Steppenwolf (31 page)

‘Right? Oh no!’ I cried in despair. ‘My God, Mozart, it’s all so wrong, of course, so diabolically stupid and bad! I’m a beast, Mozart, a stupid, evil beast. I’m sick and depraved, you’re right about that, a thousand times right. – But as far as this girl is concerned, I can only say that she herself wanted it that way. I merely fulfilled her own wish.’

Mozart laughed that silent laugh of his, but this time did at least do me the great favour of switching off the wireless.

Suddenly my defence sounded really foolish to me, even though I had still sincerely believed what I was saying only a moment ago. Now, all at once, I recalled that occasion when Hermione had been speaking of time and eternity. Then, I had immediately been willing to regard her thoughts as a reflection of my own. Yet I had taken for granted that getting me to kill her was entirely her own idea and wish, uninfluenced by me in the least. But if so, why had I not only accepted and believed a notion as horrific and strange as that at the time, but even guessed it in advance? Perhaps because it was my own idea after all? And why, of all times, had I killed Hermione when I found her naked in the arms of someone else? Mozart’s silent laughter seemed all-knowing and full of scorn.

‘Harry,’ he said, ‘you must be joking. Do you really expect me to believe that this beautiful girl wanted nothing from you other than to be stabbed in the breast with a knife? Pull the other one! Well, you did at least make a thorough job of it. The poor child is as dead as a doornail. Perhaps now would be a good time for you to accept the consequences of your gallantry towards this fair lady. Or could it be that you want to escape the consequences?’

‘No,’ I cried. ‘Don’t you understand a thing? Escape the consequences, me! There is nothing I desire more than to pay for what I’ve done, pay for it, pay for it, put my head under the executioner’s axe, take my punishment and be exterminated.’

The look of scorn Mozart gave me was unbearable.

‘Always the same pompous verbiage! But don’t worry, Harry, you’ll learn what humour is one of these days. Humour is always gallows humour, and if need be the gallows is just the place for you to learn about it. Are you ready to do it? Yes? Right, then go to the public prosecutor’s office and subject yourself to the whole humourless paraphernalia of the Law, right down to the last stage
in the prison yard when they coolly chop off your head at the break of day. You are ready to do it, then?’

Suddenly an inscription flashed up before my eyes:

and I nodded to show willing. An austere courtyard enclosed by four walls with small barred windows, a guillotine prepared to perfection, a dozen gentlemen clad in black robes and frock coats – and there was I, standing in their midst, shivering in the chill, grey, early-morning air, so pitifully afraid that my blood ran cold, but ready and willing. I stepped forward when ordered to, kneeled down when ordered to. Taking off his cap, the public prosecutor cleared his throat, as did all the other gentlemen. Unfolding an official document and holding it up to his eyes, he then read aloud:

‘Gentlemen, before you stands one Harry Haller, charged with wilfully abusing our Magic Theatre and found guilty as charged. Not only did Haller cause offence to fine art by confusing our beautiful picture gallery with so-called reality and stabbing to death the mirror image of a girl with the mirror image of a knife, but in addition he showed that he was intent upon using our theatre quite humourlessly as a mechanism for committing suicide. We therefore sentence Haller to eternal life while also withdrawing his entry permit to our theatre for a period of twelve hours. Nor can we spare the accused the further penalty of being laughed out of court. So let me hear it from you, gentlemen, after me: One – two – three!’

And every single one present came in precisely on the call of three, producing a chorus of high-pitched laughter, a terrible laughter from the beyond that human ears could scarcely bear.

When I came to again, Mozart was sitting by me as before.
Tapping me on the shoulder, he said: ‘You have heard your sentence. So you see, you’ll have to get used to going on listening to the radio music of life. It will do you good. You are uncommonly lacking in talent, my dear stupid chap, but by now I suppose even you have gradually realized what is being asked of you. You are to learn to laugh, that’s what is being asked of you. You are to understand life’s humour, the gallows humour of this life. But of course you are prepared to do anything on earth other than what is asked of you. You are prepared to stab girls to death; you are prepared to have yourself solemnly executed; you would no doubt also be prepared to spend a hundred years mortifying your flesh and scourging yourself. Or am I wrong?’

