Steppenwolf is not just a book of the sixties, an anthem to the hippies movement of “make love, not war.” It is actually the record of Hesse’s own deep turn inward during a period in which two Jungian analysts played a critical role in both his life and work as an author. It combines the genres of autobiographical confession and magical realism to produce as compelling a read today as it was when it first was published in 1927. Since then, it has been translated into 60 languages!
The two analysts are Dr. Lang, with whom Hesse had an analysis in 1919 and with whom during the winter of ‘25-26 was regularly having dinner, even thinking about moving in with him, and none other than Jung himself, with whom Hesse had consulted in1921 due to a writer’s block while writing Siddhartha. Both had huge impacts on Hesse, the man and the writer.
During Hesse’s time with Jung, I am wanting to speculate that Jung “initiated” Hesse into the Red Book. In some ways, one could say that Steppenwolf is a record of Hesse’s own “confrontation with the unconscious,” and for the aware reader, serves as a semi-fictionalized account of Jungian principles freshly encountered and experienced in Hesse’s own nekyia, or descent into the underworld. In the novel, we have the split between persona/ego and shadow; we have multiple encounters with the anima; we have life transforming experiences with Mercurius, the magician; and, we have The Immortals always in the background.
The story begins with HH, Harry Haller, Hairy Howler, in a state of despair, isolation, alienation, and loneliness. He has indeed become a “lone” wolf trapped in bourgeois society, unfit and unwilling to live any longer under these conditions. The city is Zurich, though not mentioned in the novel, and Haller’s apartment was probably Hesse’s when he was staying there in ‘25-26. In the novel, Haller makes a pact with himself and decides to end it all in two years, when he turns 50, if something doesn’t happen to make him want to claim life again. While writing Steppenwolf, Hesse himself wrote to his future biographer Hugo Ball of the same pact he had made with himself.
Something indeed happens, not the least of which is Haller’s (and Hesse’s) attendance at “the great costume ball” and entrance into the Magic Theater, the climax of the novel. Pablo, Magician in residence, tells Haller/Hesse: “Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul…I can help you to make your own world visible. That is all.” And, I can almost hear Jung’s voice addressing Hesse in his consulting room.
In the novel, Harry will move into his own experiences in the imaginal realm, having his own Red Book experiences, one after the next. Much happens during these active imaginations, including a life review and eventual murder. Any of these “encounters” has the potential to carry an evening’s conversation with your favorite reading group (like the library’s!).
The novel is also a symbolic banquet. Among the prominent ones are the following: water, mirrors, knife, gramophone, Goethe, Mozart, chess, drugs, radio, jazz, war. And finally, I would encourage the reader to take note of three redemptive characters that all have their place throughout the novel: Humor, Music, and Dance…all worth getting to know.
We will give Hesse himself the last word, from his postscript written in 1941:
“Among my books, the one that has been more often and more seriously misunderstood than any other is Steppenwolf…The reason is that the book was written by a man of 50 dealing with problems of that time of life and it often fell into the hands of quite young readers…It would please me very much if my readers were to realise that the story of the Steppenwolf, though it describes an illness and a crisis, does not describe one that leads to death or decline, but rather the opposite: recovery.”
