BOOK REVIEW: Steppenwolf

This "review" might best be described as a somewhat bookish carom resulting from: a text conversation with a friend immediately after the 2024 election result became apparent, a text conversation that friend had with a family member on the same topic, a not-so-random quote that family member tossed into their conversation from the book Steppenwolf and from Steppenwolf being one of my top "think" bands. (Yes, I mean that.)

Okay, let's see how THIS all gets tied together…

The Quote That Kicked It Off

Here is the quote that was forwarded by my friend on November 7, 2024…

Every age, every culture, every custom and every tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.

That seemed to be a freakishly apropos commentary on current events. I literally stopped watching all network news, local news, late night shows and news/interview shows as of 10:00pm November 5, 2024. Listening to the so-called journalists and hosts prattle on about events when none had helped actually educate the public from committing such an atrocious democratic "own-goal" literally made me feel nauseous. (It still does and I haven't returned to these programs since.) As another great wit once put it, it became clear to me that by NOT watching any news, I might run the risk of being UN-informed but by WATCHING any news, I would be consistently MIS-informed so what was the point?

At that point, an extra three hours per day was freed and I had plenty of time for other hobbies. This quote became stuck in my head and I thought.. I'm a fan of Steppenwolf the band, I've seen enough interviews of John Kay to know Steppenwolf was absolutely NOT some mindless hard rock biker band but had material addressing serious philosophical and cultural issues… Monster. For Ladies Only. It's Never Too Late. Move Over. The Pusher. Snowblind Friend. I knew the band name came from the book but I had never read the book. Now having a lot of extra free time, I decided to read the book. I picked up a copy at the local Barnes & Noble on November 7 and completed reading it the next day and some themes have been stuck in my head ever since.

Steppenwolf – Synopsis

The book Steppenwolf is ninety eight years old as of 2025. It was written by German author Herman Hesse between 1924 and 1927 and published in 1927. Given the age of the book, I don't think I will spoil the plot or the ending through this analysis. If you haven't read the book but think you might based upon this essay, then by all means STOP HERE and come back when you're done.

The short Herd Notes of the entire book would be this…

The book Steppenwolf uses a literary device of a book within a book to first define a shorthand metaphor using the "inner" book to more clearly describe a concept that is then addressed in more detail in the arc of the "outer" book. (In reality, that outer book is also given a treatment as a manuscript written by the protagonist and left to another person to find but that abstraction doesn't move the story. Probably a little too "meta" even in 2025…) The protagonist of the outer book is an older man named Harry Haller who appears to be a man of some financial means who is spending his time traveling from town to town, renting a room for a month or two, visiting the town's libraries and taking in their unique books and local culture, then moving on to the next town. It seems clear Harry is in a perpetual melancholic frame of mind. The events of the book take place over the course of his stay at one such town over maybe four weeks.

Upon arriving in town, a stranger he encounters by chance is promoting a local entertainment establishment of some sort and leaves him a copy of a book called Der Steppenwolf which he reads and whose text is included in full in the outer book. The inner book described the circumstances of a steppe wolf living in regions between the wild steppe areas of the countryside and urban cities. These steppenwölfe become increasingly lost and adrift as the gulf in environment between the wild and modern industrialized society grows ever larger – they reach a state where they never feel comfortable in either environment and always feel drawn to the "other" environment, no matter which one they're currently in. This concept resonates with Harry and intensifies his despondency.

Harry eventually reaches a point of despondency where he has silently decided to end his life and he heads out for a meal. After finishing the meal, he delays heading home, wandering around various establishments and eventually enters a dance hall where he encounters a beautiful young woman who immediately begins chatting him up, distracting him enough from his prior thoughts and the two begin seeing each other over the days and weeks as she gets him to open up and enjoy things he previously shunned. Eventually it becomes apparent that this woman is acquainted with the man who gave Harry the copy of Der Steppenwolf and he operates what the book terms a "magic theater". Based on the narrative, one can either conclude this venue was meant to be interpreted as a psychedelic alt-world or an actual opium den filled with dazed patrons on all sorts of drug-inspired trips.

