Hermine says she will continue to help Harry, on the condition that he does everything she says. He suggests “Hermine,” because she resembles his old friend Herman, and she tells him that he is correct. When he asks for her name, she tells him to guess. Walking through the old quarter of the city, Harry spots a sign he has never noticed before: “Magic Theater-Entrance not for everybody.” The door under this sign will not open, but a man bearing another sign advertising the Magic Theater approaches Harry and gives him a pamphlet entitled “Treatise on the Steppenwolf.”īefore he goes home, Harry visits the dance hall recommended by the man who gave him the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf.” There he meets a young woman who gives him some kindly advice and makes him feel better. Unable either to renounce conventional, bourgeois life or to embrace it, Harry has been driven to the brink of suicide. He is disgusted by the sensuality, mindless optimism, and productivity of the bourgeoisie, but he is envious too. He thinks of himself as a “Steppenwolf,” a wolf of the Steppes, wandering alone through a hostile landscape. He is lonely, anxious, and unable to feel at home in the world.

Harry moves into a lodging house in an unnamed town. Hesse’s contemporaries were outraged by the novel’s depiction of sex and drug use, but it has since come to be recognized as a major work of twentieth-century German fiction. It presents itself as a manuscript written by Harry Haller, a lonely and suicidal middle-aged man who stumbles upon a “magic theater,” in which he has a series of surreal but revitalizing experiences. Steppenwolf (German: Der Steppenwolf) is a 1927 novel by the German writer Hermann Hesse, first translated into English in 1929.

Hermann hesse steppenwolf english