43). For Haller, “real” culture exists only in the past. It is this alienation that makes him a Steppenwolf—one who cannot be fully at home in modern society. His experience in the Magic Theater slowly disabuses him of the notion that no beauty can be found in modern culture. Even his first conversation with Pablo begins to dismantle the walls of critical disdain he has built around himself. Haller criticizes Pablo for placing jazz performers on an equal footing with Mozart and other great classical composers, to which Pablo replies with equanimity:

I certainly have no problem with your putting Mozart and Haydn and Valencia each at its own suitable level! It’s all quite the same to me; I don’t have to decide about the levels. I will not be asked about them […] I believe we can quietly leave that up to the dear Lord (101).

As a musician rather than a critic, Pablo does not concern himself with hierarchies of high and low culture. His role, instead, is to participate wholeheartedly in the culture of his own time:

We have to do what is ours to do, that which is our duty and task: we must play what the people desire at just that moment, and we have to play it as well and as beautifully and as impressively as possible (101).

Though in the moment Haller dismisses Pablo as a fool, Pablo soon becomes his guide to the unconscious as embodied in the Magic Theater, and Haller comes to understand that to find fulfillment, he must live fully in his own time rather than holding himself aloof from the present out of loyalty to an idealized past.