Harry is granted access by the host to the "magic theater", clearly partakes of something made available to him, and experiences a world with a room with a seemingly limitless set of doors. His host explains he can choose as many of the experiences behind each door as desired. Over the coming hours, Harry enters five different doors, experiencing different fantastical things widening his perspective. By this point several weeks into his relationship with the woman, the fifth door he chooses involves a situation where his host is lying beside the woman and his altered state leads him to remember something she said to him days before that her only goal was to get him to open up the point he could love something so much he could kill it. In his altered state, his illogical mind takes the opportunity to do exactly that, "killing her" with a knife, which results in him eventually coming back to reality where the host confirms he didn't kill anyone but clearly did not learn the correct lessons from the trips he took.

Many other analyses of Steppenwolf mention that the somewhat obtuse, book-in-a-book-in-a-book concept was pretty "meta" for its day and certainly the narrative involving the experiences in the magic theater had obvious sex and drug references that might have made the book a popular counter-culture hit later in the 1900s. These analyses also point out that Hesse was somewhat frustrated that many perceived the book as somehow glorifying suicide and making it sound intellectual. Hesse stated such interpretations completely missed the point he was making that in a world torn between incompatible extremes, it could very well be that the only rational approach to surviving is by re-inventing yourself. Maybe more than once. Maybe into multiple existences, each better optimized for the unique challenges and insanities of one extreme or another.

Steppenwolf – Highlights

What is a modern reader of the twenty first century likely to draw from a book published in 1927?

Plenty.

A modern reader of Steppenwolf will encounter prose throughout the narrative that will literally bring time to a HALT as a key analogy is pondered. There were several that made me put the book down and sit silently for twenty or thirty minutes pondering the insight someone writing so many years ago must have had to craft something so profoundly suited for the present. Here are a few examples.

An aside on false reverence for figures of the past -- At one point in the book, Harry is having a conversation about some philosophical concept and mentions the German author Goethe with great reverence, to which he hears this in response:

You take the old Goethe too seriously, my young friend. You should not take old people who are already dead so seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. For that reason, I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

This serves as a good reminder that worshiping those in the past binds us to their blind spots as well. Much like extremists in America claim to worship the “Founding Fathers” who were deeply flawed people, just like we are now.

An aside on wireless technology -- At one point early in the arc, the protagonist has a conversation with his landlady who gives him a tour of another room being rented to her nephew. The nephew is in his early 20s and his aunt (the landlady) mentions that he is very much into the latest fad of the day – "the wireless" – and has all sorts of technical paraphernalia related to crystal radios scattered about his room. This triggers an observation by the protagonist that is simply jaw-dropping.

We talked about the nephew and she showed me in a neighboring room his latest toy, a wireless set. There the industrious young man spent his evenings, fitting together the apparatus, a victim to the charms of wireless, and kneeling on pious knees before the god of applied science whose might had made it possible to discover after thousands of years a fact which every thinker has always known and put to better use than in this recent and very imperfect development. We spoke about this, for the aunt had a slight leaning to piety and religious topics were not unwelcome to her. I told her that the omnipresence of all forces and facts was well known to ancient India, and that science had merely brought a small fraction of this into general use by devising for it, that is, for sound waves, a receiver and transmitter which were still in their first stages and miserably defective. The principal fact known to that ancient knowledge was, I said, the unreality of time. This science had not yet observed it. Finally, it would, of course, make this “discovery,” also and then the inventors would get busy over it. The discovery would be made – and perhaps very soon – that there were floating around us not only the pictures and events of the transient present in the same way that music from Paris or Berlin was now heard in Frankfurt or Zurich, but that all that had ever happened in the past could be registered and brought back likewise. We might well look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without the disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von de Vogelweide. And all this, I said, just as today we see is the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his sins, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.

