نویسنده: راستین

Never has a man had a deeper, more passionate need for independence than he had. In his youth, when he was still poor and struggling to earn his bread, he preferred to starve and go about in ragged clothing, if that meant that he could salvage a bit of independence. He never sold himself for money or for luxury, to women or to the powerful, and a hundred times over he cast aside and rejected those things that clearly promised him advantage and good fortune in the eyes of the world, just in order to retain his freedom. He could imagine nothing more abhorrent and atrocious than the obligation to carry out official duties, adhere to a regular daily and yearly schedule, obey the orders of others. An office, a law chamber, the halls of bureaucracy were as abhorrent to him as death, and the most horrible thing he could experience in a dream was to be imprisoned in an army barracks. He knew how to extricate himself from all of these circumstances, often at great cost to himself. Herein lay his strength and virtue, in this he was unshakable and incorruptible, in this his character was firm and straight. But this virtue, in turn, was very closely tied to his suffering and his fate. He fared as everyone fares: he obtained what he most stubbornly sought and strove for, compelled by his own innermost drives, but he obtained more than is good for any man. At first it was his dream and his delight, but later it became his bitter fate. Men of power are brought low by power, men of money by money, the subservient by serving, the slave to passion by passion. And so it was that the Steppenwolf was brought low by his independence.

— Steppenwolf; Hermann Hesse; Kurt Beals (trans.)

---

Another was his status as a suicide. It must be said here that it is incorrect to apply the term “suicide” only to those who actually kill themselves. In fact, the latter group includes many people who only become suicides incidentally, so to speak, who are not suicides of necessity, in their very nature. Among those without a personality, without a strong stamp, without a strong fate, among the dime-a-dozen men of the herd, there are many who die by suicide, though they are not suicides through and through, it is not their whole signature and stamp, while on the other hand, among those who are suicides in their very nature, there are very many, perhaps the majority, who never actually lay hands upon themselves. The “suicide”—and Harry was one—does not necessarily need to live in a particularly close relationship to death—and one can also do that without being a suicide. But it is a peculiar trait of the suicide that he, rightly or wrongly, experiences his own self as a particularly dangerous, dubious, and endangered spawn of nature, that he always perceives himself as extraordinarily exposed and imperiled, as if he were standing on the narrowest ledge of a precipice, where a little push from without or the slightest weakness from within would suffice to send him plunging into the abyss. People of this sort are distinguished in their lines of fate by the fact that suicide is the most likely cause of death for them, at least in their own imagination. The precondition of this disposition, which almost always manifests itself by early youth and accompanies these men throughout their lives, is by no means a particular lack of vitality, on the contrary, some extraordinarily tenacious, passionate, and bold constitutions can be found among the “suicides.” But just as there are certain constitutions that tend toward fever at the slightest sign of illness, these constitutions, whom we dub “suicides,” and who are always very delicate and sensitive, begin intensely to dwell upon the prospect of suicide at the slightest shock. If we had a science with the courage to assume the great responsibility of studying human beings as such, rather than only the mechanisms of living organisms—if we had something like an anthropology, a psychology—these facts would be known to everyone.

— Steppenwolf; Hermann Hesse; Kurt Beals (trans.)

---

Just as every strength can also become a weakness (indeed, under certain circumstances it must become one), so, conversely, the typical suicide can often make of his apparent weakness a form of strength and support, indeed, he does this extraordinarily often. This was likewise the case for Harry, the Steppenwolf. Like thousands of his kind, he did not use the notion that the path to death stood open to him at every moment merely as the basis for a youthful, melancholy play of fantasy; rather, he made of this very thought a source of consolation and support. True, every shock, every pain, every bitter circumstance in life immediately awakened in him the wish to take refuge in death, as is the case for every man of his ilk. But he gradually transformed this inclination into a philosophy that was positively conducive to life. His intimate acquaintance with the thought that that emergency exit perpetually stood open to him gave him strength, made him curious to savor pains and bitter circumstances, and when he was particularly miserable, he could at times feel with a grim joy, with a sort of schadenfreude: “I’m curious to see how much a man can really endure after all! Whenever I reach the limits of what is bearable, I need only open the door, and I can escape.” There are many suicides who derive unusual strength from this thought.

