Steppenwolf: For Madmen Only

Clearly I am mad. Even after reading the warning, I entered Herman Hesse's magic theater. The one for madmen only. I can certainly tell you, it is not for everyone.

In 1929 Herman Hesse (author of Siddhartha) published a book called Steppenwolf, or the Wolf of the Steppes (a German word for grasslands, savannas or a shrubland). The Steppenwolf is a person born with two natures, that of a man and that of a wolf. But one could easily read this novel and see the wolf personality as that voice of guilt we all hear, all too often in our minds.

Hesse has been quoted as saying that people didn't understand the novel. Many find it depressing and hopeless, when in fact it is the opposite. It is simply amazing that this was first published in 1929, a book with numerous references to sex (all kinds) and even drugs. It could have very well have been written today.

The following is a list of quotes taken from this novel. I could write an essay on each and everyone, but instead, I will simply let the quotes speak for themselves. If you intend on reading the book, I wouldn't go any further as these quotes may spoil the experience for you.

I would remind you once again, however, that this is for madmen only. Not for everybody.

(all page references are for the 1990 Owl Book edition)

From the LANDLORD’S SON:

“I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him with the instinct of the healthy. This shrinking was in course of time replaced by a sympathy inspired by pity for one who had suffered so long and deeply, and whose loneliness and inward death I witnessed. In course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony. I saw that [he] was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzshce he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.”
- pg .10-11

“He was much too strong and hardy, too proud and spirited. Instead of destroying his personality [his teachers] succeeded only in teaching him to hate himself.”
- pg. 11

“Most men will not swim before they are able to…they are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”
- pg. 16

“A wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness.”
- pg. 17

“…for [his] sickness of the soul…is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which [he] belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only, but rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.”
- pg. 21

“[He] belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell.”
- pg. 22

From the TREATISE ON THE STEPPENWOLF:

“There once was a man….called the Steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life…And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one…In him the man and the wolf did not go the same way together, but were in continual and deadly enmity. One existed and solely to harm the other, and when there are two in one blood and in one soul who are at deadly enmity, then life fares ill…when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever on the watch to interfere and condemn, while at those times that he was man the wolf did just the same…if [he] has a beautiful thought, felt a fin and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act, then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed and showed him bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime was in th eyes of the beast…Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain. But it was exactly the same when [he] felt and behaved as a wolf and showed other his teeth and felt hatred and enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate manners and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched the wolf, and called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered for him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being….For all who got to love him, saw always only the one side in him. Many loved him as a refined and clever and interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come upon the wolf in him…and so it was that the Steppenwolf brought his own dual nature into the destinies of others…With this was bound up his need for loneliness and independence. There was never a man with a deeper more passionate craving for independence than he…[he] had thrown away a hundred times what in the world‘s eyes was his advantage and happiness in order to safeguard his liberty. No prospect was more hateful and distasteful to him than that he should have to go to an office and conform to daily and yearly routine and obey others…he contrived, often at great sacrifice, to avoid all such predicaments. It was here that his strength and his virtue rested. On this point he could neither be bent nor bribed. Here his character was firm and indeflectable.”
- pg. 41-46

“He would like either to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to renounce mankind and at last to live wholly a wolf’s life.”
- pg. 63

“You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your tow-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace…the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul.”
- pg. 64

From the STEPPENWOLF:

“Alas! this transition was no unknown to me. I had already experienced it several time, and always in periods of utmost despair. On each occasion of this terribly uprooting experience, my self, as it then was, was shattered to fragments…each time there had followed the loss of a cherished and particularly beloved part of my life that was true to me no more…I had built up the ideal of a new life, inspired by the asceticism of the intellect. I had attained a certain serenity and elevation of life once more, submitting myself to the practice of abstract thought and to a rule of austere mediation. But this mold, too, was broken and lost at one blow all its exalted and noble intent…And every occasion when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, was preceded by this hateful vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction and loneliness and unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of lovelessness and despair, such as I had now to pass through once more.”
- pg. 67-68