As I read that passage, my mind substituted "internet" for "radio" and was astounded at how well this description written in 1927 accurately describes the distraction generated by today's "wireless" technology. Distractions which absorb one hundred percent of our time with "information" that merits zero percent of our time and prevents us from contemplating matters of true importance to our literal, personal survival. Hesse wrote this book in the culture of pre-WWII Germany and accurately predicted the madness that would emerge if a leader rose to power who understood the power of mass media to distract and distort.

An aside on mass media slop… -- One day amid Harry's wanderings around town, he encounters an old acquaintance from college and is invited to dinner with the man and his wife. Conversation ensues and the man begins ranting about the mad ravings of some IDIOT writing to the local paper under the name Harry Haller about the coming dangers in the country. While the acquaintance knows the full name of the "idiot" and knows the full name of the man he invited to dinner, presumably Harry Haller is a very common name so the man didn't assume the two were one in the same. They were. After listening to his acquaintance berate this "idiot," Harry gets up, states he is that very idiot and storms out. He then realizes there seems to be little point in continuing to try to change public opinion against a rising tide of willful ignorance. He explains it this way to Hermine:

Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and even every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that therein lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war. They don’t forgive me that, for, of course, they are themselves all guiltless, the Kaiser, the generals, the trade magnates, the politicians, the papers. Not one of them has the least thing to blame himself for. Not one has any guilt. One might believe that everything was for the best, even though a few million men lie under the ground. And mind you, Hermine, even though such abusive articles cannot annoy me any longer, they often sadden me all the same. Two-thirds of my countrymen read this kind of newspaper, read things written in this tone every morning and every night, are every day worked up and admonished and incited, and robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings by them, and the end and aim of it all is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last. All that is perfectly clear and simple. Any one could comprehend it and reach the same conclusion after a moment’s reflection. But nobody wants to. Nobody wants to avoid the next war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the next holocaust if this be the cost. To reflect for one moment, to examine himself for a while and ask what share he has in the world’s confusion and wickedness – look you, nobody wants to do that. And there’s no stopping it, and the next war is being pushed with enthusiasm by thousands upon thousands day by day . It has paralyzed me since I knew it, and brought me to despair. I have no country and no ideals left. All that comes to nothing but decorations for the gentlemen by whom the slaughter is ushered in. There is no sense in thinking or saying or writing anything of human import, to bother one’s head with thoughts of goodness – for two or three men who do that, there are thousands of papers, periodicals, speeches, meetings in public and in private, that make the opposite their daily endeavor and succeed in it too.

Keep in mind, this quote is from a book published in 1927. Eight years before World War II started under Hitler's leadership, the entire country of Germany knew exactly where everything was headed. There were people who were speaking out years before Hitler took power who were simply overwhelmed by a growing share of the professionals and learned folk who concluded it was easier and more advantageous to fall in with the new thinking rather than fight to oppose it. The phenomenon and frustration he describes here is reflected today in machine generated content that can easily swamp any actual human thought on the internet and make it impossible to distinguish between human expression and machine slop.

Harry finds his perfect mate, Hermine -- As the story arc reaches the point where Harry encounters Hermine in the dance hall on what might have been his, ahem, last night out, a few aspects of the narrative immediately jump out in the minds of modern, post-#metoo-world readers. First, as one remembers Harry is likely a man in his fifties, quite old for 1925, it becomes immediately suspicious that he is suddenly greeted by a beautiful and very young woman who seems to be instantly attracted to him. The narrative is written primarily reflecting Harry's perspective so this initial encounter comes across as "hey, maybe I still got a little something going on here…" Of course, even when the book was new, readers eventually sussed out that Hermine was actually a prostitute and Harry was just the next desperate schlub to get set up for a longer term financial relationship. Hesse's real craft takes a bit more thinking to suss out.