‘No! With all my heart I’d be prepared to do so,’ I cried in my despair.

‘Naturally! There isn’t a single stupid and humourless activity, anything pompous, serious and devoid of wit, that doesn’t appeal to you! But, you see, nothing of that sort appeals to me. I don’t give a fig for all your romantic desire to do penance. You must be berserk, wanting to be executed and have your head chopped off! You’d commit another ten murders to achieve this stupid ideal of yours. You want to die, you coward, but not to live. But to go on living, damn it, is precisely what you will have to do. It would serve you right if you were sentenced to the severest penalty there is.’

‘Oh, and what sort of penalty might that be?’

‘We could, for instance, bring the girl back to life and marry you to her.’

‘No, I wouldn’t be prepared to go along with that. It would end in misfortune.’

‘As if what you did hasn’t already caused misfortune enough! But it’s now time to put a stop to all your posturing and killing. Can’t you finally see sense? You are to live, and you are to learn to laugh. You must learn to listen to life’s damned radio music,
to respect the spirit that lies behind it while laughing at all the dross it contains. That’s all. Nothing more is being asked of you.’

Gritting my teeth, I asked in a soft voice: ‘And what if I refuse? What if I deny you, Herr Mozart, the right to intervene in Steppenwolf’s fate and tell him what to do?’

‘That being the case,’ Mozart said peacefully, ‘I would suggest you smoke another of my lovely cigarettes.’ And as he said this, producing a cigarette from his waistcoat pocket like a conjuror and offering it to me, he suddenly ceased to be Mozart. Instead, he was my friend Pablo, gazing warmly at me with his exotic dark eyes. He also looked like the twin brother of the man who had taught me to play chess with the tiny figures.

‘Pablo!’ I exclaimed with a start. ‘Pablo, where are we?’

Passing me the cigarette, Pablo gave me a light.

‘We’re in my Magic Theatre,’ he said with a smile. ‘And should you wish to learn the tango, become a general, or have a conversation with Alexander the Great, all of that can be arranged when you next visit. However, I’m bound to say I’m a little disappointed in you, Harry. Losing all control of yourself, you violated the humour of my little theatre by wielding a knife and committing a foul deed like that. You sullied the fine images of our magic realm with the stains of reality. That wasn’t nice of you. I hope at least you did it because you were jealous when you saw Hermione lying there with me. Unfortunately you didn’t know how to handle that figure. I thought you had learned to play the game better. Never mind, it can be put right.’

Taking hold of Hermione, who immediately shrank to the size of a chess piece, he put her in the very same pocket of his waistcoat that he had previously taken the cigarette from.

The sweet, heavy smoke from the cigarette had a pleasant smell. I felt as if hollowed out, fit to sleep for a year.

Oh, now I understood everything, understood Pablo, understood Mozart, whose terrible laughter I could hear somewhere
or other behind me. I knew that the pieces of life’s game were there in my pocket, all hundred thousand of them. Though shocked to the core, I had a sense of what the game meant, and I was willing to start playing it again, to sample its torments once more, once more to shudder at the nonsense it entailed, again to journey through my personal hell, a journey I would often have to repeat.

One day I would play the game of many figures better. One day I would learn to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me. Mozart was waiting for me.

The End

Basil Creighton’s 1929 translation of
Steppenwolf
has seen long service but, despite being revised by Walter Sorell in 1963, is seriously flawed. In addition to lots of errors in vocabulary, syntax and tenses, it is marred by a number of significant omissions. It is also a heavily gendered version, often opting for ‘man’ to render the frequently occurring German word ‘Mensch’ which, though grammatically masculine, is not a marker of sexual gender, simply meaning ‘human being’. I have tried to remedy these faults and also to adopt a style better suited to a novel of the 1920s, avoiding anachronisms like ‘poltroon’ and old-fashioned inversions after direct speech such as ‘said I’. Hesse’s German has not dated that much, especially when he is writing direct speech, and I have endeavoured to reflect this by introducing a more colloquial tone than that of
the earlier translation when rendering the characters’ conversations. Any remaining errors and stylistic deficiencies are of course my own.

