Analysis
Steppenwolf recounts Harry’s spiritual
education and development, and in this section we begin to see Harry’s
gradual process of change. His encounter with his landlady demonstrates
how much he has learned from his night at the Black Eagle. Not only
has Harry has become open to human intercourse, but he has also
begun to appreciate humor. Instead of going off on a rant about
the poverty of modern culture, he manages to make a joke instead.
In doing so, Harry is acting on the lessons that his various mentors
in the novel—Hermine and, in his dream, Goethe—have tried to teach
him about the efficacy of laughter. Harry has also begun to reflect
on the unreality of time. In Harry’s dream, Goethe says that seriousness
is a result of placing too high a value on time. Later, Hermine
points to the possibility of a kind of time outside the constraints
of the temporal, lived-in world. Harry’s character develops as he
begins to assimilate the new arguments and ideas to which he is
exposed.
Hermine is both Harry’s opposite and his double. Her
name is a feminized version of Hermann Hesse’s and also sounds similar
to Harry’s. Hermine’s remarks that she looks like a boy and that
she is Harry’s mirror suggest that her character reflects Harry’s
own. At the same time, Hermine’s interest in the sensual aspects
of the world is quite different from Harry’s own obsession with
morose, contemplative thought. Whereas he is a lonely intellectual
and a reactionary against modern popular culture, she embraces everything
about life, even its most mundane events. Hermine is well versed
in the arts of living and the pleasures of the senses; over time,
she teaches Harry the dance of life. Like a mirror image, Hermine
seems intangible and almost nonexistent. The fact that she knows
so much about Harry, devotes herself so completely to his improvement,
and discusses so little of her personal history suggests that she
might be an apparition conjured up by Harry’s mind to deal with
his mental stress.
The fact that Hermine teaches Harry to dance is significant,
as Hesse’s writings frequently treat music as the most elevated,
most divine engagement of humanity. The description of Harry’s experience
at the symphony in the preface demonstrates how music can serve
as a means of transportation into transcendence. Likewise, the image
of Pablo playing effortlessly on his two saxophones echoes Harry’s
earlier mention of the ability to flow untroubled between his wolf-half
and man-half. Hermine thus decides to teach Harry how to make his
own actions fit in time and tune with music. Dancing requires human
interaction, furthering the suggestion that Hermine is Harry’s partner
or double. Hesse is deeply concerned with the problem of a divided
or splintered self, so the image of two people moving as though
they were one resonates strongly with the novel’s philosophical
concerns.
Though Hesse was greatly influenced by the German Romantics, Steppenwolf does
not follow the stylistic conventions of German Romanticism. Rather
than setting his novel in a stylized world in which the supernatural
and unnatural take place, Hesse draws the magical out of the everyday.
He grounds his novel in the world of the mundane, the recognizable,
and the common. As a result, Harry’s experience with Hermine is
rife with worldly details: shopping for a gramophone, buying records,
and learning the popular dance steps of the day. Hesse’s own writing
echoes Harry’s experience: just as Harry allows popular music to
infiltrate his jealously guarded intellectual lifestyle to come
to a real engagement with life, Hesse writes on a mundane and contemporary
plane to approach something more transcendent.