— Steppenwolf; Hermann Hesse; Kurt Beals (trans.)

Affecting high spirits, I trotted along the damp, foggy asphalt of the narrow streets, the lanterns cast their tearful, misty gaze down through the cool, damp gloom, drawing sluggish reflections from the sodden ground. The forgotten years of my youth flooded back to me—how I used to love such dark and gloomy evenings in the late fall and winter, with what eager intoxication I used to soak up the moods of loneliness and melancholy, when I would spend half the night trudging through hostile, leafless nature, through rain and storms, wrapped in my coat, already lonely even then, but filled with a deep satisfaction, and filled with verses that I would later write down by candlelight in my room, perched on the edge of my bed! Now that was all in the past, I had drained that cup and it would not be filled again. Was that a shame? No, it was not a shame. What lay behind was not a shame at all. What was a shame was in the here and now, these countless hours and days that I lost, that I merely suffered through, that brought me neither gifts nor shocks of any kind. But thank God there were also exceptions—sometimes, rarely, there were those other hours, hours that brought shocks, brought gifts, broke down walls and brought me, errant that I am, back again to the living heart of the world. Sad and yet profoundly agitated, I sought to remember my most recent experience of that sort. It had happened at a concert, it was a program of magnificent old music, and just as the woodwinds were playing a quiet passage, suddenly, between two beats, the door to the beyond had swung open to me again, I had flown through the heavens and seen God at work, I had suffered blissful pains and ceased to defend myself against anything in the world, ceased to fear anything in the world, I had affirmed everything, had given my heart to everything. It had not lasted long, perhaps a quarter of an hour, but it returned to me that night in a dream, and since then, throughout all the bleak days, it had secretly shone for me from time to time, sometimes I saw it clearly for minutes on end, leading like a golden, godly path through my life, almost always deeply buried beneath dung and dust, but then shining forth again in golden sparks, seeming as if it could never be lost again, and yet soon it was deeply lost indeed. On one occasion, when I was lying awake at night, I suddenly began reciting verses, verses so beautiful and so bizarre that it never could have occurred to me to write them down, by morning I had forgotten them, and yet they lay concealed within me like a heavy nut in an old and fragile shell. On other occasions it happened when I was reading a poet, when I was reflecting on an idea from Descartes, from Pascal, or again it shone forth and led me onward along the golden path into the heavens when I was with my lover. Oh, it is hard to find that godly path in the midst of this life that we lead, in the midst of such a very contented, very bourgeois, very mindless age, when we are confronted with this architecture, these businesses, these politics, these people! How could I be anything but a Steppenwolf and a surly hermit in the midst of a world full of goals none of which I share, and pleasures none of which I desire! I can’t bear to sit too long in a theater or cinema, I can barely read a newspaper, rarely a modern book, I can’t understand what pleasure and joy it is that people seek in the overfilled trains and hotels, in the overfilled cafés with their oppressive, overbearing music, in the bars and cabarets of the elegant cities of luxury, in the world’s fairs, on the promenades, in the lectures for the intellectually curious, at the great athletic fields—I cannot understand all of these joys, I cannot share them, though surely they would be within my reach, while thousands of others must toil and push to attain them. And, on the other hand, those things that bring me my few hours of joy, that bring me bliss, adventure, ecstasy, and exaltation, those are things that the world knows and seeks and loves only in literature, if at all, in life the world considers them insane. And indeed, if the world is right—if all this music in the cafés, all these mass entertainments, all these Americanized people who are content with so little, if all of them are right—then I really am the Steppenwolf that I have often called myself, an animal that has strayed into a foreign world it does not understand, where it no longer finds its home, its air, its nourishment.

— Steppenwolf; Hermann Hesse; kurt Beals (trans.)