D. H.

Works of literature may be understood and misunderstood in many a different way. In most cases the author of a work of literature is not the best-placed arbiter when it comes to deciding where the readers’ understanding comes to an end and their misunderstanding begins. Indeed many authors have found readers to whom their work was more transparent than it was to themselves. Besides, it is of course possible for misunderstandings to be fruitful.

That said, of all my works
Steppenwolf
seems to me to be the one that has been more frequently and more drastically misunderstood than any other. And of all people it was often the affirmative, indeed the enthusiastic readers, and not those rejecting the book, whose comments took me aback. In part, but only in part, the frequency of such cases can be explained by the fact that this book, written by a fifty-year-old man and dealing with the problems associated with that particular age, very often fell into the hands of quite young people.

However, even among readers of my own age I often encountered some who, though impressed by the book, remained curiously blind to a good half of its contents. It seems to me that these readers, seeing themselves reflected in the figure of Steppenwolf, identified with him, suffered along with him, dreamed his dreams and in the process totally overlooked the fact that the book speaks and knows of other things than just Harry Haller
and his difficulties. They failed to see that a second, higher, timeless realm exists above Steppenwolf and his problematic life or that the ‘Tract’ and all the other passages in the book concerning things intellectual, spiritual, artistic and the ‘Immortals’ evoke a positive, serene, supra-personal, timeless world of faith that contrasts markedly with Steppenwolf’s world of suffering. These readers were thus incapable of appreciating that the book, though
it does constitute a record of suffering and misery, is by no means the book of man despairing of life, but of one who believes.

Of course I cannot dictate to readers how they should understand my tale, and I have no desire to. May everyone make of it whatever strikes a chord in them and suits their needs. I would nevertheless be pleased if many readers could recognize that although Steppenwolf’s story is one of sickness and crisis, these do not end in death or destruction. On the contrary: they result in a cure.

Hermann Hesse

The 1927 novel
Steppenwolf
– literally ‘Wolf of the Steppes’ – laid the foundations of Hermann Hesse’s worldwide fame. Posthumously his reputation merged with pop culture when a 1960s Canadian-American rock band named itself ‘Steppenwolf’, clearly in reference to the dissatisfaction the novel’s hero feels with the state of modern civilization (and characteristically, the group’s greatest hit was ‘Born to be Wild’).

What gives Hesse’s
Steppenwolf
lasting international appeal is its aura of twentieth-century modernity and its (unresolved) quest for individual authenticity. That quest, it has to be said – the search for ‘oneness’ between self, world and universe – is perhaps the central theme in all of the author’s work.

Hesse is that rare phenomenon, a writer who enjoyed enormous success and instant fame with what was virtually his first novel,
Peter Camenzind
. Published in 1903–4, some 60,000 copies of it had been sold by the outbreak of the First World War. Its success allowed the twenty-six-year-old Hesse to give up his job in a Basel bookshop and from then until his death in 1962 he was able to live as a full-time writer.

The main appeal of
Peter Camenzind
lay in its glorification of the simple life lived close to nature as opposed to the experience of modern civilization, especially that of the big city, which is
viewed with a strong degree of cultural pessimism. The novel enjoyed great popularity among the
Wandervogel
and other German youth movements of the time, noted for their neo-Romantic love of the outdoor life. Yet, as Hesse himself stressed, its eponymous hero was not suited to such collective activities, not one to join any kind of movement, but essentially an individualist with a strong mystical bent, concerned to find his own path in life. As such he is the first in a long line of outsider figures in the author’s work.

Hesse’s best-known novels,
Demian
,
Siddhartha
,
Steppenwolf
,
Narcissus and Goldmund
and
The Glass Bead Game
, were all published after the First World War, which formed a caesura in his writing. Before 1914, his works showed a sentimental attachment to the region, or ‘Heimat’, a sense that even problematic individuals were somehow anchored by their roots. Like many other writers of his generation, Hesse welcomed the outbreak of war as a way towards cultural renewal and collective identity. Yet he soon took a decisive pacifist turn, which earned him, a resident of Switzerland since 1912, the hostility of Germany’s nationalist circles and right-wing press. The cosmopolitan humanism that characterized his writing after 1914 was a factor in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in November 1946.