Herman Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (1927) is not usually found among the existentialist canon (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man makes it into Gordon Marino’s anthology, but not this one) but nevertheless has a unique voice as a post-World War I existentialist novel, preceding Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and released in the same year as Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Hesse believed that this work was misunderstood by most people. Steppenwolf was meant to be an optimistic and hopeful novel of recovery and healing, instead of what was apparently taken as a denunciation of life by the mid-20th Century youth identifying with the middle-aged protagonist Harry Haller. What Hesse thought was the question, his audience had taken for an answer. The source of this healing, to Hesse, is a kind of unseriousness to life: what is called “humour” in the novel. This anticipates what Simone de Beauvoir will call “seriousness” in The Ethics of Ambiguity, which will be our main philosophical text of focus this week.

With the exception of the families of the landlady and the academic, Steppenwolf ‘s characters are unique in that they may all just be a reflection or part of Harry himself. Harry, in turn is a reflection of the author himself, who throughout his life also entertained thoughts of suicide throughout his life. I have linked, along with the novel excerpt, a short faux-autobiographical essay by Hesse himself which will provide some context into what Hesse believed his personal challenges were.

[Excerpt from Steppenwolf]
[Life Story Briefly Told, by Herman Hesse]
[Chapter II of The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir]

(As a side note, Much of the scholarly work on this novel refers heavily to the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Jung to interpret what the characters represent for Harry as different aspects of his psyche that allow him to relate with and overcome himself. While acknowledging the influence that Jungian theory had on Hesse, I won’t be discussing Jung, although if any of you know the field better than I do, I’d be very grateful if you could provide some detail on what terms such as “animus” and “individuation” are.)