As the narrative unfolds, Harry views this woman as the perfect woman. She is interested in all of his interests. She has the same opinions on all of the same current controversies as Harry. While she does try to get him to try new things, she is also content to sit with him for hours every day and talk endlessly about all of his interests and opinions. And her name? Hermine. The feminine form of Herman. The first name of the actual author of the real book. Hesse crafted much of the narrative between Harry and Hermine to critique a common tendency of people to accept unquestioning flattery from people while ignoring the absurdity and inappropriateness of the larger relationship. By choosing Hermine as the character name, Hesse was implicating himself in this behavior as well, describing a pattern where a man desires essentially himself as the ultimate partner. No challenges, No arguments. No strife. But no stretching, growing, or learning either. Given Hesse's psychological state in the period when he wrote the book, this part was likely very autobiographical. However, by pointing this criticism at himself, Hesse also pointed it at every reader. Many people seem predisposed to the familiar and unchallenging, even if it stunts their emotional evolution.

Steppenwolf – Today

Do the themes in Steppenwolf still resonate and enlighten a century after its publication? Absolutely. The steppenwolf metaphor itself likely describes the feeling of every worker who has lost their job to massive, sudden swings in manufacturing, retailing, transportation or entertainment that has left entire generations of workers suddenly unemployed with no suitable skills for remaining employment sectors. It also likely describes the feelings of people who have experienced tectonic political shifts that seemingly leave them with no form of representation aggressively protecting their concerns or even accurately stating what they are.

The overall historical reception for Steppenwolf seems to indicate Hesse didn't quite nail his goal of promoting an understanding of the need to adapt through re-invention when the world becomes too incoherent. It isn't just an OPTION to try, it may very well be a NECESSITY. That message is certainly in Hesse's narrative but it was likely swamped by the edgier fantastical / psychedelic imagery that dominates the latter part of the book. However, there ARE other themes in the book that inform the experiences of the present.

The narrative involving Harry and Hermine, from their first meeting to the final scene in which Harry emerges from a drug-fueled hallucination after finding his tripped-out self was deluded into "killing" her should also trigger pause with current society. At a lower level of metaphor, the relationship between Harry and Hermine was really describing the transactional nature of prostitution. He gives X, she gives Y, he deludes himself into thinking he's still got it, she secures four weeks of steady revenue from another mark. (To further emphasize the point, in the book, Hermine never actually slept with Harry. He had sex with another woman Hermine supplied, making it clear SHE was a pimp as well.)

At another layer of metaphor, this paid, self-reinforcing delusional relationship brought about via prostitution is identical to that between individuals and modern mass media and social media platforms. There are differences in the structure of the financial transaction to be sure, but the psychology is nearly IDENTICAL. Giant corporations have devised applications that allow them to sidle up to individuals and offer them some fun or entertainment tailored exactly to their liking. Users can use the platforms to find content on virtually ANY topic ever known to man (as long as it's in English and online…). The corporations providing these systems offer them for "free." They use prior search criteria and "likes" to suggest even more content similar to your most recent intake. You're never truly "alone" on the Internet. You're never truly "wrong" about anything on the internet. It is ALWAYS possible to find some "content" somewhere created by someone who agrees with your point of view. Even if you think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to escape to the Ark before the flood, you are virtually assured of finding content specifically manufactured to "agree" with you and reinforce your beliefs no matter how ignorant or harmful they are to your or others. Why? Because there is money to be made. Unlike prostitution, it isn't clear who the "customer" is PAYING because the companies running these systems have purposely hidden the fees they are collecting throughout the entire economic system. The "customer" doesn't see the costs but they're there. In the form of rigged shopping experiences with discounts from inflated prices, reduced choice through the elimination of competition, the elimination of local competition via nationwide warehouse and delivery networks, curated news feeds that never break the user out of their self-selected bubble of truth, etc.