“No, in all conscience, there was no power in the world that could prevail with me to go through the mortal terror of another encounter with myself, to face another reorganisation, a new incarnation, when at the end of the road there was no peace or quiet - but forever destroying the self, in order to renew the self.”
- pg. 69

“…it’s a poor fellow who can’t take his pleasure without asking other people’s permission.”
- pg. 112










“Animals are sad as a rule…and when man is sad…because he sees…he always looks a little like an animal. He looks not only sad, but more right and more beautiful than usual. That’s how it is, and that’s how you looked, Steppenwolf, when I saw you for the first time.”
- pg. 114

“Before all else I learned that these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain. They were…giving life to the dead world around us.”
- pg. 143

“I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You…have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has your need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death.”
- pg. 149

“And I knew that my dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had been. It was life and reality that were wrong.”
- pg. 150

“Do you think I can’t understand your horror of the fox trot, your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of jazz and the rest of it?…You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily contented world of today. You have a dimension too many.”
- pg. 151

“And perhaps it has always been the same -”
“Always as it is today? Always a world only for politicians, profiteers, waiters and pleasure-seekers, and not a breath of air for men?”
- pg. 151-152

“It is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. It is there we belong. This is our home. It is that which our heart strives for. And for that reason, Steppenwolf, we long for death…Ah…we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach our home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.”
- pg. 153.

“I was not a modern man, nor an old-fashioned one either. I had escaped time altogether.”
- pg. 159

“…instead of this dismal pretence of dying by inches that we go in for today. Yes indeed!”
- pg. 162

“TONIGHT AT THE MAGIC THEATER
FOR MADMEN ONLY
PRICE OF ADMITTANCE YOUR MIND.
NOT FOR EVERYBODY.”
- pg. 164

“You have often been sorely weary of your life. You were striving, were you not, for escape?…It is the world of your own soul that you seek.”
- pg. 175

“…and I saw, through indistinctly and cloudily, the reflection of an uneasy self-tormented, inwardly labouring and seething being - myself…And within him again I saw the Steppenwolf, a shy, beautiful, dazed wolf with frightened eyes that smouldered now with anger, now with sadness…In bitter strife, each tried to devour the other so that his shape might prevail. How unutterably sad was the look this fluid inchoate figure of the wolf threw from his beautiful shy eyes.”
- pg. 175

“You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what your are pleased to call your personality….your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.”
- pg. 176

“You will now erase this superfluous reflection, my dear friend…true humour begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously.”
- pg. 177

“You will learn to laugh like the immortals yet.”
- pg. 178.

“In so far as a mother bore me, I am guilty. I am condemned to live.”
- pg. 186

“…war is childishness on a gigantic scale. In time, mankind will learn to keep its numbers in check by rational means.”
- pg. 188

“Yes…what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment.”
- pg. 188

“The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is known to you. It is also known to you that man consists of a multitude of souls, of numerous selves. This separation of unity of the personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness.”
- pg. 192

“It was agony to witness the fantastic extent to which the wolf had learned to belie his nature; and I stood there with my hair on end.”
- pg. 195

“And it astonished me to find how rich my life - the seemingly so poor and loveless life of the Steppenwolf - had been in the opportunities and allurements of love. I had missed them. I had fled before them. I had stumbled on over them. I had made haste to forget them.”
- pg. 202

“But that is frightful.”
“Certainly. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same.”
- pg. 206

“Even those with average gifts, given a few hundred years, come to maturity.”
- pg. 208

“It little becomes people like you to be critics of radio or of life either…Or is it that you have done better yourself, more nobly and fitly and with better taste? Oh, no…, you have not. You have made a frightful history of disease out of your life, and a misfortune of your gifts.”
- pg. 213

“My God, everything is so false, so hellishly stupid and wrong! I am a beast…a stupid, angry beast, sick and rotten.”
- pg. 213-214

“You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.”
- pg. 216

“You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to learn to listen to the cursed radio music of life and…to laugh at its distortions.”
- pg. 216

“I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.”
- pg. 217-218