What Is Admirable About Harry in The Steppenwolf?

Harry was in great despair in The Steppenwolf, but there is something admirable about the struggle he was engaged in, much as there was something admirable about the struggle that Nietzsche engaged in. What was good in Harry can be understood through Nietzsche’s “Three Metamorphoses.” He carried within him what Nietzsche calls “the strong reverent spirit that would bear much,” the spirit that first becomes the camel—kneeling down, asking, “What is most difficult…that I may take it upon myself and exult in my strength?” Harry did take on “the most difficult things”: he humbled himself, wounded his own haughtiness, suffered hunger for truth, and entered the “loneliest desert” of self-examination. But he also showed the stirrings of the lion, the one who must confront the great dragon of “Thou Shalt”—the inherited moralities, conventions, duties, and illusions of bourgeois culture that bound him. His revolt against sentimentality, religious confusion, and the lies he perceived in society was the lion’s sacred “No,” his attempt to carve out freedom for genuine meaning. Yet even this was not Harry’s final task. Nietzsche insists that the lion must become a child, “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning,” the one capable of creating new values. All of Harry’s struggle—his hunger for authenticity, his refusal to obey inherited illusions, his willingness to suffer truth—was preparing him for this final metamorphosis: the possibility of becoming new. Was Nietzsche's path ultimately a good one? Did it lead to truth for him or for Harry? That is generally the question that people get stuck on. But is it possible that his intense struggle to find the truth was right, though he failed to carry it out to completion? Nietzsche had something of the spirit of John the Baptist, as Christ described it in Matthew 11: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it” (NIV 1984).

Harry viewed himself as divided between two natures: “a human and a wolfish one.” He had loved the intellectual life, but had failed to find objective meaning. Harry explains the problem at one time in terms of the path that German academics in general had taken: “the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music.” From Kant onward, German philosophers struggled unsuccessfully to overcome skepticism and they looked for meaning and fulfillment in various versions of philosophical idealism and utopian nationalism. As German intellectual life advanced through the 19th and into the 20th century, along with advances in the German economy and industry and culture, the German people were continually discontent.

Harry’s conflict mirrors the same inward crisis Eksteins identifies in German culture before the First World War. The discontent that led the Germans to war was, ironically, evident in Harry the pacifist. In the words of Modris Ekstein, “Germans in the imperial era seemed particularly susceptible to secular idealist notions that ultimate reality was spiritual, and that the material world not only could but ought to be transcended by ideals.” Furthermore, “many Germans by the end of the century came to attribute to their supposed enemies those characteristics which they so wished to surmount in themselves.” They came to see Anglo-French civilization as “based on rationalism, empiricism, and utility; in other words, on externality. This was a world of form, devoid of spiritual values: it was a culture not of honesty and true freedom but of manners and superficiality, and dissimulation.”

German Kultur, by contrast, was said to be concerned with ‘inner freedom,’ with authenticity, with truth rather than sham, with essence as opposed to appearance, with totality rather than the norm. German culture was a matter of “overcoming,” a matter of reconciling the “two souls” that resided in Faust's breast. Richard Wagner's contribution to the German perception of Kultur in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was of particular importance. His vision of German opera aimed not only at uniting all the arts but also at elevating his Gesamtkunstwerk, his total art work, to a position where it was the supreme synthesis of and expression of Kultur, a combination of art, history, and contemporary life in total drama, where symbol and myth became the essence of existence. Even politics was subsumed into theatre. Wagner's influence on German consciousness and his role in the emergence of a modern aesthetic as a whole are difficult to exaggerate.

It was the Magic Flute that was dearer to Harry than anything in the world. He was looking for fullness in music, but was not seeing it in philosophy. With no foundation in basic beliefs, the pursuit of intellectual life in music was a false hope that many Germans had fallen for, along with other falsehoods, and Harry was caught in that same trap.

When war did come in 1914, the German people thought they had finally overcome the divisions within themselves and achieved unity. “In the jubilation of August 1914 Germans genuinely believed that this goal had been achieved, that the condition of war had in fact brought about a condition of peace, of ‘overcoming.’ Conflicts and differences had been set aside, and Germans had finally achieved that unity, spiritual and physical, which Bismarck had tried, but in the end failed, to bring about.”

Harry remarked that, “None of us intellectuals is at home in reality.” Indeed, he was not at home in reality. That was one of the central points that Hermine and Pablo sought to make with Harry, culminating in the magic mirrors. His intellectual commitments did not make sense, even to him. As he heard Jazz music at a dance hall, he remarked that, “This kind of music, much as I detested it, has always had a secret charm for me.” He had conflicting beliefs about music and did not know how to reconcile them. Indeed, the whole idea of himself as a Steppenwolf was contained in his inability to make sense of the world he lived in. The Steppenwolf was “that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.” So when he did have a “beautiful thought” or “felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act,” the wolf was there to jeer at him and “showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime was in the eyes of a beast.” And when the wolf expressed hatred against humanity for their lying and degenerate manners and customs, then the human part of him would mock the wolf part as brute and beast.

The reason for the division was the persistence of the bourgeois life in Harry. For, “It is open to man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness.” Or, “he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures.” The first path is one of seeking God in the way of an ascetic and the second is to live a life of vice, and the bourgeois path is a mixture of the two. “Now, it is between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism.” On the one hand, there is the life of virtue, and on the other there is the life of ease, and the bourgeois chooses to live in neither extreme. Rather than surrendering the self life and giving himself up wholly to the pursuit of objective truth, “his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity.”

Harry is caught in an antinomy, rooted in dualistic thinking. Herman Hesse describes Harry’s problem in terms of misunderstanding the self, and that is in fact the problem, but his view of himself is based on his view of what is eternal, and Hesse was not able to see the problem in terms of God’s eternality. Hesse depicted the problem more in terms of the Buddhist doctrine of anātman, but he was correct in seeing the problem in terms of Harry’s failure to understand himself. As Hesse puts it, “[A] Steppenwolf must once have a good look at himself. He must look deeply into the chaos of his own soul and plumb its depths. The riddle of his existence would then be revealed to him at once in all its changelessness, and it would be impossible for him ever after to escape first from the hell of the flesh to the comforts of a sentimental philosophy and then back to the blind orgy of his wolfishness.”