The decade of the 1960s has gone down in United States history as the era of the Youth Rebellion. It was a time of campus sit-ins and college dropouts. Young people rejected the values of their elders and warned each other: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” In contradiction to their own slogan, many of these same young people avidly read a little-known German author, already deceased (he died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five). What’s more, they favored a novel he had written in 1927, when he was fifty. The writer was Hermann Hesse and the novel was Steppenwolf. Also popular with the rebels was Siddhartha, which Hesse wrote in 1922.
Hesse has been called a Neo-Romantic, meaning that his work echoes the ideas of the German Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Steppenwolf has the melancholy, pessimism, and preoccupation with death and suicide characteristic of the Romantics, while Siddhartha is an example of the Romantics’ fascination with distant times and places, Eastern religions, and fairy tales and legends.
Steppenwolf is the only one of Hesse’s ten novels set in a twentieth-century city: all the others take place in past or future time and in exotic or imaginary places. Although modern in setting and content, the novel has numerous references to writers of the Romantic era; one of its “Immortals,” the geniuses who hover above the earth, is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the greatest German writer of the period.
Like the Romantic writers, Hesse treats artists and intellectuals as outsiders in their society. In Steppenwolf he calls them the “Steppenwolves,” untamed wolves who have strayed into the city from the steppes, the open plains. He called himself a Steppenwolf, and before writing the novel he wrote a series of poems titled “Steppenwolf: a Bit of Diary in Verse” (later published under the title Crisis).
This concept of the artist as a stranger in his world stems in part from the fact that Germany in the Romantic era (and until 1871) was not a unified nation but a loose collection of mostly small states. Its writers generally considered themselves citizens not of their little communities but of the world. They were scornful of the restraints of propriety and sought the freedom to experience the heights and depths of the emotions. In the same vein, Steppenwolf’s hero, Harry Haller, on his first appearance in the novel, is in a characteristically Romantic state of disgust with his placid day, which had held neither joy nor pain.
Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, but by the late 1950s he had only a small literary following in the United States. What drew the young rebels of the 1960s to his works? The truth is that these two novels, although written forty years earlier, addressed many of the rebellious youths’ concerns and interests. Steppenwolf’s hero attacks commercialism, war-making, and society’s indifference to the arts, and he takes a hallucinatory, possibly drug-induced “trip.” Siddhartha, the story of a Hindu prince’s exploration of the religions of his time, met the young people’s interest in Eastern culture as something perhaps more relevant than what the Western world offered them.
The Eastern influence was part of Hesse’s childhood as the son and grandson of missionaries who had served in India. Later, during his psychoanalysis, he would return to this atmosphere of his childhood to make a serious study of the Indian religions and their scriptures, the Vedas and Upanishads of Hinduism and the teachings of the Buddha.
Hinduism came into India with a Sanskrit-speaking nomadic people, the Aryans, about 1500 B.C., and developed into the rigid, ritualistic Brahminism against which Siddhartha rebels in the novel. A countermovement to Brahminism was Buddhism, in the fifth century B.C., which taught that each individual could achieve release from suffering without the Brahministic rituals, by following the Buddha’s teaching and giving up all worldly ties. Hesse described Buddhism as the Protestant movement of Indian religion. He first embraced and then rejected the Buddhist principle as a denial of life. Siddhartha also rejects the Buddha’s teaching, as he rejects all teaching, in order to find his own way to the peace of understanding.
In his native Germany, Hermann Hesse was not considered a writer of protest. He was regarded as part of the mainstream of German literature. However, his political outspokenness- as a pacifist in World War I and an anti-Nazi through
the 1930s and World War II- forced him to leave Germany and to become a Swiss citizen.
In the years after World War II, Hesse was again a popular author in Germany and received many letters from disillusioned young Germans. He also gained a vast audience in postwar Japan. In 1946 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The tidal wave of American interest in Hesse came too late for him to appreciate. He envisioned America as a technological hell with no soul, and he predicted that not more than ten people in the United States would ever appreciate his work. If he had lived a few years longer he would have seen his prediction overturned. The rebels of the 1960s in the United States saw him as an advocate of the antimaterialistic counterculture, the drug culture, and the search for truth in the mystic religions of the East. Throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s, Hesse was one of their heroes. Vast numbers of Steppenwolf and Siddhartha were sold, and Hesse’s other works were popular as well.
If his youthful followers had read Hesse’s biography as avidly as they read his fiction, they would have learned that his life was as relevant to them as his novels. He was a top student, but also a rebel who ran away from one school and was expelled from another. His parents had even once engaged a faith healer to drive out the demon they believed had possessed the boy. And another time he attempted suicide.
Hesse spent his life looking within himself for the meaning of human existence. Each of his novels was in some way autobiographical, and he himself acknowledged that in all his heroes he saw “pieces of himself.” Steppenwolf is his most openly autobiographical novel, and even Siddhartha, although exotic in story and setting, is a modestly disguised autobiography.
A LIFETIME OF QUEST Hermann Hesse’s life was a succession of criseslike Harry Haller’s life in Steppenwolf- and self-searching quests like both Haller’s and Siddhartha’s. He was born on July 2, 1877, in the little town of Calw in southwestern Germany, bordering on Switzerland. He was the second of his parents’ six children. His father had served as a missionary in India and his mother had been born there. Her father had also been a missionary as well as a celebrated scholar of Indian lore and languages.
