by Hermann Hesse, David Horrocks, Hermann Hesse, David Horrocks
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Der Steppenwolf first published in Germany by S. Fischer Verlag A.G. 1927
This translation first published by Penguin Classics 2012
Copyright © Hermann Hesse, 1955
Translation and Afterword copyright © David Horrocks, 2012
Cover Illustration by Julian House
All rights reserved
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-93868-4
1 An epistolary novel in sentimental vein by Johann Timotheus Hermes (1738–1821), one of the most read works of the eighteenth century.
2 Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), humorous novelist of the Romantic period, greatly admired by Hesse, who wrote introductions to a number of twentieth-century editions of his works.
3 Real name: Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), Romantic poet and thinker.
4 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), major dramatist and critic; Friedrich H. Jacobi (1743–1819), novelist and thinker, critical of rationalism; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), physicist, philosopher and satirist. These three writers indicate Haller’s interest in the Enlightenment as well as Romanticism.
5 Both these aphorisms come from Das Allgemeine Brouillon or General Rough Draft, a vast collection of thoughts on science, philosophy and the arts that Novalis jotted down in the years 1798 and 1799.
1 Born in 1805, Stifter was an Austrian novelist and story-writer. The reference is to his suicide in Linz in 1868.
2 Central figure in The Logbook of the Aeronaut Gianozzo, a story of 1801 by Jean Paul. See p. 13 footnote2.
3 Another Jean Paul character, this time from his 1809 story Army Chaplain Schmelzle’s Journey to Flätz.
4 Monumental Buddhist shrine in Java, erected in the eighth and ninth centuries AD.
1 Part of a refrain in the 1837 comic opera Zar und Zimmermann (Tsar and Joiner) by the popular Berlin composer Albert Lortzing (1801–51).
1 The reference is to a poem of autumn 1884, unpublished in Nietzsche’s lifetime, which he variously entitled ‘Vereinsamt’ (‘Isolated’) and ‘Abschied’ (‘Departure’).
2 See p. 13, footnote1.
3 Friedrich von Matthison (1761–1831), once popular, now almost totally for-gotten writer of neoclassical verse.
4 Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94), poet of the ‘Storm and Stress’ period, noted for his ballads. The ‘Molly’ poems were written for Auguste, younger sister of his then wife, Dorette. After Dorette’s death he entered into a short-lived second marriage with Auguste.
5 Christiane Vulpius (1765–1816) was for many years Goethe’s lover and eventually his wife.
6 The first line of the untitled eighth poem from Goethe’s late cycle ‘Chinese-German Hours and Seasons’ of 1827.
7 Goethe was not without admiration for the dramatist and story-writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), but he shied away from the more pessimistic aspects of his work, which he regarded as self-destructive. Kleist committed suicide in 1811. Similarly, though less strongly, the ‘Classical’ Goethe seems to have deplored the wilder aspects of Beethoven’s personality and his compositions.
8 Walther von der Vogelweide (c.1170–1230) is the most important German lyric poet of the Middle Ages.
9 The ‘Erbfeind’, that is to say, France, traditionally regarded by the Germans as their arch rival and enemy.
10 The foxtrot ‘Yearning’, written by the Philadelphia-born composer Joseph A. (Joe) Burke (1884–1950), was very popular from 1925 onwards. ‘Valencia’, another foxtrot, written by the Spanish composer José Padilla (1889–1960), became a major hit for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in 1926.
11 Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), Norwegian writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Like the philosopher Nietzsche, Hamsun influenced a whole generation of German writers, including Hesse.
12 A Sanskrit saying, literally meaning ‘You are that’ where ‘Tat’ (‘that’) is the fundamental principle underlying all cosmic reality, and ‘tvam’ (‘you’) denotes an individual’s innermost self. To recognize that the two are identical, as this pronouncement of Vedantic Hinduism teaches, is to achieve salvation or liberation.
13 Hesse’s invention, this work alludes to the famous collection of German folksongs Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), which the Romantic writers Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano assembled in the years 1806–8. By slightly changing the title, however, Hesse is also alluding to the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), specifically to his 1922 study Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), which contained many illustrations of artworks produced by patients in the psychiatric hospital of Heidelberg University.
1 Hesse puns on the word ‘Trottel’ (‘fool’) by coining the word ‘Foxtrottel’ here, which is impossible to render in translation.
2 Though not named, the film, to judge from Hesse’s description, must be Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent epic, The Ten Commandments.
3 The novel’s cult status also owed a great deal to the drug scene of the time, especially after Timothy Leary recommended it as ‘the master-guide to the psychedelic experience and its applications’.