He led me into his room, which smelled strongly of tobacco, pulled a book from a pile, and leafed through it, looking for something—
“That’s good, too, very good,” he said, “just listen to this sentence: ‘One should be proud of pain—all pain is a remembrance of our lofty rank.’ Excellent! Eighty years before Nietzsche! But that’s not the saying I was thinking of—wait—there I have it. So: ‘The majority of people do not want to swim, until they are already able to.’ Isn’t that funny? Of course they don’t want to swim! They were born for the land, not for the water. And of course they don’t want to think; they were made for living, not for thinking! Yes, and whoever thinks, whoever makes thinking his primary aim, can make great progress in it, but he’s just exchanged the land for the water, and one day he will drown.”

— Steppenwolf; Hermann Hesse; kurt Beals (trans.)

---

Something Haller once said gave me the key to understanding this. He said to me, when we had been talking about the so-called barbarities of the Middle Ages: “In reality, these are not barbarities at all. A man of the Middle Ages would find the entire lifestyle of our present day cruel, horrible, and barbaric in a completely different way! Every epoch, every culture, every custom and tradition has its style, has its own characteristic forms of tenderness and cruelty, beauty and barbarity, takes certain forms of suffering for granted, patiently tolerates certain evils. Human life only becomes true suffering, true hell, where two epochs, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of classical antiquity who had to live in the Middle Ages would have been miserably suffocated by it, just as a savage would suffocate in the midst of our civilization. There are times when a whole generation is caught between two epochs, between two lifestyles, in such a way that it loses all of its self-evidence, all of its customs, its sense of security and innocence. Of course, not everyone experiences this equally strongly. Nietzsche’s nature was such that he had to suffer the misery of our day more than a generation ahead of time—and what he had to endure, alone and misunderstood, is suffered today by thousands.”

— Steppenwolf; Herman Hesse; Kurt Beals (trans.)

I became more and more aware that this suffering man’s illness was due not to any shortcomings in his nature, but on the contrary only to his great wealth of gifts and powers which had not been brought into harmony. I recognized that Haller was a genius of suffering, that he, in the spirit of some of Nietzsche’s sayings, had cultivated within himself an ingenious, limitless, terrible capacity for suffering. At the same time, I realized that the basis of his pessimism was not contempt for the world, but contempt for himself, for however unsparingly and devastatingly he could speak of institutions or persons, he never excluded himself, he himself was always the first target of his own arrows, he himself was the first person he hated and rejected…

— Hermann Hesse; Steppenwolf; kurt Beals (trans.)

I remember one such remark, which was not even a remark but merely a look, from near the end of his time here. A famous philosopher of history and cultural critic, a man whose name is known throughout Europe, had announced that he would give a lecture in the university auditorium, and I had succeeded in persuading the Steppenwolf, who initially had no desire to attend the lecture, to come along with me. We went together and sat side by side in the lecture hall. When the speaker mounted the rostrum and began his address, some listeners who had imagined him to be a sort of prophet were disappointed by his rather preening and vain demeanor. When he began to speak, starting with a few words of flattery for the audience and thanking them for attending in such great numbers, the Steppenwolf cast a very brief glance in my direction, a glance that was critical of these words and of the speaker’s whole person, oh, an unforgettable and terrible glance, a whole book could be written about its meaning! His glance did not merely criticize the speaker and annihilate that famous man with its compelling, though gentle irony—that was the least of it. His glance was much more sad than ironic, it was even abysmally, hopelessly sad; this glance contained within it a silent despair that had already become certainty, become a habit and a form, so to speak. It not only penetrated the vain speaker with its light, revealing him with despairing clarity, not only ironized and dismissed the situation of that moment, the expectation and the mood of the audience, the somewhat pretentious title of the promised speech—no, the Steppenwolf’s glance pierced through our entire age, all the bustling fuss, all the striving, all the vanity, the whole superficial display of imaginary, shallow intellectualism—ah, and sadly, the glance went even deeper, went much further, than merely to the shortcomings and hopelessness of our time, of our intellectual life, of our culture. It went to the heart of all humanity, it eloquently expressed in a single second all the doubts of a thinker, perhaps a knower, about the dignity, the meaning of human life as such. That glance said, “Look, this is the kind of monkey we are! Look, this is what man is like!” and all fame, all cleverness, all feats of intellect, all human attempts at sublimity, greatness, and perseverance fell flat and were nothing but a monkey’s game!

— Hermann Hesse; Steppenwolf; Kurt Beals (trans.)