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Although I know very little of the Steppenwolf’s life, I have all the same good reason to suppose that he was brought up by devoted but severe pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine that makes the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and upbringing. But in this case the attempt to destroy the personality and to break the will did not succeed. He was much too strong and hardy, too proud and spirited. —hermann hesse, Steppenwolf1 D uring the period between the death of his father in 1916 and the completion of Steppenwolf in 1927, Hesse lived in a state of near permanent spiritual anxiety and psychological torment. He was constantly on the brink of suicide, and he specifically pointed to “breaking the will” as that principle or doctrine that made life so very hard for him. As is often stressed in the secondary literature, Hesse’s “spirit would not be broken. It is perhaps this battle of wills more than any other factor that set a would-be writer and future Nobel laureate on his path.”2 If Hesse won the battle, he paid a heavy price for his victory. In the mid-1920s, following the completion of Siddhartha, Hesse’s literature took a radically confessionalist turn. As Hesse explained in a letter of 1926, “I gave up aesthetic ambition years ago and I don’t write fiction but rather confession, just as someone drowning or someone poisoned isn’t concerned with his hairstyle or the tone of his voice but simply screams out loud.”3 After the war, there was no going back to a religion of art. “I can no longer enjoy and approve many beautiful and well-constructed works of today’s poets, whereas I can feel sympathetic toward many very crude and carelessly constructed utterances of the youngest, simply as attempts at unrestrained candor.”4 Hesse’s Steppenwolf, though not carelessly constructed, did strike many readers as crude; Hesse’s public airing of his innermost torments and fantasies shocked readers. The 161 12 Steppenwolf “the hell of myself” product of a severe period of crisis, in Steppenwolf Hesse laid bare his soul in the attempt to right its wayward course. “In your letter,” Hesse wrote to his sister Adele in 1926, you write the following about the time around Papa’s funeral: “There was not just a wonderful atmosphere, but real force.” Now, listen, dear Adisle, I cannot go along with you there, with all those subtle distinctions that remind me a little of our parents. Papa or Mama often spoke very appreciatively about a poem or piece of music, with a rather revealing smile, only to add that all of this was, of course, “only” atmosphere, “only” beauty, “only” art, and, fundamentally, wasn’t anywhere near as valuable as morality, character, will, ethics, etc. This doctrine has ruined my life, and I shall not return to it, not even in the kind, gentle form manifested in your letter.5 These last words are demonstrative of the depth of Hesse’s resentment and anger toward the Pietist ethos of his childhood. That they were written precisely as Hesse began work on Steppenwolf is no accident. The tortured psyche of the novel’s protagonist, Harry Haller, is predicated, we read, upon Harry’s Pietist “upbringing, which had as its foundation [the principle of] ‘breaking the will.’”6 The battle of divided will; the struggle between instinctual and spiritual desires that rages within Harry Haller (and, indeed, in all of Hesse’s major protagonists); Harry’s harsh judgment of himself and others; his self-loathing and inability to find any sustained peace of mind—all this, at least in Hesse’s mind, was in large measure the literary abreaction of Hesse’s own inner struggle with the consequences of his Pietist upbringing. That Harry’s totem animal is the wolf, the natural enemy of the lamb, is no accident.  Steppenwolf was not initially well received. Hesse’s friends and the reading public alike balked at the forthright descriptions of the Roaring Twenties . Hesse’s friend and biographer Hugo Ball operated Zürich’s famed Café Voltaire, birthplace of Dada and the performative genre of cabaret. Hesse’s descriptions of the 1920s world of jazz and cabarets, absinthe and special cigarettes, eroticism and sexual experimentation shocked what was left of his bourgeois, middle-class readership, and early social and literary criticism found little of value in the work. The German Catholic...

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