From an early age, young Hermann haunted his grandfather’s library of Asian literature. His parents’ house was a stopping place for missionaries and scholars returning from the East, and it was filled with Indian literature and art. Contrasting with this exposure to exotic religions was his parents’ form of Christianity.
As members of the Pietist sect of the Lutheran Church, they believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible. They disapproved of dancing, theater, sports, and public performances.
Hermann began composing poetry at the age of five and decided to become a writer at thirteen. At fourteen his parents enrolled him in a theological seminary, expecting him to follow family tradition and become a minister. In rebellion against the rigid school atmosphere, he ran away. His parents then entered him in a conventional school, but he was soon expelled. He was apprenticed to booksellers, worked in a clock factory, and for a time helped in his father’s religious publishing company. From the age of twenty-one he worked in bookshops in the German university town of Tubingen and then in Basel, Switzerland.
Throughout these stormy years, Hesse pursued his self-education in German literature and wrote poetry and autobiographical fiction. In 1904 his first novel, Peter Camenzind, was published. It is the story of a young man who breaks away from his middle-class background to live close to nature. When this book met with success, he quit his job to write full-time.
That same year he married and went to live at Gaienhofen, on the German shore of Lake Constance (Bodensee). Two more novels followed (Beneath the Wheel, 1906, and Gertrud, 1910), as well as articles and reviews in German cultural journals, one of which he cofounded. A spiritual pilgrimage he took to India in 1911 proved disappointing- the ancient Eastern land he sought was already too Westernized- although the experience later bore fruit in Siddhartha.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 found Hesse living in Bern, Switzerland, the country which from then on was to be his permanent home. While working on behalf of German prisoners of war, he wrote articles condemning the war and the nationalism that had led to it, becoming the target of hundreds of hate letters from Germany.
The novel Rosshalde in 1914, the story of an artist struggling in an unhappy marriage, reflected trouble in Hesse’s own marriage. In 1916 his father died, his youngest son became seriously ill with meningitis, and his wife was committed
to a mental hospital. Shaken by these blows, Hesse came close to a breakdown.
He had long been interested in the work of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and of Freud’s Swiss disciple, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Feeling his mental health threatened, he entered a sanitarium and underwent psychoanalysis.
The first product of this experience, the novel Demian: the Story of a Youth, appeared in 1919 under a pen name. It enjoyed great success and won a prize for first novels, which Hesse returned, revealing his identity. Years of productivity followed, despite periods of severe depression in the 1920s (which nevertheless yielded the novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf).
Steppenwolf has been called a psychoanalytic novel, and some biographers describe it as a fictionalized version of Hesse’s own psychoanalysis. Hesse had been interested in the system originated by Freud of bringing into the conscious mind those experiences, real and imagined, that are buried in the unconscious.
The theory is that these memories have been suppressed because they are too painful to be faced, but if they are brought to light and examined they can cease to be emotionally harmful.
Freud’s Swiss disciple Jung formulated his own theoretical structure of the mind, or psyche. To Freud’s two psychological levels, the conscious and the unconscious, Jung added a third: the collective unconscious, a repository of the myths and symbols drawn from the shared experiences of the human race. One of Jung’s archetypes, as he called these mythical images, is the Wise Old Man, who may be identified in Siddhartha as the old ferryman Vasudeva.
Hesse held that psychoanalysis merely confirmed what, as an artist, he already knew about the unconscious. Supporting him in this view was Freud’s interpretation of the artist’s role, which is to descend into the unconscious and bring back its truths in the bearable form of art. Scholars have identified many Jungian ideas in Steppenwolf, but Hesse felt that by the time he came to write the novel he was free of psychoanalytic guidance and could function independently as an artist.
On its appearance in 1927, Hesse’s fellow author Thomas Mann wrote him that Steppenwolf was an experimental novel in a class with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters, two highly innovative works that had been published earlier in the same decade. The experimental aspect of Steppenwolf has been described by some readers as its structure, which gives three different versions of the novel’s hero by three imaginary authors. Others have found the novel experimental in its blend of outer and inner reality, dramatic interior monologues (passages in which the hero is thinking aloud for the reader), and a hallucinatory journey into the unconscious which to some readers is a drug-induced “trip.” Siddhartha, by contrast, is a relatively straightforward narrative told in the form of a legend, and it has been called Hesse’s most perfect novel.
Another distinction between the two novels is that while Siddhartha ends with its hero having attained his goal, Steppenwolf ends inconclusively: Harry Haller acknowledges that he must try again, and as often as necessary, to explore his inner self. This ending may be partly due to the fact that Hesse had been blocked for eighteen months in carrying the Siddhartha story to its victorious conclusion. Five years later, in Steppenwolf, he did not try to resolve his story but took his hero only as far as he himself had gone in learning to live with himself.
He called Steppenwolf his catharsis, a Greek word meaning an esthetic experience that cleanses and purges the emotions, or, in psychoanalysis, a release of emotions that alleviates symptoms. The novel did this for its hero as well as for its author.