With its generous helpings of sex and drugs, its darkly romantic urban isolation and savage attacks on bourgeois life, it's no surprise that Hermann Hesse's 10th novel received mixed reviews when first published in 1927 or that it became a countercultural classic in the 1960s.
Like Siddhartha, Hesse's other best-known book, Steppenwolf is about one man's spiritual journey towards self-knowledge. Nearl 90 years on, its message to readers retains a religious intensity: we must explore ourselves and keep doing so. If we don't, then our lives become living deaths.
The novel's protagonist, 47-year-old Harry Haller, is living an extremely death-like existence. Once a public intellectual, he has retreated in disgust from modern European culture. Having lost his job, family and home, he lives in wolfish isolation, brooding by day and haunting taverns by night. Two souls war inside him: "the beast", yearning for savagery and isolation, and "the man" seeking culture, society and love. Harry longs to kill himself, yet clings stubbornly to his "evil days of inward emptiness and despair".
In writing Steppenwolf, Hesse drew on his own spiritual crisis. After leaving his wife in the mid-1920s, Hesse lived an isolated life in Basel, reaching suicidal depths of despair. This might explain Harry's painfully accurate descriptions of depression, which have perhaps been matched since only by William Styron's Darkness Visible.
However, in the 1960s, Hermann Hesse said that Steppenwolf was "more often and more violently misunderstood" than any of his other books. He felt many readers latched on to Harry's rebellion and despair, but overlooked his journey back from that point, which starts when he meets the beautiful young Hermine. Animating the whole theology of the novel, Hermine shows Harry he has far more than two souls in his breast and that he must let each one bloom.
Steppenwolf is a book about but ultimately against suicide. For all its savagely articulate descriptions of torment and isolation, it is most eloquent about something less glamorous but far more important: healing.