Ultimately, Hesse's narrative in which Harry becomes so drug-addled during his ongoing relationship with Hermine that an extended drug trip leads him in his addled state to "kill" the one thing he professes to truly love the most is certainly a downer, right? That's some serious, dark derangement there, right? Is it an exaggeration of the effects of self-delusion? Well, look at the 2024 electorate. How deluded were the voters supporting Trump because they only expected him to deport "bad" undocumented people but not those needed to pick our crops, mow our yards, lay down new roofs on our homes, etc.? How deluded were the thousands of farmers who voted for Trump to protect American farms now that tariffs have shifted commodities contracts between other countries and out of American markets for potentially years? How deluded were the tens of millions of voters who supported Trump for bringing manufacturing back to America, for taming inflation and eliminating wasteful government after tariffs have triggered job losses, triggered RISING inflation and jeopardized state-level funding for healthcare now that some of these very voters may find themselves unemployed? The corporate machinery controlling communication in America has perfected the art of marketing false narratives that convince vast numbers of voters to vote in direct opposition to their own best economic and social interests.

Steppenwolf – Obligatory Musical References

Of course, it should be impossible to discuss these themes of isolation and reinvention without providing a tip of the hat to the rock band Steppenwolf and their material that brought these themes to the masses beginning in 1969. In reality, the band members did not come up with the name Steppenwolf for the band. Their manager came up with the name after hearing some of their initial material, suggested it and the band liked it. However, the band's music, particularly John Kay's lyrics were definitely light years beyond the typical boy-meets-girl themes of pop music. Numerous interviews of John Kay describing his early life and escape from East Germany with his mother can be viewed on YouTube. These interviews make it clear Steppenwolf was never intended to be a banal top forty group. Two songs in particular stand out in light of the themes analyzed here. A sampling of the lyrics with the greatest affinity to the book are provided.

It's Never Too Late

Tell me who's to say after all is done
And you're finally gone, you won't be back again
You can find a way to change today
You don't have to wait 'til then

It's never too late to start all over again
To love the people you caused the pain
And help them learn your name
Oh, no, not too late
It's never too late to start all over again

And perhaps the best song Steppenwolf recorded and the song most perfectly in tune with America in the present, Monster. The lyrics below are essentially the shorter Greatest Hits cut versus the album track.

Monster

Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
Far from the reaches of Kingdom and pope

While we bullied, stole and bought a homeland
We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands, to court the wild
But she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light

The Blue and Grey they stomped it
They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war was over
They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has its share of injustice
Kind was the spirit in many a way
But its protectors and friends have been sleeping
Now it's a monster and will not obey

The cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
'Cause the whole world's got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner we can't pay the cost

'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into the noose
And it just sits there watchin'

America, where are you now
Don't you care about your sons and daughters
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster

I cannot think of a better way to condense four hundred and eighteen years of American history into three minutes and fifty nine seconds than that. It's all there. America wasn't technically founded by people seeking religious freedom. The first settlement in Jamestown in 1607 was purely a mercenary venture aimed at establishing a base from which commodities in the New World could be shipped back to England. The second settlement in Plymouth in 1620 was founded by a group of Protestants who had already fled England after being persecuted for their religious beliefs who secured a deal with an English company that had rights for development in that sector of the coast in the New World. They didn't come to America seeking "religious freedom", they came here seeking the ability to practice THEIR peculiarly restrictive form of religion. America's past certainly had its share of injustices but the country was usually able to leverage the virtually unlimited resources of an entire (stolen) continent not yet exploited by industrialization to maintain an illusion of benevolent growth. But the public has become intellectually lazy and unwilling to comprehend how the forces in a modern industrialized society interact. This has allowed the powerful to tilt the playing field in their favor and use the power of the state to maintain that imbalance in their favor. The people have lost control of the society formed over hundreds of years.

Monster, indeed. Hesse saw it coming very clearly in 1920s Germany in setting the atmosphere of the book. The band Steppenwolf saw it taking place in America in 1969. And the monster is again in near complete control of America in 2025.

WTH